Liotir thought it was useless to attempt it with
no hope of water, and I held much the same view, only it was impossible
really to think of giving it up. When at last we had surmounted all the
difficulties which beset us, and stood on the highest point which had so
far been in sight, we found ourselves on the edge of a vast plain of
parched grass, with nothing to guide us in one direction rather than
another. There was no human being in sight, no sign of water, nor any
particle of shade; nothing but grass, brown and monotonous, with white
cliffs miles away at the extremity of the plain. This was evidently the
_Foire de Fondeurle_, and in it somewhere lay the glaciere, if only we
could make out in which direction to begin to traverse the plain. In
the earlier part of this century, a very famous fair was held on this
wild and out-of-the-way table-land, to which many thousands of horses
and mules and cattle of various kinds were brought from all quarters;
but the fair has fallen off so much, that the man who had turned us up
the last hill said there were only fourteen head of cattle in 1863, and
very few of those were sold.
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