Yet at its highest it is not burdensome to a comer from richer countries.  The hotel prices themselves halt at a certain mark, and marbled buildings and aristocratic prestige cannot force them higher.  Wealthy idleness, Continental idleness in particular, knows to a nicety the sums it is willing to pay for its pleasures.  It pays that cheerfully.  A centime beyond, it would denounce as imposition.

Extortion is rare; we have not met one instance in these mountains.  Oftener we find items to be added to a charge than erased.  In this respect, the Pyrenees will prove less expensive than Switzerland, for they are so little touched by the money-reckless Anglo-Saxon.  That ubiquitous tourist has not yet come, to brush with o’er rude hand the silvery dust from their butterfly wings.  Nor—­to complete the statement—­have they yet learned to brush with o’er rude hand the golden dust from his butterfly wings.  The latter fact is perhaps as important as the former.

II.

The road to Luz, whither we are now bound, will take us back along the shadow of the Viscos to Pierrefitte, and then up the left side of the angle under the other haunch of that dividing mountain.  We start in the cool of the afternoon, preferring that time to mid-day for the drive.  The ride down to Pierrefitte is quick and exhilarating.  The six miles seem as furlongs.  One enjoys more than doubly the double traversing of fine scenery, and this review of the splendors of the Cauterets gorge many degrees intensifies its effect.  At Pierrefitte, the same innkeeper shows the same gladness to find that the same travelers are still thirsty, but there is nothing else to detain us in the little railway terminus.  Here we take up again the thread of the Route Thermale, dropped for the visit to Cauterets; and trend again up into a mountain valley, the Viscos now on the right.  The valley soon becomes a gorge in its turn, but the sides gape more widely and the incline of the road is slighter than of the one we have left.  At times the horses can trot without interruption.  It is an aggressive, inquiring road, is the Route Thermale, and thinks nothing of heights and depths nor of stepping across the Gave to better its condition.  We cross that stream several times on the way to Luz.  Each time, the passage is so narrow as to be spanned by a single arch, the keystone three hundred feet or higher above the water.

It is fourteen miles around from Cauterets to Luz, eight from Pierrefitte.  In all, less than three hours have passed when we come out from between the cliffs into a wide, level hollow, carpeted with green and yellow, patterned with fields and orchards and thatched roofs, seamed with rills, and altogether happy and alive.  Maize and millet rim all the foot-hills, and forests the higher mountains around.  We trot across the level meadows through a poplar-marked road toward the foot of the Pic de Bergonz, and run up into the little town of Luz.