You descend from the spacious entry-hall a long well staircase cut in the rock and lighted from above, until you reach a superb octagonal chamber of white marble ornamented with statues and Oriental divans covered with Persian silk. This is the great saloon, and leading out of it are other fine chambers, all of them lined with polished marble and furnished with Eastern magnificence. Externally, there is no trace of these chambers visible. They are, as I have said, excavated, like Egyptian tombs, in the heart of the mountain. The proprietor, an eccentric English bachelor, never inhabits this fantastic mansion, but lives in a second-rate hotel, spending thousands annually in adding embellishments to his astonishing castle, where, notwithstanding its magnificent suites of apartments, no human being has ever slept a night or eaten a meal. "Smith's Craze," as I have said, closes in the view to our right. To the left, beyond the torrent Paillon, is situated modern Nice, with its quays, leviathan hotels, and an almost interminable line of villas marking the celebrated Promenade des Anglais. The background of the scene is filled up by a semicircle of well-wooded hills, verdant with vines, fig, orange, olive and pomegranate trees, and sparkling with white country-seats, convents, and campanili. Towering over these hills appears another range, of rocky and bold outlines, and then another, of lofty mountains whose peaks lose themselves in clouds, and by their fantastic figures form as delightful an horizon as the eye can behold. In the centre rises the conical peak of Monte Cao, an extinct volcano, exactly resembling Vesuvius in conformation, and only wanting a curl of smoke issuing from its crater to make the illusion perfect. Alongside of Monte Cao is another extinct volcano, on which are seen the ruins of the ancient and deserted village of Châteauneuf, while between the two summits (thirty-five hundred feet high) are distinctly visible the peaks of some of the ever-snowy Alps. The foreground of the picture is formed by the deep indigo waters of the Mediterranean, diversified by a hundred sunny sails, and overhead hangs the cloudless Italian sky.