The entire country around Nice is one vast entrenched camp, constructed, equipped, and maintained, as may be supposed, with considerable difficulty and at enormous expense. A mountain fortress whose very stones, to say nothing of other materials, are transported up a trailless mountainside, is one of the wonder-works of man, and here there is a long line of such, encircling the whole region from the Italian frontier westward to Toulon. Above all, the fortifications are concentrated in the country just back of the capital of the Riviera. All the great hillsides, rocky, moss-grown, or covered with pines or olive-trees, are a network of forts and batteries, strategic roads, reservoirs of water, and magazines of shot and shell. One of the strongest of these forts is on the flanks of Mont Boron; Cap Ferrat holds another, and the “Route de la Corniche,” the only low-level line of communication between France and Italy, literally bristles with the same sort of thing. Fort de la Drette, five hundred metres in altitude, rises above that astonishing Saracen village of Eze, while a strategic route leads to another at Feuillerins, six hundred and forty-eight metres high, and thence to Fort de la Revere at seven hundred and three metres, an impregnable series of fortifications, one would think. Between the battery-crowned heights are the reservoirs and magazines of powder, all in full view of the automobile and coach tourists from Nice to Monte Carlo. The route skirts La Revere and the great towering rock back of Monte Carlo, known as the “Tête de Chien,” and the tourist may readily enough judge for himself as to the utility and efficacy of these distinctly modern defences. The crowning glory, however, is on Mont Agel, the culminating peak in the vicinity of Nice. It is situated at a height of eleven hundred and forty-nine metres, and it would take a long siege indeed to capture this fortress, if things ever came to an issue in its neighbourhood. Of all the wonderful examples of road-making in France, and they are more numerous and excellent than elsewhere, the “Route de la Grande Corniche” is the best known, covering as it does a matter of nearly fifty kilometres from Nice to Vintimille. Personally conducted tourists make the trip in brakes and char-à-bancs via Mont Gros and its observatory, the Col des Quatre Chemins, by Eze perched on its pyramidal rock, and La Turbie with its memories of Augustus, until they descend, either via Roquebrune to Menton, or by the steeps of La Turbie to Monte Carlo and its “_distractions de haut goût_.”