The storm having spent its fury, the gendarmes and the poacher left, and I was again alone.  Although it was not yet ten o’clock, there was the quietude of midnight around me.  The village was asleep, and I should have thought Nature asleep had I not heard the harsh scream of an owl as I entered my bedroom and threw open the window.  The clouds had broken up, and the moon was shining above the great rocks at the foot of which I knew that the owl was flying silently and searching with glowing eyes for the happy, unsuspecting mouse or young hare amidst the thyme and bracken.  Can Nature never rest?  Is there no peace without bloodshed under the sun and moon, no respite from ravin even when the night is hooded like a dead monk?

I turned from the moonlit clouds, the rushing dark water, the long white reach of pebbles, and made a little journey round my room.  The people who owned this inn may not have been very prosperous, but they were evidently rich in faith.  The walls were ornamented with rosaries yards long—­probably from Lourdes—­and religious pictures.  There were also statuettes of sacred figures, a large crucifix, and close by the bed a holy-water stoup.  The inhabitants of the Lozere, like those of the Aveyron, are not only believing, they are zealous, and in their homes they surround themselves with the emblems of their faith.  These are the only works of art which the villagers possess—­almost their only books.

At seven the next morning I had left Les Vignes, and was making my way up the gorge, whose rocky walls drew closer together, became more stupendous, fantastic, and savagely naked.  All cultivation disappeared.  A rock of immense size, pointing to the sky, but leaning towards the gorge, soon attracted my notice, as it must that of any traveller who comes within view of it.  This monolith, over 200 feet in height, has its base about 500 feet above the stream, but it is only a jutting fragment of the prodigious wall.  It has received the name of L’Aiguille, from its needle-like shape.  Below this, and partly in the bed of the stream, is another prodigious block of dolomite called La Sourde, and here the channel is so obstructed by the number and size of the rocks which have fallen into it, that the river has forced a passage beneath them, and does not reappear until the obstacle is passed.  But although the water vanishes, its muffled groan arises from mysterious depths.  This, together with the monstrous masses of dolomite, wrinkled, white and honeycombed, the narrowness and gloomy depth of the gorge, the fury of the water as it descends amongst the blocks to leap into its gulf, makes the imagination ask if something supernatural has not happened here.  But the geologist says that this chaos of tumbled-down rocks is simply the result of a ‘fault’ in the stratification, and that, the foundations having given way, the masses of dolomite fell where they now lie.