[Illustration:  THE VILLAGE OF GEDRE.]

Starting again, we commenced the zigzag ascent past the church—­the road winding among fields golden with daffodils, mingling here and there with the lovely blue of the gentians and the pink Primula farinosa—­towards the base of the Coumelie, the mule-path to the Cirque de Troumouse leading through a field above us, as we reached the zigzag’s top.  Still gently ascending round the foot of the Coumelie, the pointed summit of the lofty Taillon (10,323 ft.) came into view ahead, with the grandiose Campbieil (10,418 ft.) up the Heas valley; and the Pic de Saugue immediately above on the right, from whose height the splendid Cascade d’Arroudet, dashing past the shepherds’ cottages, launches its foaming showers into the river below.  A few more graceful curvings of the road and we entered the region so aptly termed “Chaos.”  Attributed to an earthquake at the end of the fourteenth century, rightly or wrongly, the fact nevertheless remains that one of the huge buttresses of the Coumelie became detached from the main summit, and dashed down in enormous blocks to the valley below.  There they lie, the road passing between, in the wildest and most indescribable confusion.  Here a heap piled one above another, there a mighty shoulder split in twain by a conical fragment which rests in the breach that it made; some towering above the road, others blocking the river below, a few isolated and many half-buried; but all combining to form as wild and wonderful a chaos as the eye could wish to gaze on, but which the pen must fail to describe.  Far away on the shores of China, at the port of Amoy, is another scene which, though it must yield the palm to this, is nevertheless one of a similarly wild nature.  The “Valley of the Ten Thousand Rocks,” as the spot is called, in the midst of which stands a joss-house (or temple), may be reached in a pleasant walk from the harbour of Amoy, by way of the wonderful Rocking Stone, and along paths lined with aloes and cacti.  There the grass grows between the confusion of boulders, and the Chinamen’s incense ascends to the blue sky; but these points of difference from the Chaos of Gavarnie, though tending to subdue part of the barren wildness, nevertheless still leave a resemblance between the two scenes that is worthy of record.

[Illustration]

Leaving this “boulder” region behind us, we passed through a huge avalanche that stood in frozen filthiness far above the carriage on each side of the road, while immediately over us on the left rose the mountain from which it had come—­rightly named the Sugar-loaf—­and opposite, on the right, the serrated summit of the Soum de Secugnac (8442 ft.).