stonishing a height
were to be found on earth. Not even at night had he imagined such
appalling upward and upward into the sky, and this he said though he had
seen the Alps, of which it is true that when you are close to them they
are very middling affairs; but not so the Pyrenees, which are not only
great but also terrible, for they are haunted, as you shall hear. But
before I begin to write of the spirits that inhabit the deserts of the
Aston, I must first explain, for the sake of those who have not seen
them, how the awful valleys of the Pyrenees are made.

All the high valleys of mountains go in steps, but those of the Pyrenees
in a manner more regular even than those of the Sierra Nevada out in
California, which the Pyrenees so greatly resemble. For the steps here
are nearly always three in number between the plain and the main chain,
and each is entered by a regular gate of rock. So it is in the valley of
the Ariege, and so it is in that of the Aston, and so it is in every
other valley until you get to the far end where live the cleanly but
incomprehensible Basques. Each of these steps is perfectly level,
somewhat oval in shape, a mile or two or sometimes five miles long, but
not often a mile broad. Through each will run the river of the valley,
and upon either side of it there will be rich pastures, and a high plain
of this sort is called a _jasse_, the same as in California is called a
"flat": as "Dutch Flat," "Poverty Flat," and other famous flats.

First, then, will come a great gorge through which one marches up from
the plain, and then at the head of it very often a waterfall of some
kind, along the side of which one forces one's way up painfully through
a narrow chasm of rock and finds above one The great green level of the
first jasse with the mountains standing solemnly around it. And then
when one has marched all along this level one will come to another gorge
and another chasm, and when one has climbed over the barrier of rock and
risen up another 2000 feet or so, one comes to a second jasse, smaller
as a rule than the lower one; but so high are the mountains that all
this climbing into the heart of them does not seem to have reduced their
height at all. And then one marches along this second jasse and one
comes to yet another gorge and climbs up just as one did the two others,
through a chasm where there will be a little waterfall or a large one,
and one finds at the top the smallest and most lonely of