The town is a gem of daintiness, in strong contrast to the surrounding melancholy rocks and forests of the mountainside. Peaks, approximating ten thousand feet in height, rise on all sides, and dominate the more gentle slopes and valleys, but still the general effect is one of a savage wildness, with which the little white houses of the town, the electric lights and the innumerable hotels--a round score of them--comport little. Certainly the beneficial effects accruing to semi-invalids here might be supposed to be great--if they would but leave "the game" alone. A simple mule path leads to the Col de Riou back of Cauterets, though it is more frequented by tourists on foot than by beasts of burden. Here on the Col itself, in plain view of the Pic du Midi and its sister peaks, the Touring Club has erected one of those admirable guide-book accessories, a "_table d'orientation_." On its marbled circumference are traced nearly three hundred topographical features of the surrounding landscape, and a study of this well-thought-out affair is most interesting to any traveller with a thought above a table d'hôte. Throughout the region of the Pyrenees these circular "_tables d'orientation_," with the marked outlines of all the surrounding landscape, are to be found on many vantage grounds. The principal ones are:-- On the Ramparts of the Château de Pau. The Col d'Aspin. The Col de Riou. Platform of the Tour Massey at Tarbes. Platform de Mouguerre. Summit of the Pic du Midi. Summit of the Cabaliros. Summit of the Canigou. Over the Col de Riou and down into the Gave de Pau again, and one comes to Luz. Luz is curiously and delightfully situated in a triangular basin formed by the water-courses of the Gave de Pau and the Gave de Barèges. Practically Luz is a _ville ancienne_ and a _ville moderne_, the older portion being by far the most interesting, though there is no squalor or unusual picturesqueness. Civic improvements have straightened out crooked streets and razed tottering house fronts and thus spoiled the picture of mediævalism such as artists--and most others--love. A ruined fortress rises on a neighbouring hill-top which gives a note of feudal times, but the general aspect of Luz, and its neighbouring pretty suburb of St. Sauveur, each of them possessed of thermal establishments, are resorts pure and simple, which, indeed, both these places were bound to become, being on the direct route between Pau and Tarbes and Gavarnie, and neighbours of Cauterets and Barèges.