essiniere and ascend to Dourmillouse. The immediate vicinity
of Pallons is fair and fertile, but a short walk up the course of an
impetuous torrent brought us to a narrow gorge, beyond which we found a
totally different region. Bare slopes of rock that looked grim even in
the sunny morning, and a waste valley-bottom, here of considerable
width, but sterile and bleak, made up the landscape. Its dreariness was
only increased by an occasional chalet standing beside a patch of limp
and discolored potato-vines. As we went on the scene grew more and more
gloomy. The tillage is in cleared spots not so large as the heaps of
stones that surround them, or on bits of practicable soil left by
land-slides in the midst of their hideous debris. The only trees are
dwarfish pollards, reduced to bare trunks with thin tufts of green atop
by the practice of stripping off the sprouts every two or three years to
make fodder for the goats. Midway up the valley we passed the village of
Violins. It seemed mournfully empty, and many of the houses were in
reality deserted. A shy, bright-faced fellow opened the little _temple_
for our inspection, and Pastor Charpiot reminded us how its interior was
not only planned by Neff, but in large measure his actual handiwork.
Half an hour further on our path led us through the hamlet of Minsas,
now entirely abandoned and in ruins. The desolation of the valley here
becomes appalling. On either hand sheer precipices of crumbling rock
rise above steep slopes of gravel and loose stones. The ground is strewn
thick with great boulders, many of which had left traces of their
furious descent before settling, sometimes close beside the path, or
even after crossing it in a final bound. The precipices from which they
had detached themselves are composed of strangely-twisted strata, and
frequently recurring streaks of lurid red give them a fierce and ghastly
aspect. Landslips and torrents of stones are so frequent of late years
that no more attempts are made to clear away the rubbish thus deposited.
Where these scourges have not fallen the sullen stream has carried
devastation. Floods occur every year. That of 1856 wrought a ruin from
which the villages have never rallied. In the whole upper half of the
valley of Fressiniere there is not, I suppose, an acre of land capable
of cultivation. In the time of Neff, wretched as its condition must
always have been, the poverty of this region was not so utterly hopeless
as it has