Those baths remove fat, and also skin-diseases.  The patients remain in the great tanks for hours at a time.  A dozen gentlemen and ladies occupy a tank together, and amuse themselves with rompings and various games.  They have floating desks and tables, and they read or lunch or play chess in water that is breast-deep.  The tourist can step in and view this novel spectacle if he chooses.  There’s a poor-box, and he will have to contribute.  There are several of these big bathing-houses, and you can always tell when you are near one of them by the romping noises and shouts of laughter that proceed from it.  The water is running water, and changes all the time, else a patient with a ringworm might take the bath with only a partial success, since, while he was ridding himself of the ringworm, he might catch the itch.

The next morning we wandered back up the green valley, leisurely, with the curving walls of those bare and stupendous precipices rising into the clouds before us.  I had never seen a clean, bare precipice stretching up five thousand feet above me before, and I never shall expect to see another one.  They exist, perhaps, but not in places where one can easily get close to them.  This pile of stone is peculiar.  From its base to the soaring tops of its mighty towers, all its lines and all its details vaguely suggest human architecture.  There are rudimentary bow-windows, cornices, chimneys, demarcations of stories, etc.  One could sit and stare up there and study the features and exquisite graces of this grand structure, bit by bit, and day after day, and never weary his interest.  The termination, toward the town, observed in profile, is the perfection of shape.  It comes down out of the clouds in a succession of rounded, colossal, terracelike projections—­a stairway for the gods; at its head spring several lofty storm-scarred towers, one after another, with faint films of vapor curling always about them like spectral banners.  If there were a king whose realms included the whole world, here would be the place meet and proper for such a monarch.  He would only need to hollow it out and put in the electric light.  He could give audience to a nation at a time under its roof.

Our search for those remains having failed, we inspected with a glass the dim and distant track of an old-time avalanche that once swept down from some pine-grown summits behind the town and swept away the houses and buried the people; then we struck down the road that leads toward the Rhone, to see the famous Ladders.  These perilous things are built against the perpendicular face of a cliff two or three hundred feet high.  The peasants, of both sexes, were climbing up and down them, with heavy loads on their backs.  I ordered Harris to make the ascent, so I could put the thrill and horror of it in my book, and he accomplished the feat successfully, though a subagent, for three francs, which I paid.  It makes me shudder yet