Beyond Gedres is a wild valley called Chaos, which is well named.  After a quarter of an hour’s journey there, the trees disappear, then the juniper and the box, and finally the moss.  The Gave is no longer seen; all noises are hushed.  It is a dead solitude peopled with wrecks.  The avalanches of rocks and crusht flint have come down from the summit to the very bottom.  The horrid tide, high and a quarter of a league in length, spreads out like waves its myriads of sterile stones, and the inclined sheet seems still to glide toward inundating the gorge.  These stones are shattered and pulverized; their living fractures and thin, harsh points wound the eye; they are still bruising and crushing each other.  Not a bush, not a spear of grass; the arid grayish train burns beneath a sun of brass; its debris are scorched to a dull hue, as in a furnace.

A hundred paces further on, the aspect of the valley becomes formidable.  Troops of mammoths and mastadons in stone lie crouching over the eastern declivity, one above another, and heaped up over the whole slope.  These colossal ridges shine with a tawny hue like iron rust; the most enormous of them drink the water of the river at their base.  They look as if warming their bronzed skin in the sun, and sleep, turned over, stretched out on their side, resting in all attitudes, and always gigantic and frightful.  Their deformed paws are curled up; their bodies half buried in the earth; their monstrous backs rest one upon another.  When you enter into the midst of the prodigious band, the horizon disappears, the blocks rise fifty feet into the air; the road winds painfully among the overhanging masses; men and horses seem but dwarfs; these rusted edges mount in stages to the very summit, and the dark hanging army seems ready to fall on the human insects which come to trouble its sleep.

Once upon a time, the mountain, in a paroxysm of fever, shook its summits like a cathedral that is falling in.  A few points resisted, and their embattled turrets are drawn out in line on the crest; but their layers are dislocated, their sides creviced, their points jagged.  The whole shattered ridge totters.  Beneath them the rock fails suddenly in a living and still bleeding wound.  The splinters are lower down, strewn over the declivity.  The tumbled rocks are sustained one upon another, and man to-day passes in safety amidst the disaster.

But what a day was that of the ruin:  It is not very ancient, perhaps of the sixth century, and the year of the terrible earthquake told of by Gregory of Tours.  If a man could without perishing have seen the summits split, totter and fall, the two seas of rock come bounding into the gorge, meet one another and grind each other amidst a shower of sparks, he would have looked upon the grandest spectacle ever seen by human eyes.