A comparatively bare steep tempted us to make straight for our object; but having with difficulty fought our way upwards through a jungle of fern and dwarf elder, we presently found ourselves entangled among the _débris_ of a not very ancient forest fire. The ground was toothed with sharp splinters of burnt rock, and strewn with a network of branches, too rotten to bear our weight, but quite strong enough to trap our feet and tumble us over—all which gins and snares were treacherously concealed by a forest of bracken which rose above our heads. Add to this, that at every few yards we had to scale high barricades of sooty timber, and at the time were at a loss to conceive why Providence should have made fir-trees so confoundedly spiky! When it is remembered that we had about five-and-twenty pounds on our backs, and that the sun was broiling hot, it may be imagined that our progress was slow, and in fact we were forced to win every inch as much with our hands as our feet. However, as we gradually stormed our citadel, we were rewarded for our bumps and lacerations by a view as strange as it was picturesque. In these upper regions it was only the smaller trees that had been actually burnt down, the larger had been simply killed and left standing. The sight as we looked down had a savage fascination quite unique; the colours were so varied, so striking, so bizarre, that they deserved to have been perpetuated by a great painter. Here and there were the charred funereal skeletons of forest giants, with jagged stumps of branches in harsh relief against a distant background of green valley and blue undulating mountain, almost voluptuous in its softness of tint and contour. In some trunks the blackness was chequered, where the bark had peeled off, by broad scars, taking every tint of amber; in others, it was draped in ashy festoons of lichen, or swathed in verdant folds of moss. Some trees, already roasted to death by fire, had at a later period been shivered by the lightning, and the whiteness of their splinters showed that little but their bark had been charred by the previous conflagration. Some indeed had actually survived it, and on one side a small island of still flourishing trees—a dark yew-green fir, an emerald and a golden beech—stood out against the sootiest thicket.