TOPOGRAPHICAL
to hide from us under the mountain side—three-quarters of a mile they are vertically below. (Lantern.) With that absurd nearness of effect one gets in the Alps, we see the little train a dozen miles away, running down the Biaschina to Italy, and the Lukmanier Pass beyond Piora left of us, and the San Giacomo right, mere footpaths under our feet. . . .
And behold! in the twinkling of an eye we are in that other world!
We should scarcely note the change. Not a cloud would have gone from the sky. It might be the remote town below would take a different air, and my companion the botanist, with his educated observation, might almost see as much, and the train, perhaps, would be gone out of the picture, and the embanked straightness of the Ticino in the Ambri-Piotta meadows—that might be altered, but that would be all the visible change. Yet I have an idea that in some obscure manner we should come to feel at once a difference in things.
The botanist's glance would, under a subtle attraction, float back to Airolo. "It's queer," he would say quite idly, "but I never noticed that building there to the right before."
"Which building?"
"That to the right—with a queer sort of thing———"
"I see now. Yes. Yes, it's certainly an odd-looking affair. . . . And big, you know! Handsome! I wonder———"
That would interrupt our Utopian speculations. We should both discover that the little towns below had changed—but how, we should not have marked
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