Two Summers in Guyenne: A Chronicle of the Wayside and Waterside

by Edward Harrison Barker

One has to climb or descend a steep wooded hill to reach the cavern, for the entrance is on the side of it. The métayer acts as guide, and his services are indispensable, for there are few subterranean labyrinths so extensive and so puzzling as this.

Although the principal gallery is barely a mile in length, there are so many ramifications that one may walk for hours without making a complete exploration of the daedalian corridors, even with the help of the guide. With sufficient string to lay down and candles to light him, a stranger might enter these depths alone and come to no harm; but if he despised the string and trusted to his memory he would soon have reason to wish that he had remained on the surface of the earth, where, if he lost himself, there would be fellow-creatures to help him. Now with the sticky and tenacious clay trying to pull off his boots at every step, now walking like a monkey on hands and feet to keep his head from contact with the rock, he would grow weary after an hour or so, and begin to wish to go home, or, at any rate, to the hotel; but the more his desire to see daylight again took shape and clearness, the more bewildered he would become, and farther and farther he would probably wander from the small opening in the side of the hill. Thus he might at length hear the moan of water, and if it did not scare him, he would see by the glimmer of his solitary candle the gleam of a stream rushing madly along, then plunging deeper into the earth, to reappear nobody knows where. This cavern offers little of the beauty of stalactite and stalagmite; but the roof in many places has a very curious and fantastic appearance, derived from layers of flints embedded in the solid limestone, and exposed to view by the disintegration of the rock or the washing action of water. They can be best likened to the gnarled and brown roots of old trees, but they take all manner of fanciful forms.

The little house in which I am living stands almost on the spot where some particularly precious skeletons, attributed to prehistoric men and women, were dug up about twenty years ago, when the late Mr. Christy was here busily disturbing the soil that had been allowed to remain unmoved for ages. The overleaning rock, which is separated from my temporary home only by a few yards, probably afforded shelter to generations of those degraded human beings from whom the anthropologist who puts no bridle on his hobby-horse is pleased to claim descent. Near the base is one of those symmetrically scooped-out hollows which are such a striking peculiarity of the formation here, and which suggest to the irreverent that a cheese-taster of prehistoric dimensions must have been brought to bear upon the rocks when their consistency was about the same as that of fresh gruyère. According to one theory, they were washed out by the sea, that retired from the interior of Aquitaine long before the interesting savages who made arrow-heads and skin-scrapers out of flints, and needles out of bone, came to this valley and worked for M. Lartet and Mr. Christy. Others say that the sea had nothing to do with the fashioning of these hollows, but that they were made by the breaking and crumbling away of the more friable parts of the limestone under the action of air, frost, and water. While members of learned societies discuss such questions with upturned noses, a rock above them will sometimes be unable to keep its own countenance, but, simulating without flattery one of the human visages below, will wear an expression of humour fiendish enough to startle the least superstitious of men.

Upon the lower part of my rock is hanging the wild rose in flower, and above it is a patch of grass that is already brown, although we are in the first week of May; then upon a higher grass-grown steep is a solitary ilex, looking more worthy of a classic reputation than many others of its race. Its trunk appears to rise above the uppermost ridge of bare rock, and the outspread branches, with the sombre yet glittering foliage, are marked against the sky that is blue like the bluebell, as motionless as if they had been fixed there by heat, like a painted tree on porcelain.

On the other side of the house is a small balcony that looks upon the road, the peaceful valley, and the darkly-wooded cliffs just beyond the Vézère. During the brief twilight—the twilight of the South, that lays suddenly and almost without warning a rosy kiss upon the river and the reedy pool—I sometimes watch from the balcony the barefooted children of the neighbours playing upon the white road. Poor village children! As soon as a wanderer gets to know them, he leaves them never to see them again. Living in a great city is apt to dull the sensibility, and to close men up in themselves. In a village you become forcibly interested in surrounding humanity, and enter into the lives and feelings of others. A young woman died yesterday in child-birth, and was buried to-day. Everybody felt as if the awful shadow that descended upon the lonely house across the river had passed close to him and her, and left a chill in the heart. When the uncovered waggon bearing the deal coffin wrapped in a sheet, and having at the head an upright cross of flowers and leaves that shook and swayed with the jolting of this rustic hearse, moved towards the church, nearly the whole of the population followed. Only the day before another woman was carried along the same white road towards the little cemetery, but the coffin then was borne upon the shoulders of four persons of her own sex. Now and again fatigue brought the bearers to a standstill; then they would change shoulders by changing places. And the white coffin, moving up and down as a waif on the swell of the sea, passed on towards the glowing west, where presently the purple-tinted wings of evening covered it.

But the peasants are not sentimentalists—far from it. Always practical, they are very quick to perceive the futility of nursing grief, and especially the unreasonableness of wishing people back in the world who were no longer able to do their share of its work. A young man came into the village with a donkey and cart to fetch a coffin for his father who had just died.

'Apé! I dare say he was old,' was the reflection of our servant—a Quercynoise. If it had been the old father who had come to fetch a coffin for the young man, she would have found something more sympathetic to say than that.

Sometimes at sunset I climb the rugged hill behind the house. Then the stony soil no longer dazzles by its white glitter, but takes a soft tint of orange, or rose, or lilac, according to the stain of the sky, and there is no light in the rocky South that so tenderly touches the soul as this. Here the spurge drinks of the wine of heaven with golden lips wide open; but the hellebore, which has already lost all its vernal greenness, and is parched by the drought, ripens its drooping seeds sullenly on the shadowy side of the jutting crag, and seems to hate the sun. Higher and yet far below the plateau is a little field where the lately cut grass has been thrown into mounds. Here the light seems to gain a deeper feeling, and the small vineyard by the side holds it too. It is one of the very few old vineyards which, after being stricken nearly unto death by the phylloxera, have revived, and by some unknown virtue have recovered the sap and spirit of life. The ancient stocks gnarled and knotted, and as thick as a man's arm, together with the fresh green leaves and the hanging bunches of buds that promise wine, wear a colour that cannot be rightly named—a transparent, subtle, vaporous tint of golden pink or purple, which is the gift of this warm and wonderful light. A cricket that has climbed up one of the tender shoots strikes a low note, which is like the drowsy chirrup of a roosting bird. It is the first touch of a fiddler in the night's orchestra, and will soon be taken up by thousands of other crickets, bell-tinkling toads, croaking frogs in the valley, and the solitary owl that hoots from the hills. Below, how the river seems to sleep under the dusky wings of gathering dreams where the white bridge spans it! Beyond, where the blue-green sky is cut by a broken line of hill and tree, the rocks become animated in the clear-obscure, and the apparently dead matter, rousing from its apathy, takes awful forms and expressions of life.

My small boat had been lying on the Vézère several days doing nothing, when I decided upon a little water-faring up the stream. This canoe had been knocked together with a few deal boards. It had, as a matter of course, a flat bottom, for a boat with a keel would be quite unsuitable for travelling long distances on rivers where, if you cannot float in four inches of water, you must hold yourself in constant readiness to get out and drag or push your craft over the stones. This exercise is very amusing at the age of twenty, but the fun grows feeble as time goes on. My boat was not made to be rowed, but to be paddled, either with the short single-bladed paddle which is used by the fishermen of the Dordogne, and which they call a 'shovel,' or by the one that is dipped on both sides of the canoe alternately. There being rapids about every half-mile on the Vézère, and the current in places being very strong, I realized that no paddler would be able to get up the stream without help, and so I induced my landlord to accompany me and to bring a pole. He was a good-tempered man, somewhat adventurous, with plenty of information, and a full-flavoured local accent which often gave to what he said a point of humour that was not intended. The voyage, therefore, commenced under circumstances that promised nothing but pleasantness. It was a perfectly beautiful May afternoon, with a fresh north breeze blowing that tempered the ardour of the sun.

The water changed like the moods of a child who has only to choose the form and manner of his pleasure. Now it pictured in its large eye, whose depth seemed to meet eternity, the lights and forms and colours of the sky, the rocks, and the trees; now it leapt from the shaded quietude, and, splitting into two or more currents, separated by willowy islets or banks of pebbles, rushed with an eager and joyous cry a hundred yards or so; then it stopped to take breath, and moved dreamily on again. Where the water was shallow was many a broad patch of blooming ranunculus; so that it seemed as if the fairies had been holding a great battle of white flowers upon the river. We glided by the side of meadows where all the waving grass was full of sunshine. On the bank stood purple torches of dame's violet, and the dog-rose climbing upon the guelder rose was pictured with it in the water. On the opposite bank stood the great rocks which have caused this part of the river to be called the Gorge of Hell. Here human beings in perpetual terror of their own kind cut themselves holes in the face of the precipice, and lived where now the jackdaw, the hawk, the owl, and the bat are the only inhabitants. In the Middle Ages the English companies turned the side of the rock into a stronghold which was the terror of the surrounding district.