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The machine was one of those electric contrivances that do their work noiselessly and efficiently, like a garrotter or the guillotine. No odour, no teeth-disturbing grind of rack-and-pinion, no trumpeting, with that machine! It arrived before the gate with such absence of sound that Alice, though she was dusting in the front-room, did not hear it.

The rack-and-pinion railway from Montricheux to the Dents de Loup wound upward like a single filament flung round the mountains by some giant spider. The miniature train, edging its way along the track, appeared no more than a mere speck as it crept tortuously up towards the top.

One can go by rail, changing at Sant' Ellero into the expensive rack-and-pinion car which climbs through the vineyards to a point near the summit, and has, since it was opened, brought to the mountain so many new residents, whose little villas cling to the western slopes among the lizards, and, in summer, are smitten unbearably by the sun.

The map gives no idea of the city's importance as the southernmost point at which a standard-gauge railway reaches the Adriatic, for the railway leading to Ragusa, to which the Italians so repeatedly refer as providing an outlet for Jugoslavia, is not only narrow-gauge but is in part a rack-and-pinion mountain line.

Ann declared in favour of the walk. "Let's go straight up to the Roche d'Or. I always feel as if I'd reached the top of the world there. It's certainly as near the top as I shall ever get!" she added laughing. "I don't feel drawn towards mountaineering, so I shall probably never ascend beyond the limits of the rack-and-pinion."

Another short journey remained, so in company with the inevitable soldier, priest, and old lady with a huge umbrella, Paul took a seat in one of the open cars of the little rack-and-pinion railway that runs up the steep hill through the apple orchards to the old cathedral city. In a few minutes the train stopped at a miniature station.

It is a winding and tortuous road that leads up to the portals of this huge old pile, and I couldn't help thinking how stupid I have always been in execrating the spirit of progress that conceives the funicular and rack-and-pinion railroads which serve to commercialise grandeur instead of protecting it.