There are but two resources:  to learn a description by heart, or to make the journey.  I have made the journey, and am going to give the description.

We leave at six o’clock in the morning, by the road to Scia, in the fog, without seeing at first anything beyond confused forms of trees and rocks.  At the end of a quarter of an hour, we hear along the pathway a noise of sharp cries drawing near; it was a funeral procession coming from Scia.  Two men bore a small coffin under a white shroud; behind came four herdsmen in long cloaks and brown capuchons, silent, with bent heads; four women followed in black mantles.  It was they who uttered those monotonous and piercing lamentations; one knew not if they were wailing or praying.  They walked with long steps through the cold mist, without stopping or looking at any one, and were going to bury the poor body in the cemetery at Luz.

At Scia the road passes over a small bridge very high up, which commands another bridge, gray and abandoned.  The double tier of arches bends gracefully over the blue torrent; meanwhile a pale light already floats in the diaphanous mist; a golden gauze undulates above the Gave; the aerial veil grows thin and will soon vanish.

Nothing can convey the idea of this light, so youthful, timid, and smiling, which glitters like the bluish wings of a dragon-fly that is pursued and is taken captive in a net of fog.

Beneath, the boiling water is engulfed in a narrow conduit and leaps like a mill-race.  The column of foam, thirty feet high, falls with a furious din, and its glaucous waves, heaped together in the deep ravine, dash against each other and are broken upon a line of fallen rocks.  Other enormous rocks, debris of the same mountain, hang above the road, their squared heads crowned with brambles for hair; ranged in impregnable line, they seem to watch the torments of the Gave, which their brothers hold beneath themselves crusht and subdued.

We turn a second bridge and enter the plain of Gedres, verdant and cultivated, where the hay is in cocks; they are harvesting; our horses walk between two hedges of hazel; we go along by orchards; but the mountain is ever near; the guide shows us a rock three times the height of a man, which, two years ago, rolled down and demolished a house.

We encounter several singular caravans:  a band of young priests in black hats, black gloves, black cassocks tucked up, black stockings, very apparent, novices in horsemanship who bound at every step, like the Gave; a big, jolly, round man, in a sedan-chair, his hands crossed over his belly, who looks on us with a paternal air, and reads his newspaper; three ladies of sufficiently ripe age, very slender, very lean, very stiff, who, for dignity’s sake, set their beasts on a trot as we draw near them.  The cicisbeo is a bony cartilaginous gentleman, fixt perpendicularly on his saddle like a telegraph-pole.  We hear a harsh clucking, as of a choked hen, and we recognize the English tongue.