A wall of granite crowned with snow hollows itself before us in a gigantic amphitheater.  This amphitheater is twelve hundred feet high, nearly three miles in circumference, three tiers of perpendicular walls, and in each tier thousands of steps.  The valley ends there; the wall is a single block and impregnable.  The other summits might fall, but its massive layers would not be moved.  The mind is overwhelmed by the idea of a stability that can not be shaken and an assured eternity.  There is the boundary of two countries and two races; this it is that Roland wanted to break, when with a sword-stroke he opened a breach in the summit.  But the immense wound disappeared in the immensity of the unconquered wall.  Three sheets of snow are spread out over the three tiers of layers.

The sun falls with all its force upon this virginal robe without being able to make it shine.  It preserves its dead whiteness.  All this grandeur is austere; the air is chilled beneath the noonday rays; great, damp shadows creep along the foot of the walls.  It is the everlasting winter and the nakedness of the desert.  The sole inhabitants are the cascades assembled to form the Gave.  The streamlets of water come by thousands from the highest layer, leap from step to step, cross their stripes of foam, unite and fall by a dozen brooks that slide from the last layer in flaky streaks to lose themselves in the glaciers of the bottom.

The thirteenth cascade on the left is twelve hundred and sixty-six feet high.  It falls slowly, like a dropping cloud, or the unfolding of a muslin veil; the air softens its fall; the eye follows complacently the graceful undulation of the beautiful airy veil.  It glides the length of the rock, and seems to float rather than to fall.  The sun shines, through its plume, with the softest and loveliest splendor.  It reaches the bottom like a bouquet of slender waving feathers, and springs backward in a silver dust; the fresh and transparent mist swings about the rock it bathes, and its rebounding train mounts lightly along the courses.  No stir in the air; no noise, no living creature in the solitude.  You hear only the monotonous murmur of the cascades, resembling the rustle of the leaves that the wind stirs in the forest.

On our return, we seated ourselves at the door of the hut.  It is a poor, squat little house, heavily supported upon thick walls; the knotty joists of the ceiling retain their bark.  It is indeed necessary that it should be able to stand out alone against the snows of winter.  You find everywhere the imprint of the terrible months it has gone through.  Two dead fir-trees stand erect at the door.  The garden, three feet square, is defended by enormous walls of piled-up slates.  The low and black stable leaves neither foot-hold nor entry for the winds.  A lean colt was seeking a little grass among the stones.  A small bull, with surly air, looked at us out of the sides of his eyes; the animals, the trees and the site, wore a threatening or melancholy aspect.  But in the clefts of a rock were growing some admirable buttercups, lustrous and splendid, which looked as if painted by a ray of sunshine.