I slept almost through the night, to the sound of the torrents, and awoke at day-break, on the 22nd, among the mountains. The Carinthian valleys are pleasant, but present no striking characteristics: the peasants have no distinctive dress; a few women wear furs, like the Hungarian women; others have white hoods set on the back of their heads, or blue woollen caps with a padded edging, half way between the Osmanli's turban and the bonze's skull-cap with the button at the top. I changed horses at Villach. On leaving that stage, I followed a wide valley on the banks of the Drave, a new acquaintance: by dint of crossing rivers, I shall end by reaching my last shore. Lander[241] has just discovered the mouth of the Niger; the daring traveller surrendered his life to Eternity at the very moment when he taught us that the mysterious African stream discharges its waters into the Ocean. At nightfall, we were nearly stopped at the village of St. Paternion: the carriage wanted greasing; a peasant screwed the nut of one of the wheels in the wrong direction, with so much force that it was impossible to remove it. All the clever people in the village, with the blacksmith at their head, failed in their attempts. A boy of fourteen or fifteen years of age left the band, returned with a pair of pincers, thrust aside the workers, wound a brass wire round the bolt, twisted it with his plyers and, bearing with his hand in the direction of the screw, removed the nut without the slightest effort, amid general cheering. Might not that child be a budding Archimedes? The queen of an Esquimaux tribe, the same woman who drew for Captain Parry a chart of the polar seas, used attentively to watch sailors welding pieces of iron at the forge and outstripped all her race through her genius. During the night of the 22nd, I passed through a thick mass of mountains; their confusion continued before me as far as Salzburg: and yet those ramparts did not protect the Roman Empire. The author of the _Essayes_, speaking of the Tyrol, says, with his ordinary vivacity of imagination: "It resembles a gown that we only see plaited up, but that, if it were spread out, it would form a very large country[242]." The mounts among which I wound were like a landslip from the upper chains, which, covering a vast ground, had formed little Alps presenting the different accidental features of the great ones. Cascades rushed down from every side, leaping over beds of stones, like the torrents in the Pyrenees. The road passed through gorges hardly open to the gauge of the calash. In the neighbourhood of Gmünd, hydraulic forges mixed the echo of their stamps with that of the sluices; from their chimneys, columns of sparks escaped amid the night and the dark forests of pine-trees. At each blow of the bellows on the hearth-stone, the open roofs of the factory lit up suddenly, like the dome of St. Peter's in Rome on a holiday.