Wanderings by Southern Waters, Eastern Aquitaine

by Edward Harrison Barker

After leaving Cajarc in the morning I was soon alone with Nature on the right bank of the river. Autumn was there in a gusty mood, blowing yellow leaves down from the hills upon the water and driving them towards the sea over the rippled, gray surface lit up with cold, steel-like gleams of sunshine struggling through the vapour. The wilderness of herbs and under-shrubs along the banks was no longer aflame with flowers. Dead thistles, whose feathered seeds had drifted far away upon the wind to found new colonies, and a multitude of withered spikes and racemes, told the old story of the summer's life passing into the death or sleep of winter. Yet the river-banks were not without flowers. A rose, very like the 'monthly rose' of English gardens, was still blooming there, together with hawkweed, wild reseda, and a mint with lilac-coloured blossoms which one sees on every bit of waste ground throughout this region.

A rock rising from the river's bank carried the ruin of an ancient chapel. Only the apse was left. It contained one narrow deeply-splayed Romanesque window, and a piscina where the priest washed his hands. The altar-stone lay upon the ground where the altar must have stood, and behind it a rough wooden cross had been piously raised to remind the passer-by that the spot was hallowed.

The road now ran under high red rocks or steep stony slopes, where, on neglected terraces overgrown with weeds, the dead or dying vines repeated the monotonous tale of the phylloxera.

I passed through the village of Lannagol, mostly built upon rocks overlooking the bed of its dried-up stream, and was soon again under the desert hills, where the fiery maple flashed amid the sombre foliage of the box. The next village or hamlet was a very curious one. Rows of little houses, some of them mere huts, were built against the side of the rock under the shelter of huge masses of oolite or lias projecting like the stories of mediaeval dwellings. People climbed to their habitations, like goats, up very steep paths winding amongst the rocks. The overleaning walls were blackened to a great height by the smoke from the chimneys.

It was dusk when I crossed a bridge leading to the village of Cénevières, where I intended to pass the night. There was a very fair inn here, less picturesque than many of the auberges of the country, but cleaner, perhaps, for this reason. The aubergiste was suspicious of me at first, as he afterwards admitted, for like others he had turned over in his mind the question, Is he a German spy? Judging from my own experience in this part of France, I should say that a German tourist would not spend a very happy holiday here. The sentiment of the Parisians towards the Teuton is fraternal love compared to that of the Southern French. These people proved themselves to be thorough going haters in the religious wars, and the old character is still strong in them.

Although the Germans in 1870-71 did not show themselves in Guyenne, the resentment of the inhabitants towards them is intense, and it is the vivacity of this feeling that renders them so suspicious of foreigners. I noticed, however, that as I went farther down the Lot the people became more genial, so that the long evenings in the rural inns generally passed very pleasantly. Dinner over, I usually took possession of a chimney-corner, the only place where one can be really warm on autumnal nights, and while satisfying the curiosity of the rustic intelligence concerning the English and their ways I gathered much information that was useful to me respecting local customs and the caverns, castles and legends of the district where I happened to be. By nine o'clock everybody was yawning, and if the village blacksmith, the postman, and the bell-ringer had not left by that time, they were in an unusually dissipated frame of mind. By ten o'clock the great kitchen was dark, and the mice were making up a quadrille upon the hearth, supposing no cat to be looking on.

Early the next morning I was climbing the hill towards the Castle of Cénevières. This building is a most picturesque jumble of the castellated styles of the thirteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. The oldest part of the structure—and it is very considerable—is that of a frowning feudal fortress of great strength, built upon a rock, which on the side of the Lot is a perpendicular wall some 200 feet high. The inhabitants agree in saying that the feudal walls are the work of the English, but they are probably in error. The original castle belonged to Waïfré. It afterwards passed to the Gourdon family, who doubtless rebuilt it upon the old foundations. The last descendant of this family was one of the most ardent Huguenots in the Quercy. The late Gothic superstructure, which is still inhabited, has a very high-pitched roof, with dormer windows covered by high gables with elaborate carvings. Very near this castle, in the side of the cliff, is a fortified cavern, which for centuries has gone by the name of La Grotte des Anglais. It must have been in communication with the castle, of which it may have served as an outwork or a place of refuge in the last extremity. I might have passed the whole day trying to find it but for the help of a peasant, who led the way down the rocks, hanging on to bushes of box. The remains of a small tower, pierced with loopholes on one side of the opening, and the other ruined masonry, leave no doubt as to the defensive use to which this cavern was at one time put.

Having left Cénevières, I recrossed the Lot and passed through Saint-Martin, a village of little interest, but the point from which it is most convenient to reach a certain cave where animals of the prehistoric ages were obliging enough to die, so that their skeletons might be preserved for the delight and instruction of the modern scientific bone-hunter. This is not one of the celebrated caves in the department, consequently the visitor with thoughts fixed on bones may carry away a sackful if he has the patience to grub for them. If the cavern were near Paris it would give rise to a fierce competition between the palaeontologist and the chiffonnier, but placed where it is the soil has not yet been much disturbed. I went in search of it up a very steep, stony hill, and there had the good fortune to meet an old woman who was coming down over the rocks with surprising nimbleness. She knew at once what I wanted. Although she spoke French with great difficulty, three words out of every five being patois, she made me understand that her house was just in front of the cave, and that it was not to be visited without her consent and guidance. She therefore began to reascend the 'mountain,' as she called the hill, making signs to me to follow. There was certainly nothing wrong with the old woman's lungs, for it was as much as I could do to keep pace with her, especially when she led the way up almost naked rock. At length we reached the brow of the hill, where a cottage showed itself in a desert of limestone, but where a little garden, by dint of long labour, had been formed upon a natural terrace on which the sun's rays fell warmly.

The woman left me in the cottage while she went to find her daughter. It was composed of one small room, in which there were two beds, an old worm-eaten walnut buffet, an eight-day clock after the pattern of Sir Humphrey's, a hearth covered with white wood-ashes, a large wheel-shaped loaf of black bread in a rack, onions, grapes, garlic, and balls of twisted hemp hanging from the beams; baskets of maize and chestnuts, and a great copper swing-pot, only a little less imposing than the one out of which the scullion fished the fowls for Sancho Pança. I afterwards learned that two couples slept in the two beds—the old pair and the young pair.

Presently the old woman reappeared, followed by a much younger one, carrying upon her head a copper water-pot, that glowed in the sun like a wind-blown brand. Having set down her pot, the daughter, a rather wild-looking person with sun-baked face and large gleaming eyes, took an old-fashioned brass dish-lamp—a deformed and vulgar descendant of the agate lamp held in the hand of the antique priestess—and, after bringing the wick towards the lip, lighted it. I lit the candle I had brought with me, and, followed by the old woman, we entered the cavern, near the mouth of which was a fig-tree. The entrance was so small that it was almost necessary to crawl for some distance; but it must have been much larger at one time if the story that the younger woman told me about the bones of a mastodon having been discovered inside was well founded. As we proceeded, the roof rose rapidly, so that the rocks overhead could not presently be seen by the light of the candle and lamp. Farther in, the roof became lower, and it was connected with the ground in places by natural columns of vast size, formed in the course of ages by the calcareous deposit of the dropping water. Near the end of the cavern, at about 100 yards from the entrance, various holes dug in the yellow soil showed where the bone-searchers had been at work. I had ample encouragement, for I had only to stir the earth a little to find bones half turned to stone. I selected two or three teeth with the hope that a scientific friend would say they were a mastodon's or a mammoth's. If I had liked the prospect of carrying a bag of bones on my back down the valley of the Lot, I might have taken away many very large specimens. I called to mind, however, an experience of early days which prevented me from being again a martyr to science. I had found a quantity of bones in a newly-dug gravel-pit, and fully believing that they belonged to some animal that flourished before the flood, I carried them twelve miles with infinite labour and suffering, and then learned that they were part of the anatomy of a very modern cow. Since that adventure I have left bones for those who understand them.