But as I ascended the valley the breadth of cultivated land grew narrower, and the habitations fewer.  On either side the cliffs rose higher, and the walls of Jurassic rock, above the brashy steeps, more towering, precipitous, and fantastic.  Where vegetable life could draw sustenance from crumbling, stones stretched a veritable forest of box.  Now, in a narrow gorge, the Dourbie frolicked about the heaps of pebbles it had thrown up in its winter fury.  Strong wires, attached to high rocks, crossed the gorge and the stream, and were made fast to the side of the road.  Bundles of newly-cut box at the lower end showed the use to which these wires were put.  Far aloft upon the heated rocks women were cutting down the tough shrub for firewood or manure, for it is put to both uses.  It serves a very useful purpose when buried in dense layers between the vine rows.  When I looked aloft, and saw those petticoated beings toiling in the terrible heat, I thought it a pity that there was no society to protect women as well as horses from being cruelly overworked.  Let social reformers ponder this truth:  The more the man is encouraged to shirk work, the more the woman will have to toil to make up for wasted time.  As it is, women everywhere, except perhaps in England, work harder than men, as far as I can speak from observation.

I was on my way to Vieux Montpellier—­the ’Devil’s City’—­and already the scenery began to take the character to be expected of it in such a neighbourhood.  It seemed as though the demon builder of the fantastic town, sporting with man’s architectural ideals before his appearance on the earth, had hewn the red and yellow rocks above the Dourbie into the ironic semblance of feudal towers and heaven-pointing spires.

The highest limestone rocks in this region, those which rise from the plateau or causse and strike the imagination by the strangeness of their forms, are dolomite; in the gorges they approach the character of lias towards the base, and not unfrequently contain lumps of pure silex embedded in their mass.  The redness which they so often show, and which, alternating with yellow, white, or gray, adds to the grandeur of their rugged outlines, is due to the iron which the rock contains.

A young gipsy-woman, carrying a child upon her shoulders, and holding on to a dusky little leg on each side of her neck, followed in the wake of an old caravan drawn by a mule of resigned countenance—­a beast that seemed to have made a vow never to hurry again, and to let the flies do their worst.  She vanished upon the winding road, and presently I saw another wayfarer seated on the bank beside the stream, binding up a bleeding foot under the trailing traveller’s joy.  Before reaching the village of La Roque-Sainte-Marguerite, I passed a genuine rock dwelling.  A natural cavern, some twenty or thirty feet above the level of the road, had been walled up to make a house.  It had its door and windows like any other dwelling, and some convenient crevice in the rock had probably been used for a chimney.