Explore "The Valley" by Hilaire Belloc on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Everybody knows, I fancy, that kind of landscape in which hills seem to lie in a regular manner, fold on fold, one range behind the other, until at last, behind them all, some higher and grander range dominates and frames the whole.
The infinite variety of light and air and accident of soil provide all men, save those who live in the great plains, with examples of this sort. The traveller in the dry air of California or of Spain, watching great distances from the heights, will recollect such landscapes all his life. They were the reward of his long ascents, and they were the sunset visions which attended his effort when at last he had climbed to the utmost ridge of his day's westward journey. Such a landscape does a man see from the edges of the Guadarrama, looking eastward and south toward the very distant hills that guard Toledo and the ravines of the Tagus. Such a landscape does a man see at sunrise from the highest of the Cevennes looking right eastward to the dawn as it comes up in the pure and cold air beyond the Alps, and shows you the falling of their foothills, a hundred miles of them, right down to the trench of the Rhone.