After some difficulty in working round and over rocks that barred, the passage, I came to a spot where it was impossible to follow the gorge any farther.  The walls narrowed to an opening a few yards wide, where the stream fell in a cascade of some thirty feet.  I took my mid-day meal like a forester in the midst of this beautiful desolation, and then, having found a spot where I could escape from the gorge of the Alzou, I climbed the steep towards the north.

Here there was a blinding glare of sunshine reflected by the naked stones.  Goats looked down at me from the upper rocks near the line of the blue sky.  When I reached the boy who tended them, I asked him the way to the road that I wished to strike upon the plateau.  After staring at me for some time, he screwed up his mouth, and said:  ’Je comprenais pas francais, you.’  You did not apply to me, but to himself, for it means I in the Southern dialect.

Here was a boy unable to speak French, although all children in France are now supposed to be educated in the official language of the republic.  Such cases are uncommon.  In the Haut-Quercy, where patois is the language of everybody, even in the towns, one soon learns the advantage of asking the young for the information that one may need.

I found the road I wanted, and also the spot marked on the map as the Saut de la Pucelle.  It is one of those numerous gouffres to be found in the Quercy, especially in the district of the Dordogne.

Here a stream plunges beneath the surface of the earth to join the subterranean Ouysse, or the Dordogne.  A ravine, sinking rapidly, becomes a deep, dark, and gloomy gully, at the end of which is a wall of rock.  The stream pours down a tunnel-like passage, at the base of the rock, with a melancholy wail.  Where the sides are not too steep they are covered with trees and shrubs.

As I stood amidst the poisonous dog-mercury, under the hanging ivy and the hart’s-tongue ferns, watching the stream glitter on the edge of everlasting darkness, and listening to its death-dirge, I pictured awful shadows issuing from the infernal passage and seizing the terror-stricken ghost of the guilty horseman, of whom I had heard from a local legend.

This legend, as it is commonly told, is briefly as follows:  Centuries ago a virtuous young woman was persecuted by the lord of a neighbouring castle, who was not at all virtuous.  One day, when she was mounted upon a mule, he gave chase to her on horseback.  He was rapidly gaining upon her, and she, in agony of soul, had given herself up for lost, when, by one of those miracles which were frequent in those days, especially in the country of Notre Dame de Roc-Amadour, the mule, by giving a vigorous stamp with one of his hind-legs, kicked a yawning gulf in the earth, which he, however, lightly passed over with his burden, while the wicked pursuer, unable to check his steed in time, perished in the abyss.