Wanderings by Southern Waters, Eastern Aquitaine Part 3

Having left the pit, we went in the direction of Loubressac, to which village my companion belonged. While still upon the _causse_ a spot was reached where a small iron cross had been raised. The stone pedestal bore this inscription:

'SOUVENIR DE HeLeNE BONBeGRE, MORTE MARTYRE EN CE LIEU EN 1844.

VIEILLE-ESCAZE ET LAVAL ONT FAIT CONSTRUIRE CETTE CROIX.

PRIEZ POUR CES DEUX BIENFAITEURS.'

The old man knew Helene Bonbegre when he was young, and he told me the tragic story of her death on this spot. She was going home in the evening, and her sweetheart the blacksmith accompanied her a part of the distance. They then separated, and she went on alone. They had been watched by the jealous and unsuccessful lover, whose heart was on fire. Where the cross stands the girl was found lying, a naked corpse.

The murderer was soon captured, and most of the people in the district went to St. Cere to see him guillotined. It was a spectacle to be talked over for half a century. The blacksmith never forgave himself for having left the girl to go home alone, and it was he who forged the cross that marks the scene of the crime and sets the wayfarer conjecturing.

The peasant changed his ideas by filling his pipe. He smoked tobacco that he grew in a corner of his garden for his own use, and which he enjoyed all the more because it was _tabac de contrebande_. He gave me some, which I likewise smoked without any qualm of conscience, and thought it decidedly better than some tobacco of the regie. He lit his pipe with smuggled matches. Had I been an inspector in disguise, I should never have made matters unpleasant for him; he was such a cheery, good-natured companion. He had brought up his family, and had now just enough land to keep him without breaking his back over it. He was quite satisfied with things as they were. I did not ask him if he was a poacher, but took it for granted that he was whenever he saw a good chance. Almost every peasant in the Haut-Quercy who has something of the spirit of Nimrod in him is more or less a poacher. Those who like hare and partridge can eat it in all seasons by paying for it.

Occasionally the gendarmes capture a young and over-zealous offender, but the old men, who have followed the business all their lives, are too wary for them. They are also too respectable to be interfered with.

At Loubressac I took leave of my entertaining friend, but not before we had emptied a bottle of white wine together. It was a _vin du pays_, this district having been less tried by the phylloxera than others farther south and west. I was surprised to find white wine there, the purple grape having been almost exclusively cultivated for centuries in what is now the department of the Lot.

In the room of the inn where I lunched there were four beds; two at one end and two at the other. There was plenty of s.p.a.ce left, however, for the tables. The rafters were hidden by the heads of maize that hung from them. The host sat down at the same table with me, and when he had nearly finished his soup he poured wine into it, and, raising the plate to his lips, drank off the mixture. Objectionable as this manner of drinking wine seems to those who have not learnt to do it in their youth, it is very general throughout Guyenne. Those who have formed the habit would be most unhappy if they could not continue it.

_Faire chabron_ is the expression used to describe this sin against good manners. The aubergiste was very friendly, and towards the close of the meal he brought out a bottle of his old red wine that he had treasured up 'behind the f.a.ggot.'

Before reaching this village I had heard of a retired captain who lived here in a rather dilapidated chateau, and who was very affable to visitors, whom he immediately invited to look through his telescope, which, although not a very large one, had a local celebrity, such instruments being about as rare as blue foxes in this part of the world. Conducted by the innkeeper, I called upon this gentleman. The house was one of those half-castellated manors which became scattered over France after the Renaissance, and of which the greater number were allowed to fall into complete or partial ruin when the territorial families who were interested in them were extinguished or impoverished by the Revolution. They are frequently to be found in Guyenne, but they are generally occupied by peasants either as tenant-farmers or proprietors; two or three of the better preserved rooms being inhabited by the family, the others being haunted by bats and swallows and used for the storage of farm produce. It suited the captain's humour, however, to live in his old dilapidated mansion, scarcely less cut off from the society that matched with his position in life than if he had exiled himself to some rock in the ocean.

The ceremony of knocking or ringing was dispensed with for the sufficient reason that there was neither bell nor knocker. We entered by the open door and walked along a paved pa.s.sage, which, was evidently not held as sacred as it should have been by the roving fowls; looked in at the great dark kitchen, where beside the Gothic arch of the broad chimney was some ruinous clockwork mechanism for turning the spit, which probably did turn to good purpose when powdered wigs were worn; then ascended the stone staircase, where there was room for four to walk abreast, but which had somewhat lost its dignity by the bal.u.s.ters being used for hanging maize upon.

Presently we came to a door, which the aubergiste knocked sharply with his knuckles.

There was a sound of footsteps within, and then the door opened. I was standing before a rather florid man of about fifty, with close-cropped hair, a brush moustache, and a chin that seemed undecided on the score of shaving. He wore a flannel s.h.i.+rt open at the throat, and a knitted worsted _tricot_. This was the captain. He evidently did not like Sunday clothes. When he settled down here, it was to live at his ease, like a bachelor who had finished with vanities. But although no one would have supposed from his dress that he was superior to the people around him, his manners were those of a gentleman and an officer who had seen the world elsewhere than at Loubressac. The simple, easy courtesy with which he showed me his rooms, and pointed his telescope for me, was all that is worth attaining, as regards the outward polish of a man. This was so fixed upon him that his long a.s.sociation with peasants had taken none of it away. The few rooms that he inhabited were plainly furnished; in others were heaps of wheat, maize and beans. Pa.s.sing along a pa.s.sage I noticed a little altar in a recess, with a statue of the Virgin decked with roses and wild flowers. '_C'est le mois de Marie_,' said the captain. He lived with a sister, and she took care that religion was kept up in the house.

It being the _Fete-Dieu_, preparations were being made in the village for the procession that was to take place after vespers. Sheets were spread along the fronts of the houses, with flowers pinned to them, and _reposoirs_ had been raised in the open air. I did not wait for the procession, as I expected to be in time for the one at the next village, Autoire. I took a path that led me up to the barren _causse_, from which the red roofs of Autoire soon became visible under an amphitheatre of high wooded hills.

As I approached the little village, the gleam of white sheets mingled with the picture of old houses huddled together, some half-timber, some with turrets and encorbelments, nearly all of them with very high-pitched roofs and small dormer windows. The procession was soon to start. I waited for it at the door of the crowded church, baking in the sun with others who could not get inside, one of whom was a woman with a moustache and beard, black and curly, such as a promising young man might be expected to have. The number of women in Southern France who are bearded like men shocks the feelings of the Northern wanderer, until he grows accustomed to the sight. The cure was preaching about the black bread, and all the other miseries of this life that had to be accepted with thankfulness. Presently the two bells in the tower began to dance, and the rapid ding-dong announced that the procession was forming. First appeared the beadle, extremely gaudy in scarlet and gold, then the cross-bearer, young men as chanters, little boys, most strangely attired in white satin knee-breeches and short lace skirts, scattering rose-leaves from open baskets at their sides; the cure came bearing the monstrance and Host, followed by Sisters with little girls in their charge; lastly was a mixed throng of paris.h.i.+oners. Most of the women held rosaries, and a few of them, bent with age, carried upon their heads the very cap that old Mother Hubbard wore, if tradition and English artists are to be trusted. As the last of the long procession pa.s.sed out of sight between the walls of white linen, the wind brought the words clearly back:

'Genitori, Genitoque Laus et jubilatio.'

Now I entered the little church that was quite empty, and where no sound would have been heard if the two voices in the tower had not continued to ring out over the dovecotes, where the white pigeons rested and wondered, and over the broad fields where the bending gra.s.ses and listening flowers stood in the afternoon suns.h.i.+ne, 'Laus et jubilatio,' in the language of the bells.

The church was Romanesque, probably of the twelfth century. The nave was flanked by narrow aisles. Upon the very tall bases of the columns were carved, together with foliage, fantastic heads of demons, or satyrs of such expressive ugliness that they held me fascinated. Some were bearded, others were beardless, some were grinning and showing frightful teeth, others had thick-lipped, pouting mouths hideously debased. A few were really _bons diables_, who seemed determined to be gay, and to joke under the most trying circ.u.mstances; but the greater number had morose faces, puckered by the long agony of bearing up the church. Such variety of expression in ugliness was a triumph of art in the far-off age, when the chisel of an unremembered man with a teeming imagination made these heads take life from the inanimate stone.

The road from Autoire to St. Cere soon led me into the valley of the Bave, a beautiful trout-stream, galloping towards the Dordogne through flowery meadows, on this last day of May, and under leaning trees, whose imaged leaves danced upon the ripples in the green shade. As I had no need to hurry, I loitered to pick ragged-robins upon the banks, flowers dear to me from old a.s.sociations. Very common in England, they are comparatively rare in France.

New pleasures await the wayfarer every hour, almost every minute, in the day, and however long he may continue to wander over this wonderful world of inexhaustible variety, if he will only stop to look at everything, and so learn to feel the charm of little things.

I met a beggar, and fell into conversation with him. He asked me for nothing, and was surprised when I gave him two sous. He was a ragged old man, with a canvas bag, half filled with crusts, slung upon his side. I had already met many such beggars in this part of France. They travel about from village to village, filling their bags with pieces of bread that are given them, and selling afterwards what they cannot eat as food for pigs. As they rarely receive charity in the form of money, they do not expect it. This kind of mendicant is distinctly rural, and belongs to old times.

The bold front of an early Renaissance castle, with round towers at the angles, capped with pointed roofs, drew me from the highroad. It was the Chateau de Montal, in connection with which I had already heard the story of one Rose de Montal, a young lady of some three centuries ago, who had given her heart to a n.o.bleman of the country, Roger de Castelnau. By-and-by the charms of another lady caused him to neglect the fair Rose de Montal. She remained almost constantly at a window of one of the towers, scanning the country, and longing to catch sight of the faithless Roger. One day he came down the valley of the Bave, and she sang from the height of her tower a plaintive love-song, hoping that he would stop and make some sign; but he pa.s.sed on, unmoved by the tender appeal of the n.o.ble damsel. As he disappeared, she cried, 'Rose, plus d'espoir!' and threw herself from the window.

The _metayer_, now placed in charge of the castle, showed me over it.

It was a sad spectacle. The building, one of the best preserved and most elaborately decorated works of the Renaissance in this part of Guyenne until a few years ago, then fell into the hands of a vulgar speculator, who detached all the carvings that could be removed without difficulty, and sold them in Paris. The n.o.ble staircase and all its delicate sculpture remain, but these only add to the regret that one feels for what is no longer there. Had the Commission of Historic Monuments placed the Chateau de Montal upon its list, it would probably have escaped spoliation, although, in the case of private property, the State has no power to prevent destruction, however grievous the national loss.

I entered St. Cere at sundown. This bright little town lies in the midst of fertility. It is on the banks of the Bave, and at the foot of a hill that rises abruptly from the plain, and is capped by two towers of a ruined feudal stronghold, which show against the horizon far into the Quercy, the Correze, and the Cantal. Some of the old streets have quite a mediaeval air, with their half-wood houses with stories projecting upon the floor-joists, and others of a grander origin with turrets resting on encorbelments. I had the luck to find a good old-fas.h.i.+oned inn here, and to pa.s.s the evening in very pleasant company.

The next morning I climbed to the top of the neighbouring hill to have a closer view of those towers which had been my landmarks on the previous day, pa.s.sing through the little village of St.

Laurent-les-Tours, which lies immediately under the old fortress after the manner of so many others of feudal origin. The towers are rectangular _donjons_ of the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, one being nearly a hundred and fifty feet high. The castle was raised upon a table of calcareous rock; but only the towers, a portion of the outer wall built of enormous blocks of stone, and a ruined archway marking the spot where the drawbridge once hung, remain to tell the tale of the past.

That the Romans had fortified this height there is the strongest evidence in the fact that the substructure of the rampart that once surrounded the castle is of cubic stones laid together according to the method so much practised by the Romans, and known as _opus reticulatum_. Moreover, the coins, pottery, and arms found here seem to afford conclusive proof that this remarkable hill was one of the fortified positions of the Romans in Gaul.

The spot has its Christian legend, which is briefly this: In the castle that crowned the height in the time of the Visigoth kings was born St. Esperie, daughter of a Duke of Aquitaine. Being pressed to marry, notwithstanding the vow she had made to consecrate her life to G.o.d, she hid herself in a neighbouring forest for three months. She was at length discovered by her enraged brother and lover, who cut off her head. Like St. Denis, St. Esperie picked up her head, to the unspeakable astonishment and dismay of her persecutors. They fled from her, but she followed them as far as a little stream that flows into the Bave at St. Cere. Esperie is a saint much venerated in the Haut-Quercy. The church of St. Cere is dedicated to her, and the name given to the town is supposed to be a corruption of Esperie.

From St. Cere I took the road to Castelnau-de-Bretenoux, returning for some distance by the way I came. Inns being now very scarce in the district, I decided to take my chance of lunch in a small village called St. Jean-Lespina.s.se. Another saint! The map of France is still covered with the names of saints, in spite of all the efforts of revolutionists and pagan reformers to make the people abandon their 'Christian superst.i.tions.' Those who in the 'ages of faith' built up this a.s.sociation of saints and places could have had no conception of the power that these names would have in binding Christianity to the soil in the faithless or doubting ages to come. The only inn at St.

Jean-Lespina.s.se was kept by a blacksmith, and the room where I had my meal was over the forge. Bread and cheese and eggs were, as I expected, the utmost that such a hostelry could offer in the way of food for a wayfarer's entertainment. Before leaving the village I found the church--a curious old structure of the Transition period, with a large open porch covered with mossy tiles, held up by rough pillars. There were stone benches inside, on which generations of villagers had sat and gossiped in their turn. In the interior were columns engaged in the wall of the nave, with the capitals elaborately and heavily foliated with pendent bunches of flowers and fruit, much more in accordance with English than French taste.

I crossed the Bave, and followed a road bordered with hedgerows of quince that presently skirted sunny slopes covered with lately-planted vines. Thunder was moaning and growling in the distance when I reached the much-embowered village of Castelnau, upon a height immediately under the reddish walls and towers of the immense feudal stronghold, the fame of which went far and wide in the Middle Ages. Its name in the Southern dialect means 'new castle,' but it dates from the eleventh or twelfth century. Extensive additions were made in subsequent ages, notably a wing in the Renaissance style, which was inhabited until the middle of the present century, when all but the walls was destroyed by fire.

The feudal castle was built upon the plan of a triangle, with a tower at each angle, the one at the apex being the _donjon_. The form of this lofty keep is rectangular, and the machicolations and embattlements which were added in the fifteenth century are in a perfect state of preservation. Upon the platform, which I was able to reach by means of ladders and the half-ruinous spiral staircase, viper's bugloss spread its brilliant blue flowers over the dark stones, and enticed the high-soaring bees. The view of the wide and beautiful Dordogne Valley from these old battlements was not less grand because more than one-half of the sky was of a bluish-black--a mysterious canopy that concealed the genius of the storm, but from the turbulent folds of which there darted every minute a dazzling line of light. The tower on which I stood, although the highest of the three, had never been struck by lightning, but one of the others had been repeatedly struck, and the ruined masonry showed abundant signs of the scorching it had undergone in this way. Lightning is capricious and incomprehensible in its preferences.

This castle was besieged by Henry Plantagenet in 1159, but without success. Subsequently he made another effort, and then reduced it. His son Henry made it his headquarters for some time after he had revolted. In 1369 Thomas de Walkaffera the English seneschal who held Realville on behalf of his sovereign, was besieged there by a Lord of Castelnau, a.s.sisted by other barons. The garrison was overcome and ma.s.sacred. Another Lord of Castelnau, John, Bishop of Cahors, convened a meeting of the States of the Quercy in his fortress, at which a rising against the English was decided upon. It resulted in their temporary expulsion from the Quercy.

Besides the towers and exterior walls, there are some chambers of the old castle in good preservation. The chapel is still roofed, and the altar-stone is in its place. In an elevated chamber at the lower end, the dead were laid while awaiting burial.

Descending to the village, I entered the parish church--a Gothic building of the fourteenth century, containing many interesting details. The oak stalls, each with a quaint human figure carved upon it, are exceedingly curious. Outside the church little girls were playing, in the charge of a Sister who had a beautiful sweet face. She showed me the way to the next village, where I hoped to find shelter from the gathering storm. I have a pleasant picture in the mind of Castelnau--a bowery, ancient, mossy place, with vines climbing about the houses or on trellises in the little steep gardens, and a golden bloom of stonecrop upon the rough walls.

I reached the village of Prudhomat just as the storm burst over it, and took shelter in a small inn, which, like most of those in the country, had its room for the public upstairs. Two women who were there made the sign of the cross each time the lightning flashed--a widespread custom of the French peasantry; but a couple of men who were eating salad and bread paid no heed to the furious cannonade that was kept up by the darkened heavens. It was four o'clock, and they were having their _gouter_. The peasants of the Quercy do not live on the fat of the land; but they generally have five meals a day, two more than the middle-cla.s.s French. They begin with soup at a very early hour in the morning; then they have their dinner about ten, which is chiefly soup; at three or four they have a _gouter_ of bread and cheese, salad or fruit; and at six or seven they have their supper, which is soup again.

The old woman who sat near the window worked diligently with her distaff laden with hemp, except when the flas.h.i.+ng lightning made her stop to raise her thin hand to her forehead. She was twisting the thread from which the sheets of the country are made. They are coa.r.s.e, but they last longer than the hands that work the hemp, and descend from mother to daughter.

More than two hours I waited in this auberge while the rain fell in torrents, the lightning blazed, and the thunder crashed. The whole sky was the colour of slate. When at length a line of bright light appeared in the western sky, I could curb my impatience no longer, and, hoisting my pack, I was soon on the road to Carennac.

A little beyond the village I pa.s.sed a gipsy encampment ranged along the side of the highway on a strip of waste land. There were no tents; but there were four or five miserable little caravans, roofed over with tattered and dirty canvas. They were tents on wheels. Some thin and ascetic-looking old mules and wizen donkeys had been taken out of the shafts, and were now nibbling the short wayside gra.s.s, the young burdocks and mulleins, which, but for the rain, would have filled their mouths with dust. Small portable stoves--alas! not the traditional fire with three stakes set in the ground and tied at the top, with the pot swinging therefrom--had been lighted outside the caravans, and gipsy women were making the evening soup. Bright-eyed, shock-headed, uncombed, unwashed, but exceedingly happy gipsy children were tumbling over one another on the wet turf, showing so much of their brown skin between their rags that they would have been more comfortable and quite as decent had they been naked. A hideous old man, merely skin and bones, sitting nose and knees together upon a sack, did not take my curiosity in good part, but glared at me morosely. The younger men of this interesting community were elsewhere--perhaps mending saucepans, or rea.s.suring ducks alarmed by the thunderstorm. A musician of the party must have been kept in by the bad weather, for from one of the caravans came the diabolic screech of a wheezing concertina that had got rid of all its ideals and dreams of distinction.

The bright line in the west moved very slowly upwards, and the rain continued to fall, although less drenchingly than before. The setting sun strove with the cloud-rack and coloured the veil of vapour that its rays could not pierce. The nightingales and thrushes in the shrubs, and the finches amidst the later blossoms of the may, took heart again, and the song rose from so many throats near and far that the whole valley of the Dordogne was filled with warbling. As the birds grew drowsy the frogs came out to spend a happy night on the margins of the pools and the brooks, until their joyful screaming and croaking was a universal chorus. I was by the side of the broad river that flowed calmly through the fairest meadows. The face of the stream, the pools in the road, the gra.s.s and the leaves, were brightened with the orange glow of a veiled light as of some sacred fire s.h.i.+ning in the dusk through clouds of incense. It grew warmer and warmer until it purpled and died away in grayness and mournful shadow.

The beauty of nature at such moments, when the colours brighten and fade like the powers of the mind as the human day is closing, takes a solemnity that is unearthly, and it is good to be alone with the mystery.

It was dark when I reached Carennac. I did not realize how wet I was until I sat down in an auberge and tried to make myself comfortable for the night. It is not easy, however, to be happy under such circ.u.mstances. When the fire on the hearth was stirred up and fed with fresh wood to cook my dinner of barbel that had just had time to die after being pulled out of the Dordogne, I placed myself in the chimney-corner to dry before the welcome blaze. How cheering is a fire, even in June and in Southern France, on a rainy night, when the sound of sighing trees comes down the chimney and the tired wayfarer's clothes are sticking to his legs and back! How cheering, too, at such a time is a dinner, however modest, in the light and warmth of the fire. A humble barbel has then a more delicate flavour than a salmon-trout cooked with consummate art for people who never know what it is to be hungry.

The next morning I was in the cloisters belonging to the Benedictine priory of Carennac, of which Fenelon was the t.i.tular prior. Hither he came for quietude, and here he wrote his 'Telemaque,' a historical trace of which is found in a little island of the Dordogne, which is called 'L'Ile de Calypso.' It is recorded that the mother of the great Churchman and writer, when she feared that she would be childless, went on a pilgrimage to Roc-Amadour, and that Fenelon was the consequence of that act of devotion.

The cloisters of Carennac, built from plans furnished by that fountain of ecclesiastical art in the Middle Ages, the monastery of Cluny, must, judging from the remnants of tracery in the arcades, and the delicately carved bosses of the vaults, have been once a spot where the spirit of Gothic architecture found delight. Now the spirit of ruin dwells there, leading the bramble and the celandine to conquer, year after year, some fresh territory upon the ancient quadrangle's crumbling wall. Above, where the sunbeam strikes upon the wrinkled stone, the lizard basks and the bee fresh from its hive hums as blithely among the yellow flowers of the celandine as if the blocks raised by men in their reaching towards Heaven were nothing more than the rocks that cast their shadows upon the Dordogne. Upon the ground, man, by using no rein of respect to curb the lower needs of life, has desecrated the spot with pigsties! Some inhabitant of Carennac, into whose hands the cloisters pa.s.sed in recent times, thought that a place which was good enough for Benedictine monks to walk in might, with a little fresh masonry, be made fit for pigs to feed and sleep in. But an end had come to this idyllic state of things. The cloisters of Carennac had just been placed on the list of historic monuments. The adjoining church had been 'cla.s.sed' long before.

This church, a small Gothic edifice of the twelfth century, has a far-projecting porch enriched with a specimen of mediaeval carving which is a long delight to the few archaeologists who find their way to the almost forgotten village of Carennac. The composition, which fills the tympan of the scarcely-pointed arch, represents Christ surrounded by the twelve Apostles. The influence of Byzantine art is perceptible in the treatment. Very few such masterpieces of twelfth-century carving have been so well preserved as this. The seated figure of Christ in the act of blessing His Apostles, the right hand upraised, the left resting upon a clasped book, impresses the beholder by its majesty and serenity. Very different are the figures of the Apostles: these are men, and of a very common type too, such as the Benedictines were accustomed to see in their own cloisters, or among their dependents at Carennac. But how animated are the forms, and how expressive the faces! The mouldings which serve as a border to the composition are much more Romanesque or Byzantine than Gothic, and the columns that support it have capitals which are purely Romanesque.

In the interior of the church is a fifteenth-century group of seven figures, representing the scene of the Holy Sepulchre; an admirable composition, showing to what a high degree of excellence French sculpture had attained even at the dawn of the Renaissance.

WAYFARING UNDERGROUND.

Upon the stony plateau above Roc-Amadour is a cavern well known in the district as the Gouffre de Revaillon. It had for me a peculiar attraction on account of the gloomy grandeur of the scene at the entrance. When I saw it for the first time I understood at once the supernatural horror in which the peasant has learnt to hold such places. It responds to impressions left on the mind of the 'Stygian cave forlorn,' the entrance to Dante's 'City of Sorrow,' and that other cave where Aeneas witnessed in cold terror the prophetic fury of the Sibyl.

This effect of gloom, horror and sublimity is the result of geological conditions and the action of water, which together have produced many similar phenomena in the region of the _causses_, but in no other case, I believe, with such power in composing the picturesque. Imagine an open plain which in the truly Dark Ages whereof man has had no experience, but of whose convulsions he has learnt to read a little from the book whose leaves are the rocks, cracked along a part of its surface as a drying ball of clay might do, the fissure finis.h.i.+ng abruptly and where it is deepest in front of a ma.s.s of rock that refused to split. This was apparently the beginning of the Gouffre de Revaillon. Then came another submersion which greatly modified the appearance of things. There was evidently a deluge here after the land had dried and cracked, and it must have lasted a very long time for the waves to have hollowed, smoothed and polished the rocks inside the caverns and elsewhere as we now see them. Those who have observed with a little attention a rugged coast will, without being geologists, recognise the distinctly marine character of the greater number of these orifices in the calcareous district of the _causses_. The was.h.i.+ng and smoothing action of the sea along the sides of the gorges which cut up the surface of the country in such an astonis.h.i.+ng manner is not so easy to distinguish. But the reason is obvious. This limestone rock is by its nature disintegrating wherever it is exposed to the air and frost, and the foundations of the bastions which support the _causses_ are being continually sapped by water which carries away the lime in solution and deposits a part of it elsewhere in the form of stalact.i.te and stalagmite in the deep galleries where subterranean rivers often run, and which probably descend to the lowest part of the formation. Thus by the dislodgment of huge ma.s.ses of rock which have rolled down from their original positions, and the breaking away of the surfaces of others, the most convincing traces of the sea's action here have nearly disappeared. In the gorge of the Alzou, however, near Roc-Amadour, about 100 feet above the channel of the stream, there is a considerable reach of hard rock approaching marble, the polished and undulating surface of which tells the story of the ocean, just as the sides of the caverns in much more elevated positions tell it.

In the rock where the fissure ends at Revaillon is an opening like a vast yawning mouth, the roof of which forms an almost perfect dome.

Adown this a stream trickles towards the end of summer, but plunges madly and with a frightful roar in winter and spring. The steep sides of the narrow ravine are densely wooded, and the light is very dim at the bottom when the sun is not overhead. I made my first attempt to descend the dark pa.s.sage in the early summer, but there was too much water, and I was soon obliged to retreat. One afternoon in October I returned with a companion, and we took with us a rope and plenty of candles. We carried the rope in view of possible difficulties in the shape of rocks inside the cavern, for it should be borne in mind that in _gouffres_ of this character the stream frequently descends by a series of cascades. The weather was very sultry, and the sky towards the west was of a slaty blue. A fierce storm was threatening, but we paid no attention to it--a mistake which others bent on exploring caverns where streams still flow should be warned against. There is probably no force in nature more terrible, or which makes a man's helplessness more miserably felt, than water suddenly rus.h.i.+ng towards him when he is underground.