S. Baring-Gould

“ I do not suppose that he noticed the scent of the wallflowers growing out of every fissure wafted in on the summer air. There was logic thought in his head, but no poetry in his heart, no sweetness in his soul. He looked across in the direction of Angoulême, and wished he had a ladder and a hammer that he might smash the serene face of the Saviour looking down on the city from the western gable of the cathedral. Five and twenty years must elapse before that wondrous domed pile was to be wrecked by the Huguenots, his disciples. ”

“ Some are revealed by accident; a peasant is ploughing, when his oxen are suddenly engulfed, and he finds that they have broken through the roof of one of these hiding-places. A gentleman is building his chateau, when in sinking his foundations he finds the rock like a petrified sponge—but not like a sponge in this, that the galleries are artificial. A paysan lets himself down his well to clean it out, as the water is foul. He finds that in the side of the shaft is the opening of a passage; he enters, follows it, and finds a labyrinth of galleries. ”

“ In 1537, says Froude, while the harbours, piers, and fortresses were rising in Dover, "an ancient hermit tottered night after night from his cell to a chapel on the cliff, and the tapers on the altars before which he knelt in his lonely orisons made a familiar beacon far over the rolling waters. The men of the rising world cared little for the sentiment of the past. ”

“ Gest was let down into the cavity, and the priest and other men held the rope. It was fifty fathoms down to the floor. Gest had a candle in his hand, and he now lighted it and looked about him. He saw a big ship with five hundred men in it, and they were all preparing to start up, but as the light of the (consecrated) candle fell on them none stirred, but they stared blankly and snorted. Gest smote at them to cut off their heads, but it was as though his sword passed through water. ”

“ Immediately above the village is a much larger cavern 72 feet high and 36 feet deep. It is vaulted like a dome, and tendrils of ivy and vine hang down draping the entrance. Violets grow in purple masses at the opening, and maiden-hair fern luxuriates within. At the extreme end, high up, to be reached only by a ladder of forty rungs, is another opening into a cave that runs far into the bowels of the Causse, to where the water falls in a cascade that now flows forth beneath the outer cave and supplies the village with drinking water and a place for washing linen. ”

“ The spires of rock range about 3300 feet high, jumbled together by nature in a sportive mood. Here and there, perched like nests of the solitary eagle, are the ruins of former hermitages, burnt by the French under Suchet in July 1811, when they amused themselves with hunting the hermits like chamois in the cliffs, hung the monks of the monastery, plundered it of all its contents, stripped the Virgin of her jewellery, and burnt the fine library. ”

“ Twice did Elijah take refuge in a cave.
What took place in Palestine, took place in every part of the world wherever there are limestone and chalk and volcanic breccia and sandstone. It would seem as though a merciful Providence had not only provided the first shelters for man against the inclemency of the weather, but had also furnished him with places of secure refuge against the violence of his fellow-man. As sure as the rabbit runs to its hole on the sight of the sportsman, so did the oppressed and timorous when the slayer and the marauder appeared. ”

“ The soul of man has its wings so battered by its cage and is so enamoured of its groundsel and bit of sugar, that even if the door be left open it will not look forth, certainly not break away. Yet there is a world beyond the bars, and a world peopled by happy spirits, and if it cannot at once join them, it can call to them and unite with them in rapturous song. ”

“ There are two very remarkable castles at Brengues; both were fortified by Perducat and Besserat. One hangs like a swallow's nest under the eaves of the overhanging rock, and is now wholly inaccessible, so much so that it is in perfect preservation. The river flows far below, and a talus of rubble runs up to the foot of the cliff, along which talus, on a narrow terrace, is a path. This path was defended both above and below the castle by gates that were battlemented and to which guard-rooms were attached. The pensile castle is not large. ”

“ But not a roof remains, not a living soul is to be seen in the street, not a huxter's stall in the market-place, only tiles strewn about and white rocks blackened with smoke show that man lived there.
By a flight of stairs cut in the rock, the visitor can ascend to the furrow in the face of the cliff, and there he finds that the whole has been elaborately utilised. There are chambers excavated in the chalk that were formerly closed by wood partitions, with recesses for beds, cupboards, seats—clearly the bedrooms of ladies. ”

“ Many of the cave-dwellings have but a ledge a few feet wide, and perhaps only a dozen or twenty feet long before their doors, and at the extreme edge one may see the children standing, unaffected with giddiness, like a row of swallows, contemplating the visitor. I cannot say how it may be with the lower houses, but those high up are pronouncedly odoriferous; for the inhabitants have no means of disposing of their garbage save by exposing it on their little shelves to be dried up by the sun, or washed down by the rain over the windows and doors of their neighbours beneath. ”

“ Twice in the year tours of inspection are made by the surveyors, but visitors are no longer allowed access to the catacomb. There have occurred cases of men having been lost in the intricate labyrinth.
The crypts in which were laid the bodies of saints gave occasion to kings, princes, and great men employing like mausoleums.
The poor and mean might lie in the earth, but men of consequence must have vaults in which the members of their families might be laid. What hideous profanation of sepulchres would have been spared had the kings of France been laid in the earth! ”

“ A little further, in a large hall, a circular hole in the floor unfenced gave access by rope or ladder to a lower range of galleries. Any one exploring by the feeble light of a single candle, without a guide, might be precipitated down this abyss without knowing that there was a gaping opening before him. A long ascending passage, with niches in the sides for lamps, leads to where the fibres of the roots of the trees on the mound above have penetrated and are hanging down. It is said that the gallery led on to the castle, but since this latter has been ruined it has been blocked. ”

“ Expense and trouble are incurred to convey a corpse from one end of Europe to England, that it may repose in the family vault. We decorate our graves with flowers as though the dead appreciated them; they are but the representatives of the ancient sacrifice to the dead. We drink to the memory of the deceased as though pouring out libations to them. Our tombstones are direct descendants of the menhir and the obelisk, our altar-tombs of the dolmen, our family vault of the primeval cave ossuary. ”

“ The white Jurassic limestone dappled orange, fawn colour, and silver grey, rises 250 feet above the river, the lower portion is in terraces, very narrow, on which are the houses clinging to the rock, cramped between the Dordogne and the cliff which rises 140 to 160 feet above. The old houses are echeloned along the face of the rock, superposed the one on the other, calcined by the sun as they face south, and the rock behind cuts off all northern winds and reflects the glare of the southern sun. ”

“ The first men who settled in this favoured valley under shelters open to the blaze of the sun, in a soft and pleasant climate, where the air when not in proximity to men, is scented with mint, marjoram and juniper, where with little trouble a salmon might be harpooned, must have multiplied enormously—for every overhanging rock, every cavern, even every fallen block of stone, has been utilised as a habitation. Where a block has fallen, the prehistoric men scratched the earth away from beneath it, and couched in the trench. ”

“ There, from his rock, his eye ranged over the rolling woodland and open champagne country for miles so that he could see and prepare against the enemy who ventured to approach his stronghold; now it is buried in larch and Austrian pine plantations, so that nothing is visible from the cave, save their green boughs. It seems strange that for so many years he can have been suffered to continue his depredations without an attempt being made to surround his rock and keep him imprisoned therein till he was starved into surrender. ”

“ At the extremity of the nave, which is raised on steps to form a choir, anciently stood the high altar, but this has been removed. Above, where it was can be discerned faintly through the obscurity, a bas-relief rudely sculptured, but very curious. It occupies the entire width of the choir; on the right is an angel playing upon a stringed instrument, with outspread wings, as if in the attitude of soaring, and on the left, perched on a rock, is a monstrous animal with gaping jaws, bristling mane, and raised paws. ”

“ The farmer to whom the meadow belonged naturally enough objected, and collected a number of men who linked themselves together with ropes and surrounded the field. The horse took no notice but continued browsing. The ring gradually contracted on him. Kynaston saw the proceeding from his eyrie, and uttered a shrill whistle. At once the gallant steed pricked up his ears, snorted, ran, leaped clean over the head of a man, and scrambled up the stair in the cliff, to his master's shelter. On another occasion a thief, thinking it no harm to rob a felon, succeeded in leaping on the horse's back. ”

“ At the Roc d'Aucor, in the valley of the Vers (Lot) , a gaping cave is visible far above where any ladder could reach and inaccessible by climbing from the top of the crag, as that overhangs like a wave about to break. Nevertheless, athwart the opening are, and have been from time immemorial, two stout beams let into the rock horizontally. Dimly visible in the depth of the cavern is some tall white figure, and the peasants declare that it is that of a man—a statue in marble, keeping guard over a golden calf. ”

“ A tall flight of steep steps rudely fashioned of large unshapen blocks of stone, conducted to the entrance of the hermitage, and the dim light within its hoary, moss-grown, sloping walls is admitted through irregularly formed apertures, pierced through the dense body of the rock, and command magnificent views of the subjacent scenery. ”

“ No wonder, if in such a state of things, the minds of men were stirred by a passion akin to despair, which ended in a new and grand form of suicide. It would have ended often, but for Christianity, in such an actual despair as that which had led in past ages more than one noble Roman to slay himself, when he lost all hope for the Republic. ”

“ In this valley is the village of Sauliac, in an amphitheatre of rocks, where road and river describe a semicircle. The cliff runs up to a height of 300 feet. Houses are perched on every available ledge, grappling the rock, where not simply consisting of faced caverns. In the midst of this cirque stands the castle, buried in stately oaks. It was not built till 1460, when the long agony of the war was over, and nothing remained of the English save their empty nests in the rock, and their hated name. ”

“ According to an Indian legend, the first men were bred like maggots in the heart of the earth, but laying hold of some depending fibres drew themselves up into the light of day. We reverse the order, and from the bright spiritual sphere crawl underground by the thousand tendrils of daily life. ”

“ The many-windowed English mansion sleeping among turfy lawns to the plash of a fountain, and the cawing of rooks in the beechwood, tell of a tranquil past life-record broken only by transient unrest; whereas the towers on the Continent with their meurtrières and frowning machicolations, bristling on every hill, frequent as church spires, now gutted and ruinous, proclaim a protracted reign of oppression and then a sudden upheaval in resentment and a firebrand applied to them all. ”

“ A huge limestone precipice rises above the Bodmenalp, that is a paradise of wild flowers. A hundred and seventy feet up the cliff gapes a cavern, and at its mouth is a tiny chapel. It is reached by what is now a safe pathway and over a bridge cast across a chasm. But formerly the ascent could not be made without danger. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, some Alpine shepherds, who had reached the cave, reported that they had seen in it the remains of an altar. ”

“ Now just at this time, Eric (King of Sweden) happened to pass nigh the barrow of Asvid, and the Swedes thinking it might contain treasure, broke into it with mattocks, and saw disclosed a cave deeper than they had anticipated. To explore this, a youth, chosen by lot, was let down in a basket. But Asmund, when he saw the boy descend, cast him out, and got into it himself. ”

“ Just beyond, excavated in the bluff, is the chapel of S. Gervais, consisting of two portions, an outer and an inner chamber. But the cliff face had been cut for the windows too thin, and the whole slid away at the same time probably as the disaster happened to the castle, and has exposed the interior of this monolithic church. There are remains of frescoes on the wall painted with considerable spirit; a king on horseback blowing a horn, and behind him a huntsman armed with a boar-spear. Benches cut in the rock surround the sanctuary. Externally a niche contains a rude image of the saint. ”

“ Within this enclosure is a chasm, not natural, but excavated with a good deal of art and regularity, in form like a baker's oven. There is no ladder there for descent into the cave, and one is brought, that is light and narrow. Once at the bottom you see on one side, between the ground and the masonry, a hole about large enough for a man to squeeze through. One lies on the back, and holding in one hand a honey-cake, thrust the feet in at the opening, and then work oneself till the legs are in up to the knees. ”