The sun went down in the west, painting the rocks on the left bank of the Vézère a daffodil yellow, and then slowly a cold, death-like grey stole over the landscape. With the sun the life had gone; and yet, strange to say, no sooner had this dead glaze come over the face of Nature than the human beings woke to activity and began to issue from their houses, cautiously at first, then with greater boldness as the shadows thickened. The men bore their reaping-hooks, their pruning-knives strapped to the end of poles, converting them into formidable weapons. Others had their bills thrust through their leather belts; and every bill and knife was fresh sharpened, explaining the significance of the strange hiss which had been in the air. It had been caused by the grindstones and the files in every house.
Presently the men who had been standing in knots were marshalled into two distinct parties or bands. One, armed with their extemporised halberds and lances, remained in Ste. Soure under Ogier, whereas the other division, laden with sacks, with casks, with loads of faggots, passed over the river, were joined by a contingent from the left bank of the Vézère, and proceeded to ascend the hills. Behind this party, borne by four men, was Rossignol, lying on his bed. His wife desired to follow, and was with difficulty restrained and sent back to take care of her children. Silently, patiently, the men ascended the steep flanks of the hillside, each bearing his burden; even the wounded Rossignol endured the inevitable jerking without a murmur.
A word must here be given to explain the salient character of the country. Originally a vast region in Périgord—the Black Périgord, as it was called from its sombre woods and deep cleft ravines, was one plateau of hard chalk, raised from six hundred and fifty to nine hundred feet above the sea. At some geologic period difficult to define an immense rush of water passed over the plain and tore every rent formed by the upheaval of the chalk into gorge and gully, down which the furious waters poured, scooping out the sides and tearing themselves away. The course taken by the flood is easily recognisable by this fact—that it has left its wash on the tops of the plateau, where to the present day lies a film of caoline, that is to say of feldspathic clay, the produce of the granite ranges to the north and north-east; and this caoline lies in some places in considerable pockets, white as chalk, and only distinguishable from chalk by the experienced eye, and lies in sufficiently important beds to be worked and exported to porcelain factories. Nay, more than this: on the top of these great plateaux of chalk are strewn boulders and pebbles of volcanic production, that were derived unmistakably from the far away Auvergne mountains.
The flood that swirled over the chalk plains not only tore them into islets, and ate out paths through every chink, but also left the surfaces undulating, having washed away what beds were soft and left those which were hard.
These plateaux are more or less untenanted by human beings, because more or less soilless. They are given over to forest or to baldness.
The ravines, the river-valleys, are walled in by precipices with gulfs here and there in their sides where the rock has crumbled away, or caverns have collapsed, and which allow, as lateral combes, access to the riverside. Up such a combe did the peasants now toil, zigzagging, corkscrewing their way, far to the rear of the headland of l'Eglise Guillem, and wholly invisible from it.
The Captain had so far paid attention to the challenge conveyed by the scorched glove as to give the sentinel on the gate-tower warning to be on the alert, but he had neglected to post anyone on the top of the cliff that overhung his eagle nest. He anticipated no danger from that quarter, for his castle was inaccessible thence, unless, what was inconceivable, assailants should descend on him like spiders from above, at the end of ropes.
"Bah!" scoffed the Chieftain; "a boor! What is Del' Peyra but a country clown? I will teach him such a lesson in a day or two as will make him skip. There is not a Seigneur in the land will lend him half-a-dozen horsemen."
There was, however, an incident in the past that had entirely escaped the memory of Guillem, even if he had heard of it.
At the end of the twelfth century, a carpenter, Durand by name, had roused the peasants to free themselves of their oppressors. What the king could not, what the nobles would not do, that they had done. They had assembled in great multitudes, assumed a white linen hood, called themselves "The Brotherhood of Peace," and hoped to initiate an era of tranquillity by massacring without mercy every routier in the land. They had butchered many thousands, had defeated them in pitched battles, but had themselves been quelled by a combination of the nobles when they attempted to interfere with their turbulence.