The valley now widened out, and a village came into view, together with a ruined castle upon a mamelon, that rose like a volcanic cone from the plain.  On the castle wall an immense wooden cross had been set, showing against the sky with an effect truly grand.  The village was Vers, and the castle, which was built by the English, is called the Chateau de Bears.

At Vers I was met by an old man, who insisted upon showing me another cave fortified by the English, after taking the precaution of telling me that he would accept nothing for his trouble.  He was long and lean and brown, and had a ‘glittering, eye’ like the Ancient Mariner, but his conversation was much more cheerful than that of the hero who shot the albatross.  He was a born actor, for he accompanied his talk with magnificent dramatic gestures, and, after letting his voice drop suddenly to a tragic whisper, he would raise it again to the most gusty and blustering heights of sound.  He was a strong type of the Southerner, inasmuch as all this amazing vehemence and gesticulation was quite uncalled for.  It is remarkable, however, how much may be done by mere action and intonation to impress the listener with the idea that the speaker must be a person of uncommon intelligence.  But when half a dozen such talkers are engaged in discussion upon some trivial topic, and each employs the same means to enforce his views upon the rest (this occurs nightly in the cafes at Cahors), the Northerner is inclined to think that they are all mad.  The wiry old man explained to me, in order to account for the ease and agility with which, notwithstanding his years and his awkward sabots, he stepped from block to block in the ascent, that he had been all his life a rock-blaster.  At length we reached the cavern.  The English, who used it as a refuge, had shown much sagacity in its selection, for the enemy that attacked them there would have been compelled to climb up the face of the rock beneath by following zigzag ledges, while the besieged behind their loopholed wall were raining arrows and bolts upon them.  The wall, as it exists, is twenty or thirty feet high.  There is a doorway protected by an inner wall.  To reach the upper loopholes and parapet the men mounted upon oak beams resting crosswise between the masonry and the rock.  One massive beam, crumbling and worm-eaten, as may be supposed after the centuries that it has been there, may still be seen serving as the lintel of a window.

I made a rather long stay at Vers, in order to visit the site of a Celtic town on the causse; but I did not start upon this journey until the next day.  The inn where I put up was much more comfortable than some others which I had chosen for night-quarters while wandering down the valley.  To anybody fresh from London it would have seemed primitive indeed, with its broad hearth and massive iron dogs, its enormous fire built with logs and the roots of trees, and its cosy chimney-corners, where the sitters’ heads were from time to time enveloped with wreathing smoke; but I had grown so accustomed to such sights that this hostelry seemed to contain all the blessings and commodities of an advanced state of civilization.