Now came sunny banks bright with the common flowers that deck most of the waysides of Europe.  Bedstraw galium and field scabious, ox-eyes and knapweed, bladder-campions and ragged robins, mallows and crane’s-bill—­all the flowers of the English banks seemed to be there.  Where the bare rock showed itself, yellow sedum spread its gold, and in the little clefts stood stalks of cotyledon, now turning brown.  At the base of the rocks, where there was still some moisture, were the blue flowers of the brooklime veronica, and the brighter blue of the forget-me-not.  Having passed a village, I met the Tarn again.  Here the beauty of the rushing water, and all that was pictured upon it, tempted me to sit down upon a bank; but I had no sooner chosen the spot than I changed my intention.  A red viper was curled up there, and sleeping so comfortably that it really seemed unkind to wake it with a blow across all its rings.  When I thought, however, of the little consideration it would have shown me had I sat upon it, I added it without compunction to the number of aspics I had already slain.

My mind was taken off the contemplation of this good or evil deed by a scene that seemed to contain as much of the picturesque as the eye could seize and the mind dwell upon, without being bewildered and fatigued.  I had turned the bend of the wooded gorge, and, looking up the river, saw what resembled a dyke of basalt stretching sheer across the stream, with a ruined castle on a bare and apparently inaccessible pinnacle, another ruin on the opposite end of the ridge, and, between the two, a little church on the brink of a precipice.  Houses were clustered at the foot of the rocks by the blue water.

This was Ambialet, so called from the extraordinary loop which the Tarn forms here in consequence of the mass of schistous rock which obstructs its direct channel.  After flowing about two miles round a high promontory, where dark crags jut above the dark woods, the stream returns almost to the spot from which it was compelled to deviate, and the lower water is only separated from the upper by a few yards of rock.  There are several similar phenomena in France, but there is none so remarkable as that at Ambialet.

Although nothing is now to be seen of its defensive works, except the ruined castle upon the high rock, Ambialet was one of the strongest places in the Albigeois.  Now a small and poor village, it was in the Middle Ages an important burg, with its consuls, its council of prud’hommes, and its court of justice.  It became a fief of the viscounts of Beziers, and was thus drawn into the great religious conflict of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Viscount of Beziers having espoused the cause of Count Raymond of Toulouse.  An army of Crusaders, which had been raised to crush the Albigenses, having Simon de Montfort at its head, appeared before Ambialet in 1209, and, although the burghers were quite capable of withstanding a long siege, they were so much impressed