high as Etna, and covering with their huge bases half a county of
land--there lies, in the Spanish Pyrenees, a little town. It has been
mentioned in books very rarely, and visited perhaps more rarely. Of
three men whom in my life I have heard speak its name, two only had
written of it, and but one had seen it. Yet to see it is to learn a
hundred things.

There is no road to it. No wheeled thing has ever been seen in its
streets. The crest of the Pyrenees (which are here both precipitous and
extremely high) is not a ridge nor an edge, but a great wall of slabs,
as it were, leaning up against the sky. Through a crack in this wall,
between two of these huge slabs, the mountaineers for many thousand
years have wormed their way across the hills, but the height and the
extreme steepness of the last four thousand feet have kept that passage
isolated and ill-known. Upon the French side the path has recently been
renewed; within a few yards upon the southern slope it dwindles and
almost disappears.

As one so passes from the one country to the other, it is for all the
world like the shutting of a door between oneself and the world. For
some reason or other the impression of a civilisation active to the
point of distress follows one all up the pass from the French railway to
the summit of the range; but when that summit is passed the new and
brilliant sun upon the enormous glaciers before one, the absence of
human signs and of water, impress one suddenly with silence.

From that point one scrambles down and down for hours into a deserted
valley--all noon and afternoon and evening: on the first flats a rude
path, at last appears. A river begins to flow; great waterfalls pour
across one's way, and for miles upon miles one limps along and down the