"The rooms, for the most part, had no supports. The doors were often made of a single square stone, and here and there I also noticed fallen columns. After we had passed several cross-alleys or streets, and before we had reached the middle of the subterranean city, my attendant's light went out. As he was lighting again by mine, it occurred to me that possibly both our lights might be extinguished, and I asked the boy if he had any matches. 'No,' he replied, 'my brother has them.' 'Could you find your way back if the lights were put out?' 'Impossible,' he replied. For a moment I began to be alarmed at this underworld, and urged an immediate return. Without much difficulty we got back to the marketplace and from hence the youngster knew the way well enough. Thus, after a sojourn of more than an hour and a half in this labyrinth, I again greeted the light of day." [Footnote: Reisebericht in Hauran, ii., pp. 47-48.]
I have quoted this somewhat lengthy account because, as we shall see in the sequel, the subterranean dwellings and above all refuges in Europe, bear to this town of King Og of Bashan a marked resemblance.
Within four hours of Paris by Chartres and Sargé is the town of Montoire with a clean inn, Le Cheval Rouge, and next station down the Loir is Trôo. The Loir, male, is the river, not La Loire of the feminine gender. Le Loir is a river that rises in the north-east, traverses the fertile upland plain of Beauce, and falls into and is lost in La Loire at Angers. It is a river rarely visited by English tourists, but it does not deserve to be overlooked. It has cut for itself a furrow in the chalk tufa, and the hospitable cliffs on each side offer a home to any vagrant who cares to scratch for himself a hole in the friable face, wherein to shelter his head.
Trôo bears a certain resemblance to the city of Og. Originally it was all underground, but in process of time it effervesced, bubbled out of its holes, and is now but half troglodyte. The heights that form the Northern declivity of the valley of the Loir come to an abrupt end here, and have been sawn through by a small stream creating a natural fosse, isolating the hill of Trôo that is attached to the plateau only on the North. The hill rises steeply from the river to a crest occupied by a Romanesque church recently scoured to the whiteness of flour, and beside it is a mighty tumulus, planted with trees.
Formerly on this same height stood a castle, but this has been so completely broken down that nothing remains of it but a few substructures and its well.
Trôo was at one time a walled town, and as it was the key to the valley of the Loir, was hotly contested between the English and French during three hundred years, and later, between Catholics and Huguenots. The place was besieged by Mercader, the captain under Richard Coeur-de Lion, who had flayed alive the slayer of his master under the walls of Caylus, although Richard had promised him immunity. Here Mercader met his death, and was buried under a mound that is still shown.
But what makes Trôo especially interesting is that the whole height is like a sponge, perforated with passages giving access to halls, some of which are circular, and into store-chambers; and most of the houses are wholly or in part underground. The caves that are inhabited are staged one above another, some reached by stairs that are little better than ladders, and the subterranean passages leading from them form a labyrinth within the bowels of the hill, and run in superposed storeys. In one that I entered was an oven, with a well at its side. A little further, in a large hall, a circular hole in the floor unfenced gave access by rope or ladder to a lower range of galleries. Any one exploring by the feeble light of a single candle, without a guide, might be precipitated down this abyss without knowing that there was a gaping opening before him. A long ascending passage, with niches in the sides for lamps, leads to where the fibres of the roots of the trees on the mound above have penetrated and are hanging down. It is said that the gallery led on to the castle, but since this latter has been ruined it has been blocked. In the holes whence flints have dropped spiders harbour, that feed on ghostly moths which flit in the pitch darkness, and when caught between the fingers resolve themselves into a trace of silver dust. But on what did these spectral moths feed? A pallid boy of sixteen who guided me about the town told me that he had been born in a cave; that he slept in one every night, and worked underground all day. His large brown eyes could see objects in the dark where all was of inky blackness to me. It is astonishing with what unconcern mites of children romp and ramble through these corridors, where there is danger not only on account of pitfalls, but also of the roof falling in. Where I went, guided by a child of ten, every now and then I was warned— "Prenez garde, c'est écroulé."
The town—it was a town once, but now contains 783 inhabitants only—is partly built at the foot of the bluff, but very few houses are without excavated chambers, store-places or stables. The café looks ordinary enough, but enter, and you find yourself in a dungeon. There is but one street—La Grande Rue—and that has space and landscape on one side, and houses built against and into the rock on the other. A notice at the entrance to the street warns that no heavy traffic, not much above the weight of a perambulator, is permitted to pass along it, for the roadway runs over the tops of houses. A waggon might crash through into the chamber of a bedridden beldame, and a motor be precipitated downwards to salt the soup of a wife stirring it for her husband's supper. At Trôo chimneys bristle everywhere, making the hill resemble a pin-cushion or a piece of larded veal. There are in the depth of the hill wells, and to these mothers fearlessly despatch their children to fill a pitcher, as often as not without a light.
Many of the cave-dwellings have but a ledge a few feet wide, and perhaps only a dozen or twenty feet long before their doors, and at the extreme edge one may see the children standing, unaffected with giddiness, like a row of swallows, contemplating the visitor. I cannot say how it may be with the lower houses, but those high up are pronouncedly odoriferous; for the inhabitants have no means of disposing of their garbage save by exposing it on their little shelves to be dried up by the sun, or washed down by the rain over the windows and doors of their neighbours beneath.
I wonder how a sanitary officer would tackle the problem of sweetening Trôo. If he attempted to envelop it in a cobweb of socketed drainpipes he would get into a tangle with the chimneys; to carry them underground would not be feasible, as he would have to run them through kitchens, bedrooms and salles-à-manger. But even did he make this cobweb, he could not flush his pipes, as the water is at the bottom of the hill. The ancient Gauls and Britons had a practical and ingenious method of disposing of their refuse. They dug shafts in the chalk, shaped like bottles, and all the rubbish they desired to get rid of was consigned to these, till they were full, when they planted a tree on the top and opened another. Great numbers of these puticuli have been found in France. They have been likewise unearthed on the chalk downs of England. They were used as well for the graves of slaves. Now the good citizens of Trôo cannot employ the pitfalls in their caves for this purpose, or the wells would be contaminated. As it is, those wells are supplied from the rain-water falling on the hill of Trôo and filtering down, ingeniously avoiding the passages and halls. There are, however, some dripping caverns incrusted with stalagmitic deposit. But conceive of the sponge of Trôo acting as a filter through two thousand years and never renovated. Not the most impressive teetotal orator would make me a water drinker were I a citizen of Trôo.