f the Gave,
which their brothers hold beneath themselves crusht and subdued.

We turn a second bridge and enter the plain of Gedres, verdant and
cultivated, where the hay is in cocks; they are harvesting; our horses
walk between two hedges of hazel; we go along by orchards; but the
mountain is ever near; the guide shows us a rock three times the
height of a man, which, two years ago, rolled down and demolished a
house.

We encounter several singular caravans: a band of young priests in
black hats, black gloves, black cassocks tucked up, black stockings,
very apparent, novices in horsemanship who bound at every step, like
the Gave; a big, jolly, round man, in a sedan-chair, his hands crossed
over his belly, who looks on us with a paternal air, and reads his
newspaper; three ladies of sufficiently ripe age, very slender, very
lean, very stiff, who, for dignity's sake, set their beasts on a trot
as we draw near them. The cicisbeo is a bony cartilaginous gentleman,
fixt perpendicularly on his saddle like a telegraph-pole. We hear
a harsh clucking, as of a choked hen, and we recognize the English
tongue.

Beyond Gedres is a wild valley called Chaos, which is well named.
After a quarter of an hour's journey there, the trees disappear, then
the juniper and the box, and finally the moss. The Gave is no longer
seen; all noises are hushed. It is a dead solitude peopled with
wrecks. The avalanches of rocks and crusht flint have come down from
the summit to the very bottom. The horrid tide, high and a quarter
of a league in length, spreads out like waves its myriads of sterile
stones, and the inclined sheet seems still to glide toward inundating
the gorge. These stones are shattered and pulverized; their living
fractures and thin, harsh points wound the eye; they are still
bruising and crushing each other. Not a bush, not a spear of grass;
the arid grayish train burns beneath a sun of brass; its debris are
scorched to a dull hue, as in a furnace.

A hundred paces further on, the aspect of the valley becomes
formidable. Troops of mammoths and mastadons in stone lie crouching
over the eastern declivity, one above another, and heaped up over the
whole slope. These colossal ridges shine with a tawny hue like iron
rust; the most enormous of them drink the water of the river at their
base. They look as if warming their bronzed skin in the sun, and
sleep, turned over, stretched out on their side, resting in all
attitudes, and always