or play
chess in water that is breast-deep. The tourist can step in and view
this novel spectacle if he chooses. There's a poor-box, and he will have
to contribute. There are several of these big bathing-houses, and you
can always tell when you are near one of them by the romping noises and
shouts of laughter that proceed from it. The water is running water, and
changes all the time, else a patient with a ringworm might take the bath
with only a partial success, since, while he was ridding himself of the
ringworm, he might catch the itch.

The next morning we wandered back up the green valley, leisurely, with
the curving walls of those bare and stupendous precipices rising
into the clouds before us. I had never seen a clean, bare precipice
stretching up five thousand feet above me before, and I never shall
expect to see another one. They exist, perhaps, but not in places where
one can easily get close to them. This pile of stone is peculiar. From
its base to the soaring tops of its mighty towers, all its lines and all
its details vaguely suggest human architecture. There are rudimentary
bow-windows, cornices, chimneys, demarcations of stories, etc. One could
sit and stare up there and study the features and exquisite graces of
this grand structure, bit by bit, and day after day, and never weary his
interest. The termination, toward the town, observed in profile, is the
perfection of shape. It comes down out of the clouds in a succession of
rounded, colossal, terracelike projections--a stairway for the gods; at
its head spring several lofty storm-scarred towers, one after another,
with faint films of vapor curling always about them like spectral
banners. If there were a king whose realms included the whole world,
here would be the place meet and proper for such a monarch. He would
only need to hollow it out and put in the electric light. He could give
audience to a nation at a time under its roof.

Our search for those remains having failed, we inspected with a glass
the dim and distant track of an old-time avalanche that once swept down
from some pine-grown summits behind the town and swept away the houses
and buried the people; then we struck down the road that leads toward
the Rhone, to see the famous Ladders. These perilous things are built
against the perpendicular face of a cliff two or three hundred feet
high. The peasants, of both sexes, were climbing up and down them, with
heavy loads on their backs. I orde