The sole interest of the walk is this stupendous curve of cliffs ahead, roofed with snow and glistening with rime and moisture.  It fascinates, yet we try not to look, reserving a climax for our halting-place.  The pathway is well marked though somewhat stony and irregular; the valley-bottom is wider here and we are close by the side of the Gave.  The hemp sandals prove surprisingly useful.  Their half-inch soles of rope utterly deaden the inequalities of the ground, and the pebbly, hummocky path is as a carpet beneath the feet.  The bearers tramp steadily onward, the chairs sinking and rising in easy vertical motion, much more grateful than the horizontal “joggle” of the Pyrenean saddle-horse.  We are an hour in approaching the Cirque, which looms higher at every step.  The halting-place is reached at last.  It is a small plateau almost in the heart of the arena, and here there is a restaurant,—­the last house in France,—­and the inevitable group of idlers to ruin the effect of solitude.

IX.

They cannot ruin the effect of sublimity, however.  That term, not freely perhaps to be used in all terrestrial scenes, is beyond question applicable here.

The Amphitheatre of Gavarnie, in which we stand, surpasses easy description.  It is a blank, continuous wall of precipices, bending around us in the form of a horseshoe, a mile in diameter, and starting abruptly from the floor of the valley,—­perhaps the most magnificent face of naked rock to be seen in Europe.  Its cliffs rise first a sheer fourteen hundred feet without a break; there is a narrow shelf of snow, and above this ledge they rise to another, and then climb in stages upward still, perpendicular and black, in a waste of escarpments and buttresses, terraced with widening snow-fields tier on tier, until their brows and cornices are nodding overhead almost a mile above the arena.  Higher yet, the separate summits stand like towers in the white glaciers on the top; the Cylindre, at 10,900 feet above the sea, is partly hidden at the left by its own projecting flanges, and nearer the centre of the arc the Marbore, with its Casque and Turret, is but as an outwork concealing the greater Mont Perdu, the highest mountain in the French Pyrenees and next to the Maladetta the highest of the range.

A dozen slender waterfalls, unnoticed Staubbachs, are showering from the heights; over a ledge under the Mont Perdu streams the loftiest, known too as the loftiest fall on the Continent.  It comes over slowly, “like a dropping cloud, or the unfolding of a muslin veil,” falling steadily and with scarcely an interruption a quarter of a mile in vertical height, before it is finally whirled into spray against the rocks at the base.  And the Gave which these cascades unite to form, and which we have been following thus toward its source this morning, is no other than the Gave de Pau, which will hurry on and down through the valleys till it is flowing below the old chateau of the kings of Navarre, and later joining the Adour will pass on through Bayonne to the sea.