lost, and the twilight dwelt with greenness and dampness.  At the bottom the Dourdou ran swiftly over its pebbly bed.  After following it a little distance I found myself between towering walls of Jurassic rock, vertical towards the summit, capped on each side by a long row of houses.  There was also a church, likewise on the edge of the precipice.  This was Bozouls—­a place scarcely known beyond a small district of the Aveyron, but one of the most curious in France.  The traveller, when he reaches the gorge, after crossing a somewhat monotonous country, is quite unprepared for such a startling revelation of the sentiment of human fellowship in the midst of the savagery of nature.  Why did men build houses in rows on the brink of these frightful precipices?  It appears to have been all done for the sake of the artist and the lover of the picturesque.  And yet Bozouls grew to be a village in an age when men of work and action only knew two kinds of enthusiasm—­war and religion.  Either a castle or a religious foundation must have been the beginning of this community.  There are no remains of a fortress, but the church is very old, and its elaborate architecture suggests that it was at one time attached to a monastic establishment.  After crossing the stream I climbed to this church by a path that wound about the rocks, and found it an exceedingly interesting example of the Southern Romanesque.  The portal opens into a narthex, where there is a very primitive font like a low square trough.  The nave entrance has two columns on each side supporting archivolts, and upon the capitals of these columns are carved figures of the quaintest Romanesque character, illustrating Biblical subjects.  The nave has an aisle on each side scarcely four feet wide, and most of the separating columns are out of the perpendicular.  The capitals here are wrought with acanthus-leaves or little figures.  The sanctuary and apse are in the style of Auvergne, with this peculiarity, that the capitals of the slender columns are singularly massive, and bear only the mere outline of the acanthus-leaf for ornament.

The long street of the village, white and sunbaked, running within a few yards of the precipice, was almost as deserted as the church.  But for a Sister who stood by the convent gate like a statue of Eternal Silence, and a man who was killing a wretched calf in the middle of the road, I might have asked myself if this fantastic Bozouls was not some spectral village, reproducing the past in all except the living beings who had gone down into their graves.  When I recrossed the Dourdou, the light was several tones lower than it was when I first descended to the bottom of the ravine, and the vegetation was of a deeper and sadder green.  And the stream rushed onward with a low wail, and a distressful cry, as of a soul passing down the Dark Valley and not yet free from the panic of death.