in slices, were spread in the sun to dry.  As I continued my way down the valley I met several women and girls returning from the chestnut woods on the hillsides carrying baskets of these cepes on their heads.  Although I hoped to sleep that night at Espalion, I soon left the direct road and struck off across country to the south-west in order to take in the village of Bozouls, a place that some soldier whom I had met told me was like Constantine in Algeria.  I therefore left the valley of the Lot, and proceeded to cross the hills and tablelands which separated me from the gorge of its tributary, the Dourdou.

In taking by-paths to reach the causse, I passed over hillocks of chocolate-coloured marl mixed with broken schist and flints:  here the broom and juniper, the heather and bracken, flourished.  At length I felt the fresh breeze and drank the invigorating air of the limestone plateau.  Descending the hill beyond, on the road to Rodez, I passed a very strange-looking spot where huge flat blocks of bare gneiss, laid together as though giants of the Titanic age had here been trying to pave the world, sloped with extraordinary regularity towards the highway.  And these prodigious slabs of gneiss now lay amidst schistous marl and calcareous rock.

Farther down in the valley was a small village of which the houses were dwarfed by a gloomy strong hold, apparently of the fifteenth century, whose four high and massive towers, occupying the angles of a small quadrilateral, gave it the appearance of a vast donjon.  At a small inn kept by a blacksmith I was able to get a meal and the rest that was now needed.  The blacksmith’s wife, a pleasant young woman; who seemed much amused at the sight of a being from the outer and, to her, half-fabulous world, drew part of a duck out of the grease in which it had been preserved, and gave me this with rice for my lunch.  During the repast I was not a little worried by the questions of the blacksmith and some other village worthies who were drinking coffee in the small room that had to do for everybody, and who had so placed themselves that they could watch me at their ease.  Such a strange bird as myself did not drop into their midst every day.  They were not unfriendly, but their curiosity was troublesome, and I perceived that nothing that I might have said would have removed the impression from their minds that I was a mysterious character.

The country beyond this village was not unpleasant to the eye, with its vineyards on the slopes and its green pasturage in the valleys, but the hours went by drearily as I tramped upon the long road.  I felt solitary, and was not in the mood to be interested easily; nevertheless, I lingered on the wayside awhile before a remarkable relic of the past:  a rectangular machicolated tower of great height and strength rising out of a dark grove of trees.  The afternoon was drawing towards evening, when I descended suddenly into a deep and narrow ravine where the sunshine was