III.
The little-known region of the Causses is "the Cevennes of the Cevennes," but Stevenson in his travels did not visit the innermost Cevennes, and was during most of his journey only on the outskirts of the real country of the Camisards. The chief of these great plateaux is the Causse de Sauveterre, which extends south-west from the town of Mende for upwards of forty miles, and is in parts at least twenty miles wide. It is divided from the Causse Méjan on the south by the splendid gorges of the river Tarn, and due south of the Méjan, with the beautiful valley of the Jonte between, lies the Causse Noir, some twenty miles east and west, and ten from the Jonte on its north to the no less beautiful glen on its south, where flows the river Dourbie. Still southward, and with only this waterway dividing, extends the splendid mass of the Causse du Larzac, some thirty miles in length, from the neighbourhood of Millau to the ancient Roman town of Lodève, which boasted a continuous bishopric from the year 323 to the Revolution, and is now a bright and populous industrial centre. These are the more notable of the Causses, and all, no doubt, formed one mighty plateau in prehistoric times; but numerous swift flowing rivers have through the ages worn them asunder, producing a series of magnificent ravines that contain some of the finest scenery in France, and on whose sides we can trace the slow and steady work of the streams wearing down to their present courses through the limestone, the local name for which is cau, whence causse.
LA CAVALERIE, WITHIN THE CAMISARD WALL
(From a photograph by Mr. S. R. Crockett)
ST. VERNAN, IN THE VALLEY OF THE DOURBIE
To describe the character of the Camisard country, and to convey some idea of it to English readers, is no easy matter, since there is nothing in the British Islands, and little elsewhere in Europe, to which it may be readily compared. Yet the effort must be made, since the peculiar nature of the country is of first importance to the understanding of its people and their historic resistance of all the might of France two centuries ago.
Conceive, then, a vast expanse of rugged and rock-strewn land, covering it may be an area of two or three hundred square miles, and terminating abruptly on every side in mighty ravines, or ending in precipitous cliffs, that look down on wide and fertile valleys, frown on smiling plains. This is what the word Causse stands for, and the wonder is that folk should be content to live in dreary little villages high up on these stony fields, when a thousand feet and more in the plains and valleys below rich and fruitful soil invites the husbandman. But so it is, and in this region of France we have the strange circumstance of two peoples, differing in many essentials of character, living within a day's walk of each other, and mingling but little in the intercourse of life. As you thread your way through the valleys of the Tarn, the Dourbie, or any of the other streams that follow the rifts between the Causses, you realise that up there among the clouds live people who have small commerce with their fellows in the valleys, and in such a town as Millau, whose inhabitants must look each day of their lives at the giant walls of the Causse Noir and the Larzac, upreared to the immediate east of their own paved streets, there are thousands who have never scaled these heights.
Mr. Crockett gives us this graphic word-picture of the Larzac:
"The surface of the Causse—once Yvette had attained to the higher levels—spread out before her, plain as the palm of a hand, save for those curiously characteristic rocks, which, apparently without connection with the underlying limestone, stand out like icebergs out of the sea, irregular, pinnacled, the debris of temples destroyed or ever foot of man trod there—spires, gargoyles, hideous monsters, all dejected in some unutterable catastrophe, and become more horrible in the moonlight, or, on the other hand, modified to the divine calm of the Bhudda himself, by some effect of illumination or trick of cloud umbration....
"A wonderful land, this of the Causses, where the rain never comes to stay. Indeed, it might as well rain on a vast dry sponge, thirty miles across and four or five thousand feet in height. The sheep up there never drink. They only eat the sparse tender grass when the dew is upon it. Yet from their milk the curious cheese called Roquefort is made, which, being kept long in cool limestone cellars—the cellules of the stony sponge—puts on something of the flavour of the rock plants—thyme, juniper, dwarf birch, honeysweet heath—from which it was distilled."