ABSTRACT
T he morning, and the evening-what simple words; what infinite contents! Yet each day holds both.One morning, on a holiday in the Palni mountains, I stood soon after dawn on the hills I have christened “The Neighbours,” being next to our bungalow which is out in the wilds, two miles from the Hill Settlement itself. From “The Neighbours” (there are two, the Old Man, slightly higher than the Old Woman), one looked down into Shem-baganur and other valleys, towards the peak of Perumal and many chains of hills, one behind the other, on one side; on the other towards the Pillar Rocks and the ranges towards Travancore. But on that day the green and purple valleys and mountains had vanished; in their stead arctic fields of driven snow spread before me, their pure white broken up into crevasses and glaciers and frozen waves; towards the horizon wild fantastic shapes and boulders were piled up into solid icebergs. These Polar regions swept right from Perumal, looming faintly through illuminated sunny white masses, round the hill on which I stood, into the valleys on my right, and away and away in front over the whole expanse of plains. A crag, rooted solidly in the plain, now and then stoutly stuck its summit through the whiteness, but only succeeded in appearing faint and ghostlike; solidity, firmness, reality, belonged to the wild and snowy world of Alps. The “Neighbours” lay in radiant sunshine; behind me the downs were gleaming and laughing, while below stretched this extraordinary cloud effect. After an hour the fields of ice and snow began to lose their hold on solidity and to look what they were; the astonishing fairyland slowly vaporized. But what a morning of splendid wastefulness! A miracle of beauty, and no Artist watching to see if anyone took note of it. Or was there Some One?
