It was high-noon when Melchior de Willading and his venerable friend led the way across the foaming Rhone, at the celebrated bridge of St Maurice.  Here the country of the Valais, then like Geneva, an ally, and not a confederate of the Swiss cantons, was entered, and all objects, both animate and inanimate, began to assume that mixture of the grand, the sterile, the luxuriant, and the revolting, for which this region is so generally known.  Adelheid gave an involuntary shudder, her imagination having been prepared by rumor for even more than the truth would have given reason to expect, when the gate of St. Maurice swung back upon its hinges, literally inclosing the party in this wild, desolate, and yet romantic region.  As they proceeded along the Rhone, however, she and those of her companions to whom the scene was new, were constantly wondering at some unlooked-for discrepancy, that drove them from admiration to disgust—­from the exclamations of delight to the chill of disappointment.  The mountains on every side were dreary, and without the rich relief of the pastured eminences, but most of the valley was rich and generous.  In one spot a sac d’eau, one of those reservoirs of water which form among the glaciers on the summits of the rocks, had broken, and, descending like a water-spout, it had swept before it every vestige of cultivation, covering wide breadths of the meadows with a debris that resembled chaos.  A frightful barrenness, and the most smiling fertility, were in absolute contact:  patches of green, that had been accidentally favored by some lucky formation of the ground, sometimes appearing like oases of the desert, in the very centre of a sterility that would put the labor and the art of man at defiance for a century.  In the midst of this terrific picture of want sat a cretin, with his semi-human attributes, the lolling tongue, the blunted faculties, and the degraded appetites, to complete the desolation.  Issuing from this belt of annihilated vegetation, the scene became again as pleasant as the fancy could desire, or the eye crave.  Fountains leaped from rock to rock in the sun’s rays; the valley was green and gentle; the mountains began to show varied and pleasing forms; and happy smiling faces appeared, whose freshness and regularity were perhaps of a cast superior to that of most of the Swiss.  In short, the Valais was then; as now, a country of opposite extremes, but in which, perhaps, there is a predominance of the repulsive and inhospitable.

It was fairly nightfall, notwithstanding the trifling distance they had journeyed, when the travellers reached Martigny, where dispositions had previously been made for their reception during the hours of sleep.  Here preparations were made to seek their rest at an early hour, in order to be in readiness for the fatiguing toil of the following day.