_Place au géant!_ First among all is Mont Blanc and its satellites, pre-eminent in size, pre-eminent also in dignity. For this group is really one buttressed mountain, and all its minor masses are supports to the central dome, like the semi-domes, vaulted porticoes and abutments of Hagia Sophia to the uplifted cupola. He who stands on the summit of the great mountain beholds that this is so. His position there is pre-eminent. No other neighbouring height rivals that which he occupies. The highest are many hundred feet below, and they are all obvious supporters and tributaries of Mont Blanc itself. It is only the yet smaller and remoter elevations that assert a claim to independence.
This pre-eminence of the central mass is the key-note of Mont Blanc scenery. Moreover the mountain is not merely pre-eminent in altitude, but in volume and simplicity of form. Its upper part is a great white dome, whereas the buttress-peaks are for the most part rocky pinnacles. The contrast between these slender, jagged supports and the reposeful majesty of the Calotte is a most picturesque feature and a very rare one, not repeated, so far as I remember, in any other part of the Alps. It dominates the scenery of the whole district. No doubt within the district there are views of great beauty and considerable comprehension, where Mont Blanc forms no part--such, for example, as the Montenvers view up the Mer de Glace--but the characteristic prospects contain Mont Blanc as their central and most important object. This is specially true of all the views from summits, a quality that distinguishes them from summit-views in other districts. Whatever Aiguille you stand upon, and whatever may have been the character of the scenery passed through on the way up, the moment you arrive upon the top, Mont Blanc assumes the predominance and all else takes second rank. The ordinary summit-view, the wide world over, is a panorama, in which the uninterrupted roving of the vision round the whole circuit is the chief charm. From a minor summit in the Mont Blanc region, the great mountain shuts out a large fraction of the distant panorama and attracts chief attention to itself. Of the other conspicuous beauties of this district, its glorious ice scenery, its astonishingly precipitous crags and slender needle-peaks, we shall take occasion to speak hereafter. In this place it is only the dominant note of each locality that calls for brief description.