The hostess was a good and sprightly cook, and I watched her proceedings with a keen interest as I sat upon one of the seats in the chimney.  Having hitched the pot that contained the soup upon the hook at the end of the sooty chain, she raked out embers from the centre of the burning mass, and made separate fires with them upon the hearth.  Others she carried to a range of small charcoal fireplaces on one side of the spacious kitchen, and very soon afterwards she had sauce-pans and a frying-pan and a gridiron all murmuring or hissing together.  There was too much garlic in her cookery, but I had also grown used to that.  Although the phylloxera had blighted nearly all the vineyards in this region, the landlord here was able to put upon the table some wine, grown upon his own hillside, not unworthy of the ancient reputation of the Cahors district for its vintage.

After dinner I returned to the chimney-corner which was decidedly the most comfortable place in the inn, in spite of the smoke and the close neighbourhood of soot, and set about obtaining information from the aubergiste and his cronies who had dropped in concerning the exact whereabouts of a Celtic town whose ruined fortifications, I knew, were to be found somewhere among the barren hills to the west of Vers.  It was some time before I could make these men understand what I was really in search of, and when they understood they seemed to think I was a little mad, until the idea struck them that I might be a dealer in antiquities, hoping to pick up certain odds and ends that would repay me for the trouble of walking to such a desolate and uninteresting spot.

At length I gathered that the site of the ancient oppidum was at Murcens, a hamlet upon a hill, half a day’s walk away to the west, and that the best way to reach it was to follow the valley of the Vers.  At about seven o’clock the next morning I started, and, having been warned that I should find no inn where I could get a meal, I took with me some provisions.

It was a gray, dreary morning, and at that hour the weather could not have been more November-like had I been upon the banks of the Severn or the Trent, instead of being by one of the rivers of our ancient southern province of Guyenne.

As I turned westward up the valley of the Vers, I passed under detached fragments of the aqueduct built by the Romans to carry water to Cahors.  By taking advantage of the rocks which hem in the narrow valley, they saved themselves the trouble of raising arches to the desired height to ensure the flow.  The conduit is carried along upon a ledge hewn out of the natural wall, projecting masses of rock being cut through with the hammer and chisel.  The masonry is of undressed stone, but so firmly cemented that it is scarcely less solid than the rock itself.