Its immense length of 625 miles takes the Loire through ten departments, but the changes of scenery are not so remarkable as those of the Rhone. The source is in the Cevennes, about 4500 feet above sea-level, on the east side of the Gerbier de Jonc, and almost in sight of the Rhone. Through Haute Loire in the marvellously picturesque region of dead volcanoes near Le Puy-en-Velay it takes its course northwards, flowing at the foot of basaltic cliffs and chestnut-clad slopes. On commanding spurs ruined castles are perched in most romantic fashion, and if it were not for their painful inaccessibility, the demand among the wealthy for these little strongholds of the Middle Ages would run up their value to astonishing figures. The action of water in the past has been vastly more energetic in the Auvergnes and the Cevennes in the ages since their masses of plutonic rock were produced than at the present day, for the scoria and the general debris of seismic disturbance has been so much eroded that the throats of volcanoes filled with the last product of the immense heat below here and there stand out stripped of their cones. One of the most remarkable of these phenomena is to be seen at Le Puy. This strange _aiguille_ has been crowned with a beautiful Romanesque chapel for some nine centuries, and it is just possible that a Roman temple stood there at an earlier date. In the neighbourhood of St. Etienne the Loire is considered to be navigable. It traverses the alluvial plain of Forez, the mountains of that name to the west separating it from the basin of its great tributary the Allier, which takes a roughly parallel course and joins it just below Nevers. If rivers could express their feeling by other means than overproduction and strikes, the Allier would no doubt say something forcible as to the ascendency of its neighbour, whose claims to be the parent stream are open to question.