I passed the fields that gave his title to La Peyrouse.  The cold, which with every hundred feet had increased unnoticed, now first disturbed me.  The wind had risen (for I had come to that last stretch of the glacis, over which, from beyond the final height, an eastern wind can blow), and this wind carried I know not what dust of ice, that did not make a perceptible fall, yet in an hour covered my clothes with tiny spangles, and stung upon the face like Highland snow in a gale.  With that wind and that fine, powdery frost went no apparent clouds.  The sky was still clear above me.  Such rare stars as can conquer the full moon shone palely; but round the moon herself bent an evanescent halo, like those one sees over the Channel upon clear nights before a stormy morning.  The spindrift of fine ice had, I think, defined this halo.

How long I climbed through the night I do not know.  The summit was but a slight accident upon a tumbled plain.  The ponds stood thick with ice, the sound of running water had ceased, when the slight downward of the road through a barren moor and past broad undrained films of frozen bog, told me that I was on the further northern slope.  The wind also was now roaring over the platform of the watershed, and great patches of whirling snow lay to the right and left like sand upon the grassy dunes of a coast.

Through all this loneliness and cold I went down, with the great road for a companion.  Majesty and power were imposed by it upon these savage wilds.  The hours uncalculated, and the long arrears of the night, had confused my attention; the wind, the little arrows of the ice, the absence of ploughlands and of men.  Those standards of measure which (I have said) the Causses so easily disturb would not return to me.  I took mile after mile almost unheeding, numbed with cold, demanding sleep, but ignorant of where might be found the next habitation.

It was in this mood that I noticed on a distant swirl of rocks before me what might have been roofs and walls; but in that haunted country the rocks play such tricks as I have told.  The moonlight also, which seems so much too bright upon a lonely heath, fails one altogether when distinction must be made between distant things, and when men are near.  I did not know that these rocks (or houses) were the high group of Chateauneuf till I came suddenly upon the long and low house which stands below it on the road, and is the highway inn for the mountain town beyond.

I halted for a moment, because no light came from the windows.  Just opposite the house a great tomb marked the fall of some hero.  The wind seemed less violent.  The waters of the marshy plain had gathered.  They were no longer frozen, and a little brook ran by.  As I waited there, hesitating, my fatigue came upon me, and I knocked at their great door.  They opened, and light poured upon the road, and the noise of peasants talking loudly, and the roaring welcome of a fire.  In this way I ended my crossing of these sombre and unrecorded hills.