set before us a bottle of Bavarian beer and promised to have a
supper ready on our return.

There were still ten miles to the Riukan, and consequently no time to be
lost. The valley contracted, squeezing the Maan between the interlocking
bases of the mountains, through which, in the course of uncounted
centuries, it had worn itself a deep groove, cut straight and clean into
the heart of the rock. The loud, perpetual roar of the vexed waters
filled the glen; the only sound except the bleating of goats clinging to
the steep pastures above us. The mountain walls on either hand were now
so high and precipitous, that the bed of the valley lay wholly in
shadow; and on looking back, its further foldings were dimly seen
through purple mist. Only the peak of the Gousta, which from this point
appeared an entire and perfect pyramid, 1500 feet in perpendicular
height above the mountain platform from which it rose, gleamed with a
rich bronze lustre in the setting sun. The valley was now a mere
ascending gorge, along the sides of which our road climbed. Before us
extended a slanting shelf thrust out from the mountain, and affording
room for a few cottages and fields; but all else was naked rock and
ragged pine. From one of the huts we passed, a crippled, distorted form
crawled out on its hands and knees to beg of us. It was a boy of
sixteen, struck with another and scarcely less frightful form of
leprosy. In this case, instead of hideous swellings and fungous
excrescences, the limbs gradually dry up and drop off piecemeal at the
joints. Well may the victims of both these forms of hopeless disease
curse the hour in which they were begotten. I know of no more awful
example of that visitation of the sins of the parents upon the children,
which almost always attends confirmed drunkenness, filth, and
licentiousness.

When we reached the little hamlet on the shelf of the mountain, the last
rays of the sun were playing on the summits above. We had mounted about
2000 feet since leaving the Tind Lake, and the dusky valley yawned far
beneath us, its termination invisible, as if leading downward into a
lower world. Many hundreds of feet below the edge of the wild little
platform on which we stood, thundered the Maan in a cleft, the bottom of
which the sun has never beheld. Beyond this the path was impracticable
for horses; we walked, climbed, or scrambled along the side of the dizzy
steep, where, in many places, a false step would have sent u