The bath-house is a square portico with a double row of columns, in style at once noble and simple; the blue-gray of the marble, neither dull nor glaring, is pleasing to the eye. A terrace planted with lindens projects over the Gave, and receives the cool breezes that rise from the torrent toward the heights; these lindens fill the air with a delicate and agreeable perfume. At the foot of the breast-high wall, the water of the spring shoots forth in a white jet and falls between the tree-tops into a depth unfathomable by the eye.
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At the end of the village, the winding paths of an English garden descend to the Gave; you cross its dull blue waters on a frail wooden bridge, and mount again, skirting a field of millet as far as the road to Scia. The side of this road plunges down six hundred feet, streaked with ravines; at the bottom of the abyss, the Gave writhes in a rocky corridor that the noon-day sun scarce penetrates; the slope is so rapid that, in several places, the stream is invisible; the precipice is so deep that the roar reaches the ear like a murmur. The torrent is lost to sight under the cornices and boils in the caverns; at every step it whitens with foam the smooth stone. Its restless ways, its mad leaps, its dark and livid reflexes, suggest a serpent wounded and covered with foam. But the strangest spectacle of all is that of the wall of rocks opposite: the mountain has been cleft perpendicularly as if by an immense sword, and one would say that the first gash had been further mutilated by hands, weaker, yet still infuriate. From the summit down to the Gave, the rock is of the color of dead wood, stripped of the bark; the prodigious tree-trunk, slit and jagged, seems mouldering away there through the centuries; water oozes in the blackened rents as in those of a worm-eaten block; it is yellowed by mosses such as vegetate in the rottenness of humid oaks. Its wounds have the brown and veined hues that one sees in the old scars of trees. It is in truth a petrified beam, a relic of Babel. The geologists are a fortunate race; they express all this, and many things besides, when they say that the rock is schistose.
After going a league we found a bit of meadow, two or three cottages situated upon the gentle slope. The contrast is refreshing. And yet the pasturage is meagre, studded with barren rocks, surrounded with fallen debris; if it were not for a rivulet of ice-cold water, the sun would scorch the herbage. Two children were sleeping under a walnut tree; a goat that had climbed upon a rock was bleating plaintively and tremblingly; three or four hens, with curious and uneasy air, were scratching on the brink of a trench; a woman was drawing water from the spring with a wooden porringer: such is the entire wealth of these poor households. Sometimes they have, four or five hundred feet higher up, a field of barley, so steep that the reaper must be fastened by a rope in order to harvest it.
II.
The Gave is strewn with small islands, which may be reached by jumping from one stone to another. These islands are beds of bluish rock spotted with pebbles of a staring white; they are submerged in winter, and now there are trunks stripped of their bark still lying here and there among the bowlders. In some hollows are remains of ooze; from these spring clusters of elms like a discharge of fireworks, and tufts of grass wave over the arid pebbles; around the hushed water grows warm in the caverns. Meanwhile on two sides the mountain lifts its reddish wall, streaked with foam by the streamlets that wind down over the surface. Over all the flanks of the island the cascades rumble like thunder; twenty ravines, one above another, engulf them in their chasms, and their roar comes from all sides like the din of a battle. A mist flashes back and floats above all this storm: it hangs among the trees and opposes’ its fine cool gauze to the burning of the sun.