Each of the four Causses is a waste; but the Causse of Mende is utterly bereft of men.  Each is a high plateau; but this, I believe, the highest in feet, and certainly in impression.  You stand there as it were upon the summit of a lonely pedestal, with nothing but a rocky edge around you.  Each is dried up; but the Catisse of Mende is without so much as a dew-pan or a well; it is wrinkled, horny, and cauterised under the alternate frost and flame of its fierce open sky, as are the deserts of the moon.  Each of the Causses is silent; but the silence of the Causse of Mende is scorched and frozen into its stones, and is as old as they:  all around, the torrents which have sawn their black canons upon every side of the block frame this silence with their rumble.  Each of the Causses casts up above its plain fantastic heaps of rock consonant to the wild spirit of its isolation; but the Causse of Mende holds a kind of fortress—­a medley so like the ghost of a dead town that, even in full daylight, you expect the footsteps of men; and by night, as you go gently, in fear of waking the sleepers, you tread quite certainly among built houses and spires.  This place the peasants of the canons have called “The Old City”; and no one living will go near it who knows it well.

The Causses have also this peculiar to them:  that the ravines by which each is cut off are steep and sudden.  But the cliffs of the Causse of Mende are walls.  That the chief of these walls may seem the more terrible, it is turned northwards, so that by day and night it is in shadow, and falls sheer.

* * * * *

It was when I had abandoned this desolate wonder (but with its influence strong upon me) that I left the town of Mende, down on the noise of its river, and began to climb the opposing mountain of the Margeride.

It was already evening, though as yet there were no stars.  The air was fresh, because the year was at that season when it is summer in the vineyard plains, but winter in the hills.  A twilight so coloured and translucent as to suggest cold spanned like an Aurora the western mouth of the gully.  Upon my eastward and upward way the full moon, not yet risen, began to throw an uncertain glory over the sky.

This road was made by the French kings when their influence had crept so far south as to control these mountains.  They became despots, and their despotism, which was everywhere magnificent, engraved itself upon these untenanted bare rocks.  They strengthened and fortified the road.  Its grandeur in so empty and impoverished a land was a boast or a threat of their power.  The Republic succeeded the kings, the Armies succeeded the Republic, and every experiment succeeded the victories and the breakdown of the Armies.  The road grew stronger all the while, bridging this desert, and giving pledge that the brain of Paris was able, and more able, to order the whole of the soil.  So then, as I followed it, it seemed to me to bear