Above Le Bar is the aerial village of Gourdon, fantastic in name, situation, and all its elements. At its feet rushes the restless Loup, and tears its way through one of those curious rock-walls which one only sees in these parts. To the westward is the curious and imposing outline of Grasse, the metropolis of the neighbourhood. Near by the railway crosses the ravine on an imposing and really beautiful modern viaduct of seven arches, each twelve metres in height--nearly forty feet. Up the ravine toward the source, or downward to the sea, the charms multiply themselves like the glasses of the kaleidoscope until one, as a result of a first visit to this much neglected scenic spectacle, is quite of the mind that it resembles nothing so much as a miniature Yellowstone. CHAPTER X. NICE AND CIMIEZ When one crosses the Var he crosses the ancient frontier between France and the Comté de Nice. The old-time French inhabitants of the Comté ever considered it an alien land, and invariably expressed the wish to be buried in the Cemetery of St. Laurent du Var, just over the border in the royal domain. The present Pont du Var, which one crosses as he comes from the westward, from Cagnes or Antibes, is the successor of another flung across the same stream by Vauban, much against his will, it would seem, for he said boldly that it was so foolish a project as never to be worth a hundredth part of its cost. How poorly he reckoned can be judged by the hundreds of thousands of travellers--millions doubtless--who, in later years, have made use of it. He evidently did not foresee the tide of tourist travel, whatever may have been his genius as a military engineer. [Illustration: _Nice to Vintimille_] The Var is not a very formidable-looking river at first glance, and has not the tempestuous flood of the Rhône and the Durance in actual volume, but the excess of water which it carries to the sea, at certain seasons, is proportionately very much greater. The Rhône increases its bulk but thirty times, the Durance a hundred times, but the Var throws into the Mediterranean, in time of flood, a hundred and forty times its usual flow, a fact which ranks it as one of the most fickle waterways of Europe, if not of the world. So important a place as Nice of course has a legendary account of the origin of its name. It is claimed by some historians, and disputed by others, that it was a colony founded by the Massaliotes three hundred years before the beginning of the Christian era, and, in consequence of a signal success against the Ligurians, the place received the glorious name of Victory,--_Nicæa_, a name which with but little alteration has come down to to-day.