Once back at Aigle, we must take the little local railway that crosses the Rhone and lands us at the quiet market town of Monthey, in Valais, and at the foot of the Dent du Midi, whence an electric mountain railway will take us to Champéry. The fault about mountain railways connected with the railways of the plain is that you are apt to go right through to your destination, thus missing much that is of interest _en route_. This applies to Monthey; for all around this cigar-manufacturing _bourg_ there is much that really repays a halt. So halt we will.
Passing through the marketplace and crossing the old covered wooden bridge spanning the Vièze—a swift little river hurrying to join the Rhone, and whose source is in the mountains beyond Champéry—and following the road which rises straight in front of us across steep chestnut-shaded slopes, we come to the delightful hamlet of Choëx, the elegant white steeple of whose small white church is so prominent a landmark from Bex. In spring and early summer this quiet retreat, perched high among the rolling woods at the base of the Dent du Midi, and with its broad view across the Rhone valley to Villars, Leysin, the Tour d’Aï, and the Diablerets, is very charming. There is here, too, a wonderful wealth of flowers beneath the chestnut trees and in the woods and fields; indeed the neighbourhood of Monthey is quite as interesting in this respect as is the neighbourhood of Bex, and it can produce certain gems that are strangers on the other side of the valley. Not far from the road at _Fin du Bruit_ an ancient Druid’s altar has been discovered: great formidable rocks placed mysteriously as if on purpose, with an underground cavern beneath, containing, among other prehistoric objects, a stone coffin with a skeleton inside. Also in this subterranean chamber may be seen a crack that extends upwards in the rock to beneath the altar-rock above-ground, and some years ago I was told by the custodian that it was through this crack that the priests shouted up the messages of the gods to the assembled and trembling people. This may have been so, for it only follows the lines of the old Egyptian oracles; but unfortunately the tendency is to fake, or to supplement by the aid of plausible imagination, all that is authentic in such remains as these, particularly when a charge is made for viewing them. At any rate I believe I am right in saying that the stone-coffined skeleton, although genuinely prehistoric, was not discovered where it now lies, but in the quarries on the other side of Monthey. However, it is possible that the owner of this skeleton in life was one who worshipped in fear and trembling at this sacrificial altar; and it is a fascinating process to picture on these quiet, flowered slopes the quaking half-clad crowd, the human victim prone upon the great rock-slab, the white-bearded, white-robed priest with fanatic eye and gleaming knife upturned to the heavens—and all the awful ritual of those ancient heathen ceremonies.