The thirteenth cascade on the left is twelve hundred and sixty-six feet high. It falls slowly, like a dropping cloud, or the unfolding of a muslin veil; the air softens its fall; the eye follows complacently the graceful undulation of the beautiful airy veil. It glides the length of the rock, and seems to float rather than to fall. The sun shines, through its plume, with the softest and loveliest splendor. It reaches the bottom like a bouquet of slender waving feathers, and springs backward in a silver dust; the fresh and transparent mist swings about the rock it bathes, and its rebounding train mounts lightly along the courses. No stir in the air; no noise, no living creature in the solitude. You hear only the monotonous murmur of the cascades, resembling the rustle of the leaves that the wind stirs in the forest.
On our return, we seated ourselves at the door of the hut. It is a poor, squat little house, heavily supported upon thick walls; the knotty joists of the ceiling retain their bark. It is indeed necessary that it should be able to stand out alone against the snows of winter. You find everywhere the imprint of the terrible months it has gone through. Two dead fir-trees stand erect at the door. The garden, three feet square, is defended by enormous walls of piled-up slates. The low and black stable leaves neither foot-hold nor entry for the winds. A lean colt was seeking a little grass among the stones. A small bull, with surly air, looked at us out of the sides of his eyes; the animals, the trees and the site, wore a threatening or melancholy aspect. But in the clefts of a rock were growing some admirable buttercups, lustrous and splendid, which looked as if painted by a ray of sunshine.
At the village we met our companions of the journey who had sat down there. The good tourists get fatigued, stop ordinarily at the inn, take a substantial dinner, have a chair brought to the door, and digest while looking at the amphitheater, which from there appears about as high as a house. After this they return, praising the sublime sight, and very glad that they have come to the Pyrenees.
The Rhine constituted the great central waterway of medieval Europe; the Flemish towns were its ports and its manufacturing centers. They filled in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries much the same place that Liverpool, Glasgow, Manchester, and Birmingham fill in the nineteenth. Many causes contributed to this result.