England -- Description and travel; Europe -- Description and travel
First, then, will come a great gorge through which one marches up from
the plain, and then at the head of it very often a waterfall of some
kind, along the side of which one forces one's way up painfully through
a narrow chasm of rock and finds above one The great green level of the
first jasse with the mountains standing solemnly around it. And then
when one has marched all along this level one will come to another gorge
and another chasm, and when one has climbed over the barrier of rock and
risen up another 2000 feet or so, one comes to a second jasse, smaller
as a rule than the lower one; but so high are the mountains that all
this climbing into the heart of them does not seem to have reduced their
height at all. And then one marches along this second jasse and one
comes to yet another gorge and climbs up just as one did the two others,
through a chasm where there will be a little waterfall or a large one,
and one finds at the top the smallest and most lonely of the jasses.
This often has a lake in it. The mountains round it will usually be
cliffs, forming sometimes a perfect ring, and so called cirques, or, by
the Spaniards, cooking-pots; and as one stands on the level floor of one
such last highest jasse and looks up at the summit of the cliffs, one
knows that one is looking at the ridge of the main chain. Then it is
one's business, if one desires to conquer the high Pyrenees, to find a
sloping place up the cliffs to reach their summits and to go down into
the further Spanish valleys. This is the order of the Pyrenean dale, and
this was the order of that of the Aston.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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