We lingered for a moment at the narrow entrance to Le Desert, where the rushing river Guiers foams through the throttled gorge, giving barely room for the road scored along the lace of the cliff.  It was like a doorway to the lost domain of the monks, and Jack and I agreed that St. Bruno was a man of genius to find such a retreat.  A retreat it was literally.  St. Bernard had taken his followers to a place where, suffering great hardships, they could best devote their lives to succouring others; but St. Bruno’s theory had evidently been that holy men can do more good to their kind by prayer in peaceful sanctuaries than by offering more material aid.

Here,—­at the doorway of St. Bruno’s long corridor,—­the ravine, the old forge, the single-arched bridge flung high across the deep bed of the roaring torrent, had all grouped themselves as if after a consultation upon artistic effect.  Once, there had been an actual gate, built alike for defence and for limitation, but there were no traces of it left for the eye of the amateur.

We passed into the defile, and the motor car was out of sight long ago.  Higher and higher the brown road climbed.  The mountains towered close and tall.  Great pillared palaces of rock loomed against the sky like castles in the air, incalculably far above the green heads and sloping shoulders of the nearer mountain slopes.

I had thought that green was never so green as in the Valley of Aosta, but here in St. Bruno’s corridor there was a new richness of emerald in the green carpet and wall hangings, such as I had not yet known.  It was green stamped with living gold, in delicate fleur-de-lis patterns where the sun wove bright threads; and high above was the ceiling of lapis lazuli, in pure unclouded blue.

We heard no sound save the voices of unseen woodcutters crying to each other from mountain slope to mountain slope, the resonant ring of their axes, striking out wild, echoing notes with a fleeting clang of steel on pine, and now and again the sudden thunder-crash of a falling tree, like the roar of a distant avalanche.

By-and-bye we came to the aerial bridge which spans the Guiers Mort, slender and graceful as the arch of a rainbow, and as we gazed down at the far, white water hurling itself in sheets of foam past the detaining rocks, the sharp toot of a horn broke discordantly into the deep-toned music.  A motor car sprang round an abrupt curve and flashed by, but not so quickly that I did not recognise among the six occupants the two young Americans of Mont Revard.  They passed me as unseeingly as they did the scenery:  for they were talking as fast to two pretty girls opposite them in the tonneau, as if the girls had not been talking equally fast to them at the same time.  I bore the pair a grudge, and the sight of them brought back the consciousness of my injury.