When he had learned, with an air of indifference, all that he cared to learn, he respectfully bowed himself away from Mlle. Moiseney, to whom he had not mentioned his name, and, buckling his haversack, he put it on his back, paid his bill, and set out on foot to make a hasty ascent of the culminating point of the Albula Pass, which leads into the Engadine Valley.  One would have difficulty in finding throughout the Alps a more completely barren, rugged, desolate spot, than this portion of the Albula Pass.  The highway lies among masses of rocks, heaped up in terrible disorder.  Arrived at the culminating point, Count Abel felt the necessity of taking breath.  He clambered up a little hillock, where he seated himself.  At his feet were wide open the yawning jaws of a cavern, obstructed by great tufts of aconite (wolf’s-bane), with sombre foliage; one would have said that they kept guard over some crime in which they had been accomplices.  Count Abel contemplated the awful silence that surrounded him; everywhere enormous boulders, heaped together, or scattered about in isolated grandeur; some pitched on their sides, others standing erect, still others suspended, as it were, in mid-air.  It seemed to him that these boulders had formerly served for the games of bacchanalian Titans, who, after having used them as skittles or jack-stones, had ended by hurling them at one another’s heads.  It is most probable that He who constructed the Albula Pass, alarmed and confused by the hideous aspect of his work, did justice to it by breaking it into fragments with his gigantic hammer.

Count Abel heard a tinkling of bells, and, looking up, he saw approaching a post-chaise, making its way from Engadine to Bergun.  It was a large, uncovered berlin, and in it sat a woman of about sixty years of age, accompanied by her attendants and her pug-dog.  This woman had rather a bulky head, a long face, a snub-nose, high cheek-bones, a keen, bright eye, a large mouth, about which played a smile, at the same time spirituel, imperious, and contemptuous.  Abel grew pale, and became at once convulsed with terror; he could not withdraw his eyes from this markedly Mongolian physiognomy, which from afar he had recognised.  “Ah, yes,” he said, “it is she!” He drew over his face the cape of his mantle, and disappeared as completely as it is possible to disappear when one is perched upon a hillock.  It was six years since he had seen this woman, and he had promised himself never to see her again; but man is the plaything of circumstances, and his happiness as well as his pride is at the mercy of a chance encounter.  Count Abel was no longer proud; for some moments he had humbled himself, he had ceased to exist.