The Route Thermale was the result; it is another of the wonders of Louis Napoleon’s regime.  It has revolutionized the comforts of Pyrenean summer travel; the ridges need no longer be skirted, for they can be luxuriously crossed,—­and by one of the best carriage-roads in Europe.  Beginning at Eaux Bonnes, and running in the main parallel with the central crest, it rears itself serpent-like over four of these great intervening barriers, attaining and crossing in turn the broad valleys between them, connecting northward with the stations, southward with the springs.  This immense band, sinuous and unbroken, uplifting itself to the snow, plunging again from snow to the maize-fields, stretches along the central Pyrenees a full hundred miles.  Four days’ journey away lies its distant end at Luchon.  The hostile mountains shower it with earth and stones.  Winter buries it in ice, spring assaults it with freshets; it is rarely passable before June, and mountain storms even in summer measure their strength against it.  But Napoleon III inspired this road, and it emerges, quickly rejuvenated, from tempest and torrent, to laugh unconquered.  Of the undertakings of the Bonaparte family, only two were ever baffled by opposing forces.

Such an enterprise as this gives a new light, for the stranger, upon the popularity of the Pyrenees.  This costly road-building could only have arisen from a demand great enough to require and sustain it,—­from an amount of summer traffic, a multitude of summer visitors, commensurate in part at least with the outlay.  Evidently, figments of lonely settlements and dark paths belong in limbo with those of dismal inns.

The next great synclinal, adjoining the Valley of Ossau, is the Valley of Lavedan, and at its head in the mountains lies Cauterets, our next point of attack.  The notch of the road in each intervening ridge is called a col, that which is in the ridge that now bars us from Cauterets being the Col d’Aubisque.  Over the Col d’Aubisque, accordingly, opposite the Pic de Ger, our way to-day lies.

II.

We abandon Eaux Bonnes, almost reluctantly, to its summer’s festivities, and drive down the broad street and around the end of the park and so out through the curtain of rock into the road of the main valley.  The slow ascent begins almost at once.  We rise gradually along a wooded hill, stopping once to enjoy a cataract which, like a happy child, is noisy for its size and entirely lovable nevertheless.  A long reach of valley is then entered, bottomed by the Gave, the road well up on the side.  In an hour or more, we finally turn to cross the valley, and commence the serious ascent of the opposite side.  Facing us now from the side we have left is the mass of the Ger, very near, very high, and uncompromisingly precipitous.  All the morning this Pic looms stonily above us; the sunshine brightens its snows but cannot soften the stern rock-features.  Steadily, though