After leaving Cajarc in the morning I was soon alone with Nature on the right bank of the river.  Autumn was there in a gusty mood, blowing yellow leaves down from the hills upon the water and driving them towards the sea over the rippled, gray surface lit up with cold, steel-like gleams of sunshine struggling through the vapour.  The wilderness of herbs and under-shrubs along the banks was no longer aflame with flowers.  Dead thistles, whose feathered seeds had drifted far away upon the wind to found new colonies, and a multitude of withered spikes and racemes, told the old story of the summer’s life passing into the death or sleep of winter.  Yet the river-banks were not without flowers.  A rose, very like the ‘monthly rose’ of English gardens, was still blooming there, together with hawkweed, wild reseda, and a mint with lilac-coloured blossoms which one sees on every bit of waste ground throughout this region.

A rock rising from the river’s bank carried the ruin of an ancient chapel.  Only the apse was left.  It contained one narrow deeply-splayed Romanesque window, and a piscina where the priest washed his hands.  The altar-stone lay upon the ground where the altar must have stood, and behind it a rough wooden cross had been piously raised to remind the passer-by that the spot was hallowed.

The road now ran under high red rocks or steep stony slopes, where, on neglected terraces overgrown with weeds, the dead or dying vines repeated the monotonous tale of the phylloxera.

I passed through the village of Lannagol, mostly built upon rocks overlooking the bed of its dried-up stream, and was soon again under the desert hills, where the fiery maple flashed amid the sombre foliage of the box.  The next village or hamlet was a very curious one.  Rows of little houses, some of them mere huts, were built against the side of the rock under the shelter of huge masses of oolite or lias projecting like the stories of mediaeval dwellings.  People climbed to their habitations, like goats, up very steep paths winding amongst the rocks.  The overleaning walls were blackened to a great height by the smoke from the chimneys.

It was dusk when I crossed a bridge leading to the village of Cenevieres, where I intended to pass the night.  There was a very fair inn here, less picturesque than many of the auberges of the country, but cleaner, perhaps, for this reason.  The aubergiste was suspicious of me at first, as he afterwards admitted, for like others he had turned over in his mind the question, Is he a German spy?  Judging from my own experience in this part of France, I should say that a German tourist would not spend a very happy holiday here.  The sentiment of the Parisians towards the Teuton is fraternal love compared to that of the Southern French.  These people proved themselves to be thorough going haters in the religious wars, and the old character is still strong in them.