Elsewhere, wherever mountains have to be traversed, similar conditions prevailed. Near Spalato, it is true, the path was railed in some distance, the only railings of the kind in Europe, apparently; but near Mt. Olympus one looked over the edge of the precipice he had to ride along and saw carcasses of horses, caught as they fell, or fallen, to warn him to be careful. Says one who knew both, the road over Pen-maen-mawr in these days was more fearful than any Alpine way. As for Spain, there were quite a number of main roads which allowed nothing more than single file here and there: the pass into Castile on the road from Bayonne, for instance, and another between Granada and Cartagena, on entering which it was customary for travellers to tighten their belts and say an "Ave Maria" for those who had lost their lives thereabouts. Above San Sebastian ten men might hold the road against an army and no beasts but mules could be trusted on it, nor on the pass from France into Aragon, so steep that no man was safe there; while south of Santander, according to Sir Richard Wynn, for two leagues the road was two feet broad and one hundred perpendicular fathoms above the river. Neither were the efforts thus entailed brightened by the idea of mountaineering as a form of pleasure. Probably the only recorded climb undertaken during this period with no other object than that of getting to the top is the ascent of "Les Jumelles," the highest peak near Pau, an ascent known to us through De Thou. One M. de Candale started at four o'clock one May morning in the first half of the sixteenth century. Before half-way was reached, his younger companions were on the way down; they had come in their shirts and found the cold too much for them; M. de Candale was wearing a fur coat. At half-way the last trace of a human being was left behind, but he and some peasants reached the top with the help of ladders and grappling-irons and took measurements. It is characteristic enough of the age that De Thou's comments on the calculated height are a comparison with the reckonings of Apuleius and Plutarch concerning Olympus, which they considered the highest mountain in the world. Mediæval opinion put Mt. Sinai first, probably because that was the only mountain a mediæval Christian ever tried to get to the top of, a process of reasoning which may be traced in the guesses of these travellers, and in local opinion, as to which was the highest of the Alps; it is always one of those past which they endeavoured to make their way, St. Gothard or St. Bernard, for which they claim preëminence. Another fashion of reckoning is to calculate, not perpendicularly, but according to the apparent length of the way, which makes Mt. Quarantana "six miles high"; while one traveller has a unit of measurement entirely his own, a mountain being to him so many "towers" high, the tower in question being the belfry of Malines, his native place.