Guizol is set to work to excavate, the other watching and holding aloft two pine-torches. Fortunately for Guizol, Gastoun, the lover of Rosette, had followed him one night, wondering uneasily at his regular absences from home. Suddenly the gold-seeker leaps up, seeing a flag of stone.
"The treasure!" he yells. There is not a moment to lose, for if they do not get the gold before the goat awakes, the chance is over.
"Oh, thou dear little bletta oulivié" (olive rod used for gold finding), "thou didst not deceive me after all," the man shouts, pouncing on a vase and other buried objects. They begin to find the gold, when the sorcerer suddenly takes an iron bar and knocks down his companion and thrusts him into the hole crying, "Gold, gold, all mine now!"
But Gastoun rushes in and the two engage in a death-wrestle in the pitch darkness.
"Lo cabro d'or, lo dian!" screams the man and rushes away past his foe, who is dressed in a goat-skin; and so finally the story ends happily with the rescue of the stunned Guizol and the betrothal of Gastoun and Rosette.
When Gastoun afterwards visited the cabanoun of the recluse, he found it all burnt and a blackened skull lying among the stones. "A rustling sound was heard and a huge black spider ran hastily across the stones and climbed on the dead man's skull," fixing its eyes on the intruder. Then it shot out its line and wafted itself to the few half-burnt rafters, "and there it swung round and round in a perfect gavotte." And for many a day after, as it was rumoured in the mountains, there were strange sounds at nightfall from the ruined cabanoun, and the peasants said they heard the drone and cry of the cornemuse and saw a skeleton seated on a stone playing a horrible dance.
This story—founded on a legend that is said to exist in some form or other all over the world—affords a quick picture of the place and the people; but it is further remarkable as a story which seems founded on some case of mesmeric power, probably by no means uncommon among these mountaineers, a Celtic people, it is said, and perhaps for that reason especially sensitive to this mysterious force.
There is a version of the legend at Nice in which the treasure-chamber is under the bed of the Paglion. On a round table a life-sized gold goat and kid are watched over by an exemplary demon who takes only an hour's sleep out of the twenty-four. If a bold adventurer can then creep in and blow the golden trumpet that the demon is so ill-advised as to keep handy for the purpose at his side, that imprudent spirit is forced to remain fixed to the chair, while a swarm of little goblins come trooping in to offer their services in carrying the treasure to any spot that the seeker may decide.
The entrance to this treasure-chamber is the house of a magician between the Tina dei Pagani (the Pagan's Wine-vat, or Roman amphitheatre) and the temple of Apollo, at Cimiez. The district is somewhat haunted by demons and the sort of society that they frequent. The Witches' Rock, rising high beyond Mont Chauve in inaccessible crags, was dear to the uncanny crew, and it was here they danced their "unearthly reels."
On the Rocca di Dom at Avignon witches and wizards (masc and masco) used to assemble in the far-off days when there were only a few windmills built upon the rock.