The level ground here is of no great extent, but the adjacent mountains rise so gently, even on the left-hand side, that they can, so to speak, be curled and combed up to the very ears.[98] The whole country seems full of clock towers and villages high up in the hills, and near the town are several fine houses well built and situated. M. de Montaigne declared “that he had all his life distrusted the verdict of other people upon the amenities of foreign lands, no one being able, apparently, to appreciate them except by the rule of his own peculiar habit, and the custom of his village; and that he paid very little respect to the information given him by travellers. But now he was more amazed than ever over their stupidity, seeing that he had heard tell--and especially concerning travelling in this region--of the exceeding difficulties to be overcome in these passes of the Alps; that the manners of the people were uncouth, the roads impassable, the lodging rough, and the air intolerable. As to the air, he thanked God to find it so mild--for he was fain of excess of heat rather than of cold, and up to the present we had experienced only three days of cold, and an hour or so of rain--and moreover, if he were minded to take his little girl[99] of eight out for a walk, he would as lief take her out on this road as in his own garden; that, as to the lodgings, he had never seen a country where they were so plentiful and good, having always found accommodation in handsome towns well supplied with provision and wine at a cheaper rate than elsewhere.” They use in these parts a machine with various wheels to turn the spits. They bind closely a strong cord round a great spindle of iron; this unwinds itself, and, the movement thereof being arrested somehow, the process lasts an hour. When it stops the machine has to be wound up afresh. As to smoke-jacks we saw several of these. So great is the abundance of iron that, besides fitting gratings of divers sorts to their windows and doors, they cover even the wooden shutters with plates of iron. Here we came again into the land of vines, which we had lost sight of since we quitted Augsburg. Round about these parts most of the houses have every storey vaulted. In Germany they do what we cannot do in France, to wit, they use hollow tiles to cover the narrowest slopes of roofing, as in their clock towers. Their tiling is smaller and more hollowed, and sometimes plastered at the joints. We quitted Brixen on the morning of the morrow, and traversed the same wide open valley, the roadsides being adorned with divers fine houses. Travelling with the river Eisock on our left, we passed a small village named Clause,[100] inhabited by various sorts of workers, and at the end of three leagues came to Colman[101] in time for dinner, a small place where the archduke has a pleasure-house.