I saw this spot under circumstances very favourable to the full reception of its fantastic, mysterious, and gloomy influence.  It was late enough in the afternoon for the feeling of evening and of the coming night to be in the air, especially here, where dark pines stood in the mimic streets and squares like cypresses in a cemetery.  The awful mournfulness of the shadowy groves was deepened by my own solitariness, for although surrounded by frightful shapes that caricatured humanity, mine was the only human form that moved amongst the dumb but fiend-like rocks and the pines, which moaned and whispered like unhappy ghosts.  I was alone in the ‘Devil’s City,’ and perchance with the devil himself.  When a hawk flew over and screamed it was welcome, although there was nothing cheerful in its cry.  There could be no severer trial perhaps to the nerves of a superstitious person than to take a solitary walk by moonlight through Montpellier-le-Vieux.  The sense of the weird and the horrible would give him too many cold shudders for him to enjoy the grandeur and the strangeness of the scene.

The superstitious horror in which this spot has always been held by the peasants—­chiefly shepherds—­of the district, together with the fact that the rustic, uninfluenced from without, never speaks of rocks except in terms of contempt, however extraordinary their forms may be, must be the reason why Montpellier-le-Vieux has only been known of late years to persons interested in such curiosities of nature.  To the geologist it is fascinating ground, as, indeed, is the whole expanse of these causses of Guyenne and Upper Languedoc, so fissured and honeycombed—­a region of gorges and caverns, of subterranean lakes and rivers, of bottomless pits and mysterious streams.

It is said that the dolomitic city owes its name, Montpellier-le-Vieux, to the shepherds of Lower Languedoc, who from time immemorial have brought their flocks in summer to pasture upon these highlands.  In their dialect they call Montpellier, which is to them what Paris is to the peasants of the Brie, ’Lou Clapas’—­literally, a heap of stones.  On seeing rocks covering several acres, and looking like the ruins of a great city of the past, they could think of no better name for it than ‘Lou Clapas Biel,’ or ‘old heap of stones.’  This turned into French becomes Montpellier-le-Vieux.

The ‘Devil’s City’ can be recommended to the botanist, who need not fear that the flowers he will find there will wither at his touch like those gathered for Marguerite by her guileless lover.  The ever-crumbling dolomite has formed a soil very favourable to a varied flora.  As I had, however, to reach the gorge of the Tarn before nightfall, and it was still far off, I only took away two souvenirs of the diabolic garden—­a white scabious and a bit of rock-potentil.