For days and nights on end it has snowed on the mountain. Today, over white Alpine pastures, a white sun rises into calmer skies, its rays bearing none of the devouring, dusty heat and glare of summer: its brightness is all around, shining even from the snow, permeated with an invigorating and penetrating freshness, revitalising all creatures. Even beasts of burden gambol joyfully in all this whiteness; and pensive, weary souls dream of running and jumping like fifteen-year-olds.

Between the white peaks, emerging with new splendour after the snowstorms, an immense wave of snow rises and falls, undulating gently, swelling and abating, in one great curve of brilliance like a swan's feather, subsuming everything in the valley except for the thread of blue smoke rising from the chimneys.

Such, since the beginning of the world, has been the magnificence of the mountain in winter. And yet, until the middle of the last century, the lowland folk knew almost nothing of it beyond the black, burnt rocks of summer days. A renowned alpinist, Eugène Rambert, wrote in 1867, "the mountain in winter is regarded as unapproachable". He, more than anyone, contributed to destroying this legend: today, amid blackened chalets and four-hundred-year-old pines, hotels and winter resorts have grown up everywhere, combining the comfort of town with the warm intimacy of mountain life. Right in the centre of the continent, at the confluence of most of the main European roads and railways, furnished with hundreds of funiculars and electric ramps, the world of the Alps has become accessible even to the sick and disabled, and habitable even in the depths of winter.

If the mountain often heals, it always strengthens. Winter sports re-establish the harmony between nature and humanity. These pastimes are the most healthy, most joyous that exist in the world. There is something for all ages, for all tastes, and women can excel with their proud elegance or the fluidity of their movements. Over the compressed snow race hundreds of little sledges, called "luges" locally, moving like lightning, their steel runners covering the pistes with twin tracks. But the sledge isolates the sledger: on these fast slopes he must avoid other tobogganists or risk a nasty bump! The bobsleigh eliminates this disadvantage: it is a long sledge for five, six or more people, in which young and old together share the pleasures, and the slight risks, of the slopes. One of them steers from the front, as carefully as he can. But sometimes the sleigh capsizes and everyone rolls in the snow, and laughs, and gets up all covered in fresh powder.

Shall I speak of skating, of curling, of ice hockey, of skis, those seven-league boots that fly around at dizzying heights? But without taking part yourself it is impossible to imagine the sublime pleasures enjoyed by devotees of all these sports, in the snow-fields or on the frozen lakes framed by dark pines.

Then, when the reddening sun disappears behind the white mountain with long, violet shadows, you go back inside, your blood lashed by the keen, dry cold; you are famished; warm, joyous evenings follow, when the adventures of the day are recounted among friends.

In the pure joy of these most healthy of all sports, the heart is opened to all manner of stimulating emotions. Although the winter resorts do not often reach, and hardly ever exceed, 1600m. of altitude (Bretaye, exceptionally, is at 1850m.), they are often sheltered in the folds of the proudest peaks of the Alps; sometimes even, one can stand on one's balcony contemplating face to face great virgin swathes of snow and fire. They are familiar; they are our neighbours; from them to us, when night falls, a gentle breeze rolls down from infinite space, whose crystal threshold is the Alps, the stars its flaming footlights. And their profound silence envelops us in our sleep with a white tranquillity.

In the peace of the mountain home, with its wooden walls exuding the scent of fir or pine, do not fear the monotony of a hermit's life where nothing happens and there is nothing to see: your bedroom window will almost always frame a vast and grandiose horizon. And when March returns you will have a ringside seat from which to observe a new turn in the great drama: in complete safety you can watch hundreds of avalanches cascade down in silver flows, surfing on waves of silver, rolling from all the peaks, and you can hear them leaping and crashing with cracks of thunder. This is the joyous uproar which heralds the arrival of the young spring.

"Down there", he said, pointing to the plain, "it is so dark, so cold".

This text appeared in 1920 in "La Montagne" ("The Mountain"). Unfortunately, the author is unknown.