I cannot, without a couple of sections and a plan, give an exact idea to the reader of this remarkable place. It corresponds in some of its features to the gorge figured upon page 96, but it exhibits in a much more notable manner the characteristic action and extraordinary power of running water. The length of the chasm or _gouffre_ is about 320 feet, and from the top of its walls to the surface of the water is about 110 feet. At no part can the entire length or depth be seen at a glance; for, although the width at some places is 15 feet or more, the view is limited by the sinuosities of the walls. These are everywhere polished to a smooth, vitreous-in-appearance surface. In some places the torrent has wormed into the rock, and has left natural bridges. The most extraordinary features of the Gouffre des Busserailles, however, are the caverns (or _marmites_ as they are termed), which the water has hollowed out of the heart of the rock. Carrel’s plank path leads into one of the greatest,—a grotto that is about 28 feet across at its largest diameter, and 15 or 16 feet high; roofed above by the living rock, and with the torrent roaring 50 feet or thereabouts below, at the bottom of a fissure. This cavern is lighted by candles, and talking in it can only be managed by signs. I visited the interior of the _gouffre_ in 1869, and my wonder at its caverns was increased by observing the hardness of the hornblende out of which they have been hollowed. Carrel chiselled off a large piece, which is now lying before me. It has a highly polished, glassy surface, and might be mistaken, for a moment, for ice-polished rock. But the water has found out the atoms which were least hard, and it is dotted all over by minute depressions, much as the face of one is who has suffered from smallpox. The edges of these little hollows are _rounded_, and the whole surfaces of the depressions are polished nearly, or quite, as highly as the general surface of the fragment. The water has eaten more deeply into some veins of steatite than in other places, and the presence of the steatite may possibly have had something to do with the formation of the _gouffre_. I arrived at Breil again after an absence of six days, well satisfied with my tour of the Matterhorn, which had been rendered very pleasant by the willingness of my guides, and by the kindliness of the natives. Still, it must be admitted that the inhabitants of the Val Tournanche are behind the times. Their paths are as bad as, or worse than, they were in the time of De Saussure, and their inns are much inferior to those on the Swiss side. If it were otherwise there would be nothing to prevent the valley becoming one of the most popular and frequented of all the valleys in the Alps. As it is, tourists who enter it seem to think only about how soon they can get out of it, and hence it is much less known than it deserves to be on account of its natural attractions.