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Updated: June 5, 2025
Yonder diverging roads both led to fairy land and worlds of marvel the one to Florac, so majestically placed under the colossal shadow of the Causse Mejean and above the lovely valley of the Jonte; the other across the steppe of Sauveterre and by the strange dwellings of the Caussenards to the picturesque little town of St. Eminie, the rapids of the Tarn, and the dolomite city.
Already the last edge of the Causse beyond the valley had disappeared, and already had the great road taken me higher than the buttress which holds up that table-land, when, thinking I had gained the summit, I turned a corner in the way and found a vague roll of rising land before me. Upon this also, under the strong moonlight, I saw the ruin of a mill. Water, therefore, must have risen behind it.
The showers of spring, the torrential rains of autumn, the snows of winter, have filtered to a depth of several thousand feet. We are not within sight of the grand Causse Mejean, nor of the Black Causse, or Causse Noir, and only on the threshold of Sauveterre, yet some idea may be gathered here of what M. E. Reclus calls a 'Jurassic archipelago, once a vast Jurassic island.
According to the local tradition, the peasants of the surrounding country paid a poll-tax for every sheep and ox they possessed so as to raise a levee which should sweep the Causse of these marauders, and it was due to this effort that the band was captured and every member of it hung to the branches of the walnut tree beneath which lies the broad stone.
The hire of the carriage with two good horses was eighty francs forty for the two days' drive thither, and forty for the return. It is a striking journey from Mende to St. Amans-la-Lozere, half-way halting-place between Mende and St. Chely. The region traversed is very solitary, the Causse itself hardly more so, and now, as yesterday, we follow a road wonderfully cut round the mountain-sides.
Then Duchemin committed his second error of judgment, which consisted in thinking to find better and cooler air on the heights of the Causse Larzac, across the river, together with a shorter way to Nant indicated on the pocket-map as a by-road running in a tolerably direct line across the plateau than that which followed the windings of the stream.
Imagine, then, a group of promontories, their area equal to that of Salisbury Plain, Dartmoor and Exmoor combined, with the varying altitudes of the loftiest Devonshire tor and Cumberland hill. Such a comparison may convey some feeble notion of the three Causses just named, two of which belong to the Lozere. The Causse Noir is partly in the Aveyron.
Goats are no longer permitted to browse on the mountain-sides promiscuously, as in former days, and thus slowly, but surely, not only the soil, but the climate and products of these re-wooded districts, will undergo complete transformation. And who can tell? Perhaps the Causse itself will, generations hence, cease to exist, and the Roof of France become a vast flowery garden.
'All this, added to the delightfulness of the autumn day and the horrible Causse of Sauveterre, but just passed, transformed the dreary town and narrow valley of Florac into a delicious retreat. In a note he gives the accepted derivation of Causse from calx, saying that it was of general application, and that the word certainly filled a blank in French nomenclature.
A path ran along at the base of this prodigious wall, from the top of which stretched the arid causse.
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