At nine o'clock we left Werfen, and crossing the Salza drove on through some very pretty villages to Itan, a little hamlet, where we had to wait a considerable time for horses, the Archduke John having passed through but a few hours before, on his road from the baths of Gastein to Grätz. From Itan we proceeded to Radstadt, and from thence along our former road to Unter-Tauern.
_15th._ This morning was rainy, but in spite of this I preferred walking up the mountain, to the slow pace at which the carriage ascended with four horses and two oxen. The rain ceased in about an hour, but the distant views, on our former descent so beautiful, were now all veiled in mist and cloud. We passed two very fine falls, one of them a little out of the road, which Sir Humphry got out to see. It is called Prince John's Fall, and is a cascade of from three to four hundred feet high, and is well worth seeing.
On arriving at Auf-dem-Tauern, the little village near the summit of the pass, we found the fields and the greater part of the surrounding Alps, which when we passed the first time were hidden as far as the eye could reach in snow, now richly clad with fine grass and alpine flowers. The road descending to Tweng is formed of white primary marble, mixed with mica-schist. At Tweng we struck into a cross road to Tamsweg, a large village lying in a fine broad valley, in the middle of which runs a branch of the Murr, which we have followed from the very peak of the Tauern. The inn here was very bad. In the evening I went to the village doctor for some medicine for Sir Humphry, who told me that this valley was one of the highest in Austria, the village itself lying three thousand and twenty-two Paris feet above the level of the sea, and that the pass of the Tauern was rather more than two thousand feet higher.
_16th._ We left Tamsweg this morning, and drove on, over abominable roads, to Murrau, a dirty little town on the Murr. Sir Humphry said he should stay a day here to see if he could shoot some quails, or catch any huchos[D] in the river, and he went out immediately after we arrived, about two o'clock, but found no quails. The Murr forms a very pretty cascade about a mile below the town.