When we reached the top of the Col, Liotir confessed that he did not know which way to turn, and we agreed to follow the path till we should find some one to direct us. There was a farmhouse at no great distance, and thither we bent our steps; but the sole inhabitant could give no assistance, and, in default of information, Liotir generously proposed to treat me to a bottle of wine, over which we might discuss our further proceedings. The state of fever, however, to which the garlic and the dirt of Die had brought me, made it seem impossible to eat or drink anything; so I suggested instead that I should treat him, and that seemed to be rather what he had meant by his proposal. Nothing much came of our discussion, and we marched on hot and faint for an hour more, when a casual man told us that our straight line to the _Foire de Fondeurle_ lay across the plain on our left hand, and up a most objectionable-looking hill beyond, thickly covered with brushwood and showing no signs of a path. As we crossed the plain, there was still the same total absence of water, and we reached the bottom of the hill in a state of mind and body which rebelled against the exertion of struggling with the sand and shingle and brushwood. Liotir thought it was useless to attempt it with no hope of water, and I held much the same view, only it was impossible really to think of giving it up. When at last we had surmounted all the difficulties which beset us, and stood on the highest point which had so far been in sight, we found ourselves on the edge of a vast plain of parched grass, with nothing to guide us in one direction rather than another. There was no human being in sight, no sign of water, nor any particle of shade; nothing but grass, brown and monotonous, with white cliffs miles away at the extremity of the plain. This was evidently the _Foire de Fondeurle_, and in it somewhere lay the glacière, if only we could make out in which direction to begin to traverse the plain. In the earlier part of this century, a very famous fair was held on this wild and out-of-the-way table-land, to which many thousands of horses and mules and cattle of various kinds were brought from all quarters; but the fair has fallen off so much, that the man who had turned us up the last hill said there were only fourteen head of cattle in 1863, and very few of those were sold. M. Héricart de Thury describes this plain as lying in the calcareous sub-Alpine range of the south-east of France. The woods here terminate at a height of 5,147 feet above the sea, and the _Foire de Fondeurle_ lies immediately above this point.