On the west, a perpendicular mole, crannied like an old ruin, lifts itself straight up toward the sky.  A leprosy of yellowish moss has incrusted its pores, and has clothed it all over with a sinister livery.  This livid robe upon this parched stone has a splendid effect.  Nothing is uglier than the chalky flints that are drawn from the quarry; just dug up, they seem cold and damp in their whitish shroud; they are not used to the sun; they make a contrast with the rest.  But the rock that has lived in the air for ten thousand years, where the light has every day laid on and melted its metallic tints, is the friend of the sun, and carries its mantle upon its shoulders; it has no need of a garment of verdure; if it suffers from parasitic vegetations, it sticks them to its sides and imprints them with its colors.  The threatening tones with which it clothes itself suits the free sky, the naked landscape, the powerful heat that environs it; it is alive like a plant; only it is of another age, one more severe and stronger than that in which we vegetate.

Gavarnie is a very ordinary village, commanding a view of the amphitheater we are come to see.  After you have left it, it is still necessary to go three miles through a melancholy plain, half buried in sand by the winter inundations; the waters of the Gave are muddy and dull; a cold wind whistles from the amphitheater; the glaciers, strewn with mud and stones, are stuck to the declivity like patches of dirty plaster.  The mountains are bald and ravined by cascades; black cones of scattered firs climb them like routed soldiers; a meager and wan turf wretchedly clothes their mutilated heads.  The horses ford the Gave stumblingly, chilled by the water coming from the snows.  In this wasted solitude you meet, all of a sudden, the most smiling parterre.  A throng of the lovely iris crowds itself into the bed of a dried torrent; the sun stripes with rays of gold their velvety petals of tender blue; and the eye follows over the whole plain the folds of the rivulet of flowers.

We climb a last eminence, sown with iris and with stones.  There is a hut where you breakfast and leave the horses.  You arm yourself with a stout stick, and descend upon the glaciers of the amphitheater.

These glaciers are very ugly, very dirty, very uneven, very slippery; at every step you run the risk of falling, and if you fall, it is on sharp stones or into deep holes.  They look very much like heaps of old plaster-work, and those who have admired them must have a stock of admiration for sale.  The water has pierced them so that you walk upon bridges of snow.  These bridges have the appearance of kitchen air-holes; the water is swallowed up in a very low archway, and, when you look closely, you get a distinct sight of a black hole.

After the glaciers we find a sloping esplanade; we climb for ten minutes bruising our feet upon fragments of sharp rock.  Since leaving the hut we have not lifted our eyes, in order to restore for ourselves an unbroken sensation.  Here at last we look.