is of another age, one more severe and
stronger than that in which we vegetate.

Gavarnie is a very ordinary village, commanding a view of the
amphitheater we are come to see. After you have left it, it is still
necessary to go three miles through a melancholy plain, half buried in
sand by the winter inundations; the waters of the Gave are muddy and
dull; a cold wind whistles from the amphitheater; the glaciers, strewn
with mud and stones, are stuck to the declivity like patches of dirty
plaster. The mountains are bald and ravined by cascades; black cones
of scattered firs climb them like routed soldiers; a meager and wan
turf wretchedly clothes their mutilated heads. The horses ford the
Gave stumblingly, chilled by the water coming from the snows. In this
wasted solitude you meet, all of a sudden, the most smiling parterre.
A throng of the lovely iris crowds itself into the bed of a dried
torrent; the sun stripes with rays of gold their velvety petals of
tender blue; and the eye follows over the whole plain the folds of the
rivulet of flowers.

We climb a last eminence, sown with iris and with stones. There is a
hut where you breakfast and leave the horses. You arm yourself with a
stout stick, and descend upon the glaciers of the amphitheater.

These glaciers are very ugly, very dirty, very uneven, very slippery;
at every step you run the risk of falling, and if you fall, it is on
sharp stones or into deep holes. They look very much like heaps of old
plaster-work, and those who have admired them must have a stock of
admiration for sale. The water has pierced them so that you walk
upon bridges of snow. These bridges have the appearance of kitchen
air-holes; the water is swallowed up in a very low archway, and, when
you look closely, you get a distinct sight of a black hole.

After the glaciers we find a sloping esplanade; we climb for ten
minutes bruising our feet upon fragments of sharp rock. Since leaving
the hut we have not lifted our eyes, in order to restore for ourselves
an unbroken sensation. Here at last we look.

A wall of granite crowned with snow hollows itself before us in a
gigantic amphitheater. This amphitheater is twelve hundred feet high,
nearly three miles in circumference, three tiers of perpendicular
walls, and in each tier thousands of steps. The valley ends there; the
wall is a single block and impregnable. The other summits might fall,
but its massive layers would not be moved. The mind is o