It is a silencing scene.  The effect it gives of simple largeness,—­a largeness uncomprehended before,—­may be fairly called overpowering.  There is something almost of the terrific in it, something even oppressive.  We are as a fact at the end of the world.  The eye does not seem to be deceived here, as it often is in great magnitudes; it belittles nothing; it realizes to the full this strange impression of simple, hopeless bulk, immovable and pitiless as the reign of law.

The floor of the Cirque, far from being level, is blocked with snow and the debris of falling rock.  Our halting-place is near the left curve of the arc; and a half hour’s toilsome scramble across its chord to the opposite side would take us to the foot of a darker streak in the wall which seems from here like a possible groove or gully and in fact is such.  Unscalable as it seems, that is the magic stairway which leads up out of this rocky Inferno to the higher ledges and finally over glacier-fields to the Breche de Roland, (which is invisible from the Cirque itself,) and through this gateway on into Spain.  Mountaineers and smugglers make the trip with unconcern, and it is entirely practicable for tourists, though needing a sure foot and a stout pulmonary apparatus.  The Mont Perdu is also ascended from this direction; first climbed in 1802 by the intrepid Ramond, who seems to have been as true a mountaineer as a savant, it has been occasionally ascended since; its ledges are notably treacherous and difficult, and the trip demands proper implements and practiced guides.  It is a striking fact that its upper rocks have been found to be marine calcareous beds.  That proud eminence has not stood thus in the clouds for all time; it was once buried fathoms deep under the Tertiary ocean.

An interesting anecdote attaches to this mountain.  It was assaulted some years ago by a French lady, a Mme. L., who vowed that she should be the first woman to stand upon the summit.  She was accompanied by four guides, pledged to carry her body to the top alive or dead.  No carrying was needed, however; the lady climbed with the coolness and hardihood of a born mountaineer; they camped for the night on the way, 7500 feet above the sea, at the base of the main peak, and in the morning she triumphantly gained the top.  But now the fair climber undid all the glory of the exploit:  a bottle had long been left in a niche of rock at the top, opened by each rare new-comer in turn to add his name and a sentiment or some expression of his admiration; our heroine opened this, scattered the precious contents to the winds, and inserted her card in their place, declaring that there should be but one name found on the crest of the Mont Perdu, and that her own.

Great was the indignation in the valley when this ungenerous act became known.  A young stranger was staying at St. Sauveur at the time; no sooner had he heard of the occurrence than he started up the mountain himself.  It was but a few days after Mme. L.’s ascent; the despoiled bottle was there, with its single slip of pasteboard; and a day or two later, the lady, then in Paris, received a polite note enclosing the card that she had left on the summit of the Mont Perdu, 10,999 feet above the sea!