An hour’s rest and we are off again, for time presses. The guide with the baggage will go alone, towards the west, skirting the edge of the woods, which has a Mule-path. He will wait for us at the Jas, or Bâtiment, on the upper boundary of the beeches, some 5000 feet above the level of the sea. The Jas is a large stone hut, which is to shelter us, man and beast, to-night. As for us, we continue the ascent to the ridge, by following which we shall reach the highest peak more easily. From the top, after sunset, we shall go down to the Jas, where the guide will have arrived long before us. This is the plan proposed and adopted. We reach the crested ridge. On the south, the comparatively easy slopes which we have just climbed stretch as far as the eye can see; on the north, the scene is full of wild grandeur: the mountain, sometimes hewn perpendicularly, sometimes carved into rough steps, alarmingly steep, is little else than a sheer precipice a mile high. If you throw a stone, it never stops, but falls from rock to rock until it reaches the bottom of the valley, where you can distinguish the bed of the Toulourenc looking like a ribbon. While my companions loosen masses of rock and send them rolling into the abyss so that they may watch the frightful fall, I discover under a broad flat stone one of my old insect acquaintances, the Hairy Ammophila, whom I had always met by herself on the roadside banks in the plain, whereas here, almost at the top of the Ventoux, I find her to the number of several hundreds heaped up under one and the same shelter.