We climbed and climbed, with many a muted hope and many a muted fear of the mechanism which carried us so safely, and then we ran across a stretch of comparative level and reached the last station, under the cliff on which the local hotel stood, with the mighty ruin behind it. Our passengers flocked up to the terrace of the hotel, much shoved and shouldered by automobiles bearing the company which seems proper to those vehicles, and dispersed themselves at the many little tables set about for tea, and the glory of the matchless outlook. While one could yet have the ruin mostly to one's self, it seemed the most favorable moment to visit the crumbling walls and broken tower, whose fragments strewed the slopes around. The tower was of Augustus, and the fortress into which it was turned in the Middle Ages was of unknown authority, but the ruin was the work of Marshal Villars, who blew up both trophy and stronghold sometime in the French king's wars with the imperialists in the first half of the eighteenth century. The destruction was incomplete, though probably sufficient for the purpose, but as a ruin, nothing could be more admirable. There seems to be at present something like a restoration going on; it has not gone very far, however; it has developed some fragments of majestic pillars, and some breadths of Roman brick-work; a few spaces about the base of the tower are cleared; but the rehabilitation will probably never proceed to such an extreme that you may not sit down on some carven remnant of the past, and closing your eyes to the surrounding glory of alp and sea find yourself again on the Palatine or amid the memorials of the Forum.
THE END