We thought it might be the hour when people were resting, so later we
fared forth to see the gaieties of which we had heard so much. This time
we found half a dozen others walking aimlessly up and down the streets.
At dinner, silence reigned. In the evening we tried our best to cheer
up, and went to the casino where a few persons were scattered about the
auditorium listening to music. This seemed to be the height of the
season at Spa, whose name has come into our language as a synonym for
gaiety and relaxation.
So we got away next morning and ran up a long, steep, splendid road on
to fine rolling uplands that waved away like the Bohemian Highlands,
with lovely views in the blue distance. We were some fifteen hundred
feet up, and the air was very refreshing as we sped along. Now and then
we dipped again into valleys with wooded slopes and ravines with
palisades. We were in the real Ardennes country, the famous "Forest of
Arden" of "As You Like It," which was sung by Ariosto a century or so
before that.
In this region was the church of St. Hubert, to which peasants made
Christian pilgrimage. Under the choir was a crypt where they knelt. A
thread from the stole of the ancient saint was said to have had the
power to cure hydrophobia, if aided by cauterization. But more easily,
"one may prevent hydrophobia by carrying on the finger a ring or wearing
a medal which has touched the relics of the saint; also by eating or
making one's animals eat the blessed bread of St. Hubert." This bread is
given chiefly to dogs, I believe.
We ran by picturesque La Roches and Rochefort, with fine smooth roads
following the beds of little rivers in the valleys and climbing in
zigzags the low mountains till we came, about one o'clock, to Han. Here
we went at once, of course, to the Grottes de Han, which were very
popular with tourists. It was an experience worth having. We passed
through endless passages, grotesque and beautiful with stalactites and
stalagmites, the varied effects well lighted by electricity. The finest
thing, most terrible and impressive, was the Salle du Dome, where the
black shadows were lost in the immensity of the vault. It is a cavern
four hundred feet high and more than that in breadth, with a sort of
mountain of broken boulders up which winds a path into the dusky gloom
and blackness of the upper regions. But I must say it was more
suggestive of the lower regions than the upper, especially when a guide
with a flaring torch climbed and climbed, disappearing behind cliffs of
darkness and reappearing on precipices till he stood at last, a tiny
figure far above us, in Satan's Pulpit, and lighted a fire that seemed
to burn in another world.
Later we came to the banks of the subterranean river that flows through
the mountain, and got into boats. As we floated down, the vaults
reëchoed the singing of our fellow-travelers. But presently we saw ahead
of us the light of day, peering in through the end of the cave, and
slipped out--into the rain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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