As it has been seen, Baptiste preferred
waiting for the arrival of the night breeze to having recourse to an
expedient so toil some and slow.
We have already said, that the point just described was at the place where
the Leman fairly enters its eastern horn, and where its shores possess
their boldest and finest faces. On the side of Savoy, the coast was a
sublime wall of rocks, here and there clothed with chestnuts, or indented
with ravines and dark glens, and naked and wild along the whole line of
their giddy summits. The villages so frequently mentioned, and which have
become celebrated in these later times by the touch of genius, clung to
the uneven declivities, their lower dwellings laved by the lake, and their
upper confounded with the rugged faces of the mountains. Beyond the limits
of the Leman, the Alps shot up into still higher pinnacles, occasionally
showing one of those naked excrescences of granite, which rise for a
thousand feet above the rest of the range--a trifle in the stupendous
scale of the vast piles--and which, in the language of the country are not
inaptly termed Dents, from some fancied and plausible resemblance to
human teeth.
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