broad daylight; the scene lay clear before them, terrible on all sides.

"Le Drac!" exclaimed the Abbe Gevresin, pointing to a sort of liquid
serpent at the bottom of the precipice, writhing and tossing between
rocks in the very jaws of the pit.

For now and again the reptile flung itself up on points of stone that
rent it as it passed; the waters changed as though poisoned by these
fangs; they lost their steely hue, and whitened with foam like a bran
bath; then the Drac hurried on faster, faster, flinging itself into the
shadowy gorge; lingered again on gravelly reaches, wallowing in the sun;
presently it gathered up its scattered rivulets and went on its way,
scaly with scum like the iridescent dross on boiling lead, till, far
away, the rippling rings spread and vanished, skinned and leaving behind
them on the banks a white granulated cuticle of pebbles, a hide of dry
sand.

Durtal, as he leaned out of the carriage window, looked straight down
into the gulf; on this narrow way with only one line of rails, the train
on one side was close to the towering hewn rock, and on the other was
the void. Great God! if it should run off the rails! "What a hash!"
thought he.

And what was not less overwhelming than the appalling depth of the abyss
was, as he looked up, the sight of the furious, frenzied assault of the
peaks. Thus, in that carriage, he was literally between the earth and
sky, and the ground over which it was moving was invisible, being
covered for its whole width by the body of the train.

On they went, suspended in mid-air at a giddy height, along interminable
balconies without parapets; and below, the cliffs dropped
avalanche-like, fell straight, bare, without a patch of vegetation or a
tree. In places they looked as if they had been split down by the blows
of an axe--huge growths of petrified wood; in others they seemed sawn
through shaley layers of slate.

And all round lay a wide amphitheatre of endless mountains, hiding the
heavens, piled one above another, barring the way to the travelling
clouds, stopping the onward march of the sky.

Some made a good show with their jagged grey crests, huge masses of
oyster shells; others, with scorched summits, like burnt pyramids of
coke, were green half-way up. These bristled with pine woods to the very
edge of the precipices, and they were scarred too with white
crosses--the high roads, dotted in places with Nuremberg dogs,
red-roofed hamlets, sheepfolds that