On I went, now over the glittering stones, now wading through the pink
flowers of saponaria, then in a mimic forest of tall angelica by the
water's edge, until I realized that the peasant's information was
sound--that it was impossible to walk through this gorge except upon the
railway.
Presently the rocks rose in front of me and the line disappeared into the
darkness of a tunnel. I did not like the idea of entering this black hole,
for I had brought no candle with me, but the prospect of climbing the rocks
was still more forbidding. It proved to be a short and straight tunnel with
daylight shining at the farther end. After this came another short one, but
the third was much longer and had a curve; consequently I was soon in total
darkness. The only danger to be feared was a passing train, so I felt with
my stick for the wires between the rock and the metals, and crept along by
them. From being broiled by the sun ten minutes before I was now shivering
from the cold. I longed to see again the flowers basking under the warm
sky, and to hear the grasshoppers' happy song. By-and-by I saw the blessed
light flashing at the end of the black bore. When I came out again into the
sunshine, I was following, not the Chavannon, but the Dordogne.
The gorge widened into a valley, where there were scattered cottages, cows,
sheep, and goats. Here I found a fair road on the western side of the
river, in the department of the Corrèze, and being now free of mind, I
loitered on the way, picking strawberries and watching the lizards. It
was dark when, descending again to the level of the Dordogne, I sought a
lodging in the little village of Port-Dieu. I stopped at a cottage inn,
where an old man soon set to work at the wood-fire and cooked me a dinner
of eggs and bacon and fried potatoes. He was a rough cook, but one very
anxious to please. The room where I passed the night had a long table in
it, and benches. There was no blanket on the bed, only a sheet and a heavy
patchwork quilt. Ah, yes, there was something else, carefully laid upon the
quilt. This was a linen bag without an opening, which, when spread out,
tapered towards the ends. Had I not known something about the old-fashioned
nightcap, I should have puzzled a long time before discovering what I was
expected to do with this object. The matter is simple to those who know
that the cap is formed by turning one of the ends in. There were mosquitoes
in the room, but they sang me to sleep, and if they amused themselves at my
expense afterwards, I was quite unconscious of it.
The murmur of the rushing Dordogne mingled not unpleasantly with the
impressions of dreams as I awoke. I got up and opened the small worm-eaten
window-frame. High thatched roofs, not many yards in front, were covered
with moss, which the morning rays, striking obliquely, painted the heavenly
green of Beatrice's mantle. Down the narrow road goats were passing,
followed by a sunburnt girl with a barge-like wooden shoe at the end of
each of her bare brown legs. The pure, life-giving air that entered by the
window made the blood glow with a better warmth than that of sparkling
wine. I soon went outside to see something of the place which I had entered
in the darkness.
I found that the village was built partly in the bottom of the gorge and
partly on one of its craggy sides. Closely hemmed in by rocks and high
hills overgrown with forest was a bright and fertile little valley, with
abundance of pear and walnut trees, luxuriant cottage-gardens, and little
fields by the flashing torrent, where shocks of lately-cut buckwheat stood
with their heads together waiting for the warm September hours to ripen
their black grain.
Many of the houses were half hidden in leafy bowers. I threaded my way
between these towards some ivy-draped fragments of an ancient priory upon a
mass of rock much overgrown with brambles glistening with blackberries
and briars decked with coral-red hips. Before descending to the road and
beginning the day's journey I indulged for a little while the musing mood
of the solitary wanderer in the grassy burying-ground on the edge of the
cliff.
I started for Bort ere the intensely blue sky began to pale before the
increasing brilliancy of the sun. The road ran along the bottom of the deep
valley, where there was change of scene with every curve of the Dordogne. A
field of maize showed how different was the climate here from that of the
bleak plateau above the deep rift in the rocks. I stopped beside a little
runnel that came down from the wooded heights to pick some flowers of
yellow balsam, and while there my eye fell upon a splendid green lizard
basking in the sun. Here was another proof of the warm temperature of the
valley, notwithstanding its altitude. As I went on I skirted long fields of
buckwheat upon the slope, but reaching only a little way upwards. The white
waxen flowers had turned, or were turning, rusty; but what a variety of
beautiful colour was on the stems and leaves! Greens and yellows passed
into carmine, purple, and burnt sienna. A field of ripening buckwheat has a
charm of warm colour that gladdens the eye, especially when the morning or
evening sunshine is upon it. But this glow of many tints was a sure sign
of approaching autumn; so, too, were the reddened stalks of persicaria,
filling the dry ditches by the wayside.
The valley narrowed, and upon its rocky sides was many a patch of purple
heather--little gardens for the wild bees, but not for man. Neither peasant
nor local Nimrod ever sets his foot there. Still higher, the outlines of
the topmost crags were drawn hard against the sky, for there was no vapour
in the air. Verily, the ground seemed quite alive with brown lizards
darting along at my approach and raising little clouds of dust, whilst
blue-winged grasshoppers--which, perhaps, would be more correctly described
as locusts--crossed and recrossed the road in one flight. In the midst of
such beautiful scenery, and with such happy creatures for companions, I
felt no wish to hurry. Moreover, the blackberries sometimes tempted me to
loiter. If they are unwholesome, as French peasants often maintain, I
ought to have been dead long ago. Strange that this prejudice should be
so general in France with regard to the fruit of so harmless a tribe. But
these same peasants gather the leaves of the bramble to make a decoction
for sore throat. I passed a cottage that had a vine-trellis, the first I
had seen on this side of the Auvergne mountains, and it was half surrounded
by a forest of beans in full flower on very high sticks. In a sunny space
was a row of thatched beehives.
After walking some eight miles, I was not unwilling to take advantage of
a village inn. Here I had a meal of bacon and eggs, haricots, cheese and
walnuts, with some rather rough Limousin wine. I soon became aware that
there was something amiss in the rustic auberge, and catching a dim glimpse
of a figure lying in a bed in a small room adjoining, I asked the young
woman who waited upon me if anybody was ill there. 'Yes,' she replied
dolefully. Then I learnt from her that her father, struck with apoplexy,
was lying in a state that was hopeless. There is no escaping the
mournfulness of life. When our minds are least clouded the shadow of death
suddenly stands between us and the sunshine. I was in no mood to linger at
the table.
What a relief to be out again in the sunshine and the light air, to see
the Dordogne flashing through meadows where women were haymaking with bare
feet!
It was early in the afternoon when I entered the small but active town of
Bort. The burg is only interesting by its exceedingly picturesque situation
on the right bank of the Dordogne, under a very high hill, capped by a
basaltic table, which is flanked towards the town, or rather a little to
the south of it, by a long row of stupendous columns of basalt, known as
the _Orgues de Bort_, from their resemblance at a distance to organ-pipes.
The basalt here is of a reddish yellow. The table, with its igneous
crystallizations, lies upon the metamorphic rock.
I decided to climb to the summit of the prodigious organ-pipes, and to look
at the world from that remarkable point of view. For the greater part of
the distance the way lay up a tiresome winding road on the side of the
hill. A woman, who was tying buckwheat into sheaves, said the distance was
'three small quarters of an hour.' It would have been simpler arithmetic to
have said 'half an hour,' but the peasant thinks it safer not to be
more explicit than he or she can help. Experience has taught me that
'three-quarters of an hour,' whether they are called little or not, mean an
hour or more, and that 'five quarters of an hour' mean an hour and a half,
or even two hours. I passed a team of bullocks descending from the moor
with loads of dry broom for the bakers, headed by a little old man in a
great felt hat, with a long goad in his hand, with which he tickled up the
yoked beasts occasionally, not because they needed it, but from force of
habit. This goad, by-the-bye, is a slender stick about six feet long, with
a short nail at one end, so fastened that the point is turned outwards.
A bullock is not goaded from behind, but from the front between the
shoulder-blades, and it generally suffices for the animal to see a man in
front of him with a stick. Instead of drawing back, as might be supposed,
he steps forward at his best pace. Cows and bulls are harnessed, to the
wain and plough as well as oxen; they have all to work for their living.
English cattle are allowed to grow fat in idleness, and their troubles do
not begin until the time comes for them to be eaten. It is otherwise in
France.
On the banks were fragrant, mauve-coloured pinks, with ragged petals; but
at the foot of the _Orgues_ was a rocky waste, where little grew besides
the sombre holly and fetid hellebore.
The view from the top of the cliff made me fully realize the wildness, the
sterility, the desolation of nature in this region. Beyond the valley far
beneath me where the Dordogne lay, a glittering thread, was the department
of the Cantal. The whole southern and eastern prospect was broken up by
innumerable savage, heath-covered or rocky hills, with little green valleys
or dense woods filling the hollows, the southern horizon being closed by
the wavy blue line of the Cantal mountains. To the north-east the sky-line
was marked by the Mont-Dore range, with the highest peak of Auvergne, the
Puy de Sancy, clearly visible against the lighter blue of the cloudless
air. The feeling that prevailed throughout this wide expanse of country was
solemn sternness.
I returned to Bort, and as there were still about two hours of light left,
I crossed the river and went in search of the cascades, two or three
miles from the town, formed by the Rue in its wild impatience to meet the
Dordogne. When I was skirting the buckwheat fields of the valley in the
calm open country, there was a sweet and tender glow of evening sunshine
upon the purple-tinted sheaves standing with their heads together. The
Titan-strewn rocks felt it likewise with all their heather and broom. There
was no husbandman in the plain, no song of the solitary goat-girl, no creak
of the plough, no twitter even of a bird. It was not yet the hour when
Virgil says every field is silent, but the repose of nature had commenced.
The dusk was falling when I reached a silk-mill by the side of the Rue,
and passed up the deep gorge full of shadows, led by the sound of roaring
waters. A narrow path winding under high rocks of porphyritic gneiss
brought me to the cascade called the Saut de la Saule, where the river,
divided into two branches by a vast block, leaps fifteen or twenty feet
into a deep basin to whirl and boil with fury, then dashes onward down the
stony channel, to leap again into the air and fall into another basin.
[Illustration: THE VALLEY OF THE RUE.]
I reached a rock in the channel by means of a tree that had been laid
between it and the bank, and stood in the midst of the seething, broken
torrent, from which arose that saddening odour which water in wild
commotion gives forth when daylight is dying and the darkened trees stand
like mourning plumes. On either hand the forest-covered sides of the ravine
and their savage crags seemed to reach higher as they grew darker. Where
was I? There was a tree hard by that looked very like the infernal elm
beneath whose leaves the vain dreams cluster; but it was probably an oak.