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en cette fin de jour dans un bruit de ruisseau - leurs feuilles rebroussées
par le vent avaient du reste l'éclat furtif d'une eau qui court au soleil.
Ensuite, jusqu'à mi-hauteur, elle apparaissaient fleurie de lichens flam-
boyants, comme si sa propre couleur, de roc fauve par endroits, ailleurs
rouillé, ou encore d'un bleu de nuit étrange, n'eût pas suffi à éblouir. Puis,
se dépouillant de toute végétation, elle montait, se resserrant en un pic
géant de teinte plus sombre mais plus rare encore. Presque parmi les
nuages, elle se terminait en une pointe de neige et de glace qui étincelait
comme un joyau la couronnant, elle se mirait toute dans un petit lac à ses
pieds, qui semblait l'aimer, sans fin la contempler, se tenant lui-même
dans une parfaite immobilité d'eau turquoise, ourlée sur ses bords d'une
épaisse mousse de caribou. Plus loin, dans une petite prairie, auprès de si
puissante montagne, s'agitaient dans leur naïve beauté d'un jour des pa-
vots de l'Arctique. [81-2; It was proud - incomparably proud - and incom-
parably alone. Fashioned to please the eye of an artist in its planes, its
dimensions, its colours; and it had chosen, moreover, to reveal itself in its
most glorious hour. Around its base, and presumably nourished by the
better soil provided by its own erosion and the moisture from the nearby
water, it bore a cincture of tiny fragile birch trees, which, at that day's end,
trembled with the murmuring sound of a quiet brook - and indeed their
leaves, twisting in the wind, had the fugitive sheen of running water in
the sunlight. Beyond that, reaching halfway up its flanks, the mountain
seemed aflower with flamboyant lichens, as though its own proper colours
- here a tawny patch of rock, there a streak of rusty red, then again a
strange mass of midnight blue - were not enough to bedazzle. Above this,
free of all vegetation, it mounted sheer, gathering itself into a fine giant
obelisk of a darker, yet even rarer, tint. Almost among the clouds, it en-
ded in a pinnacle of snow and ice that sparkled like a jewel. From its base
to this crowning diadem, it was reflected whole in a lake at its feet, which,
in the perfect stillness of its turquoise waters, hemmed along its edges
with caribou moss, seemed rapt in eternal contemplation and love of that
which it mirrored. And farther afield, in a meadow small compared to so
powerful a mountain, there trembled, in their simple beauty of a single
day, a mass of Iceland poppies. (82-3)]
The painter's (and thus painterly) perception sets the visual parameters
('en ses plans, ses dimensions, ses couleurs') for Roy's majestic descrip-
tion, organized around its systematic notation of planes (the water near,
the mountain in the middle, the prairie in the distance), dimensions
(from its extensive base up to its gigantic peak crowned by snow), and
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