A WILD WAY UP. 103 



narrow ditch full of rocks and. mud, which wandered up the 

 face of a hill as steep as the roofs of the LouATe or Chateau 

 Chambord. Accustomed only to English horses, I confess I 

 paused in dismay : but as men and horses seemed to take the 

 hill as a matter of course, the only thing to be done was to 

 give the stout little cob his head, and not to slip over his tail. 

 So up we went, splashing, clawing, slipping, stumbling, but 

 never falling down ; pausing every now and then to get 

 breath for a fresh rush, and then on again, up a place as 

 steep as a Devonshire furze-bank for twenty or thirty feet, 

 till we had risen a thousand feet, as I suppose, and were on 

 a long and more level chine, in the midst of ghastly dead 

 forests, the remains of last year's fires. Much was burnt to 

 tinder and ash ; much more was simply killed and scorched, 

 and stood or hung in an infinite tangle of lianes and 

 boughs, all grey and bare. Here and there some huge 

 tree had burnt as it stood, and rose like a soot-grimed 

 tower; here another had fallen right across the path, and 

 we had to cut our way round it step by step, amid a 

 mass of fallen branches sometimes much hio'her than our 

 heads, or to lead the horses underneath boughs which 

 were too large to cut through, and just high enough to let 

 them pass. An English horse would have lost his nerve, 

 and become restive from confusion and terror; but these 

 wise brutes, like the pack-mule, seemed to understand the 



