We have now reached the brink of the pit, which is not bottomless, but looks so until the eye faintly distinguishes something solid at a depth that has been measured at 175 feet.  The opening is almost circular, with a diameter at the orifice of 116 feet.  This prodigious well, sunk in successive layers of secondary rock, looks as if it had been regularly quarried; but men could never have had the motive for giving themselves so much trouble.  Did the rock fall in here?  No explanation is satisfactory.  How it fills one with awe to look into the depth while lying upon a slab of stone that stretches some distance beyond the side of the pit!  Bushes with twisted and fantastic arms, growing, they or their ancestors, from time immemorial in the clefts of the rock, reach towards the light, and the elfish hart’s-tongue fern, itself half in darkness, points down with frond that never moves in that eternal stillness which all the winds of heaven pass over, to a thicker darkness whence comes the everlasting wail and groan of hidden water.

This horrid gulf being in the open plain, with not even a foot of rough wall round it as a protection for the unwary, I asked the old man if people had never fallen into it.

‘Yes,’ he answered, ’but only those who have been pushed by evil spirits.’

He meant that only self-murderers had fallen into the Puit de Padirac.  ‘Pushed by evil spirits.’  Perhaps this is the best of all explanations of the suicidal impulse.  Strong thoughts are sometimes hidden under the simplicity of rustic expression.  He told me the story of a man who, having gone by night to throw himself into the Puit de Padirac, came in contact with a tough old bush during his descent which held him up.  By this time the would-be suicide disliked the feeling of falling so much that, so far from trying to free himself from the bush and begin again, he held on to it with all his might and shrieked for help.  But as people who are not pushed by evil spirits give the Puit de Padirac a wide berth after sundown, the wretched man’s cries were lost in the darkness.  The next morning the shepherd children, as they led their flocks over the plain, heard a strange noise coming from the pit, but their horror was stronger than their curiosity, and they showed their sheep how to run.  They went home and told their fathers what they had heard, and at length some persons were bold enough to look down the hole, from which the dismal sound the children had noticed continued to rise.  Thus the cause of the mysterious noise was discovered, and the man was hauled up with a rope.  He never allowed the evil spirits to push him into the Puit de Padirac again.