Païolive: The Lion and the Bear
By scrambling among fallen blocks, after having passed under a little natural arch, a tunnel is reached in which a score of persons might shelter from the rain. Then a path emerging into the light leads along a terrace above the abyss, and by climbing and sliding and clinging to the bushes La Gleyzasse (the Church) is reached, a rift and cavern, once inhabited, as has been proved by the discovery under the soil of flint weapons and fragments of pottery.
This is the best known of the caverns of Païolive. But the mysterious wood grows above a whole subterranean world of vaults and passages. The entrances to these grottoes are known only to the guide; they are hidden among bushes, and often they are pot-holes, wells that open without warning, and down which an incautious visitor might fall. Stones thrown in strike the sides with a sound that becomes ever feebler till they reach the unexplored bottom.
M. de Malbos describes some of these:—
"I visited as well a grotto forming a gallery, on a very rapid slope. I would not speak of it but that, entering it without a candle, I found that my right foot did not touch the ground; so I retraced my steps to light a candle, and thus illumined I saw with horror that I had had half my body suspended over a precipice, sustaining myself only by my left foot on a slide of loose stones.
"On ascending the river of Chassezac, on top of the precipice one can reach the Grotte of the Chouans. One descends, or rather jumps, down to it, where it opens on a precipice with a ledge before it. Down to this cave one has to climb with difficulty. It divides into several galleries, that are lighted by small cracks, visible at the height of one hundred feet above the Chassezac. It was in this grotto that seven Royalists, who had fled to it, were taken by means of fires of straw and sulphur lighted in the entrance. They were shot at a little distance from it. One only, Gavidel, managed to escape, having managed to breathe through the barrel of his gun, which he had unscrewed and thrust through one of the cracks I have mentioned."
Near the entrance to the wood is the group that goes by the name of the Lion and the Bear, already mentioned. There is a Lot's Wife, there is a nun, a sphynx, and so on. The Castle of the Trois Seigneurs does seem actually to have possessed a little fortress, built in and out among the spires of rock, for fragments of wall are worked into the fissures and surmount some of the points.
But perhaps the most remarkable spot is the Cros de la Perdrix, where the limestone is in a craggy jumble of all kinds of forms.