We reached Nant Bourant at twelve o'clock, or a little before, and Coutet having given his sanction to my wish to get on, we started again soon after one--and reached the top of the Col de Bonhomme about five.

You would have been delighted with that view--it is one upon those lovely seas of blue mountain, one behind the other, of which one never tires--this, fortunately, westward--so that all the blue ridges and ranges above Conflans and Beaufort were dark against the afternoon sky, though misty with its light; while eastward a range of snowy crests, of which the most important was the Mont Iseran, caught the sunlight full upon them.

The sun was as warm, and the air as mild, on the place where the English travellers sank and perished, as in our garden at Denmark Hill on the summer evenings.

There is, however, no small excuse for a man's losing courage on that pass, if the weather were foul.

I never saw one so literally pathless--so void of all guide and help from the lie of the ground--so embarrassing from the distance which one has to wind round mere brows of craggy precipice without knowing the direction in which one is moving, while the path is perpetually lost in heaps of shale or among clusters of crags, even when it is free of snow.
All, however, when I passed was serene, and even beautiful--owing to the glow which the red rocks had in the sun.