Alias the Lone Wolf

by Louis Joseph Vance

Nor would he heed the dubious head shaken by his host of Meyrueis, who earnestly advised a guide. The Causses, he declared, were treacherous; men sometimes lost their way upon those lofty plains and were never heard of more. Duchemin didn't in the least mind getting lost, that is to say failing to make his final objective; at worst he could depend upon a good memory and an unfailing sense of direction to lead him back the way he had come.

He was to learn there is nothing more unpalatable than the repentance of the headstrong....

He found it a stiffish climb up out of the valley of the Jonte. By the time he had managed it, the sun had already robbed all vegetation of its ephemeral jewellery, the Causse itself showed few signs of a downpour which had drenched it for seventy-two hours on end. To that porous limestone formation water in whatever quantity is as beer to a boche. Only, if one paused to listen on the brink of an aven, there were odd and disturbing noises to be heard underfoot, liquid whisperings, grim chuckles, horrible gurgles, that told of subterranean streams in spate, coursing in darkness to destinations unknown, unguessable.

His path (there was no trace of road) ran snakily through a dense miniature forest of dwarfed, gnarled pines, of a peculiarly sombre green, ever and again in some scant clearing losing itself in a web of similar paths that converged from all points of the compass; so that the wayfarer was fain to steer by the sun--and at one time found himself abruptly on the brink of a ravine that gashed the earth like a cruel wound. He worked his way to an elevation which showed him plainly that--unless by a debatable detour of several miles--there was no way to the farther side but through the depths of the ravine itself.

If that descent was a desperate business, the subsequent climb was heartbreaking. He needed a long rest before he was able to plod on, now conceiving the sun in the guise of a personal enemy. The sweat that streamed from his face was brine upon his lips. For hours it was thus with Duchemin, and in all that time he met never a soul. Once he saw from a distance a lonely château overhanging another ravine; but it was apparently only one more of the many ruins indigenous to that land, and he took no step toward closer acquaintance.

Long after noon, sheer fool's luck led him to a hamlet whose mean auberge served him bread and cheese with a wine singularly thin and acid. Here he enquired for a guide, but the one able-bodied man in evidence, a hulking, surly animal, on learning that Duchemin wished to visit Montpellier-le-Vieux, refused with a growl to have anything to do with him. Several times during the course of luncheon he caught the fellow eyeing him strangely, he thought, from a window of the auberge. In the end the peasant girl who waited on him grudgingly consented to put him on his way.

In a rocky gorge, called the Rajol, a spot as inhumanly grotesque as a nightmare of Gustave Doré's, with the heat of a pit in Tophet, he laboured for hours. The hush of evening and its long shadows were on the land when finally he scrambled out to the Causse again. Then he lost his path another time, missed entirely the village of Maubert, where he had thought to find a conveyance, or at least a guide, and in the silver and purple mystery of a perfect moonlight night found himself looking down from a hilltop upon Montpellier-le-Vieux.

Rumour had prepared him to know the place when he saw it, nothing for its stupendous lunacy. Heaven knows what convulsion or measured process of Nature accomplished this thing. For his part Duchemin was unable to accept any possible scientific explanation, and will go to his grave believing that some half-witted cyclops, back beyond the dimmest dawn of Time, created Montpellier-le-Vieux in an hour of idleness, building him a play city of titanic monoliths, then wandered away and forgot it altogether.

He saw what seemed to be a city at least two miles in length, more than half as wide, a huddle of dwellings of every shape and size, a labyrinth of narrow, tortuous streets broken here and there by wide and stately avenues, with public squares and vast cirques (of such amphitheatres he counted no less than six) and walls commanded by a citadel.

But never door or window broke the face of any building, no chimney exhaled a breath of smoke, neither wheel nor foot disturbed these grass-grown thoroughfares.... Montpellier-the-Old indeed! Duchemin reflected; but rather Montpellier-the-Dead--dead with the utter deadness of that which has never lived.