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There was nothing for it, then, but a twenty-mile walk due west across the Causse Larzac by night to Tournemire, where one could get trains in any one of four directions. Constraint marked that last dinner with Eve de Montalais. They were alone. Louise was dining by the bedside of Madame de Sévénié, who remained indisposed, a shade more so than yesterday.
On all sides just outside the town are vineyards, now golden in hue, peach-trees and almond groves, whilst above and far around the gray walls of the Causse shut out all but the meridian rays of the sun. As I write this, at six o'clock on the evening of the 5th of September, the last crimson flush of the setting sun lingers on the sombre, grandiose Causse Mejean.
The Tarn, its sportive mood over, the portals of its magnificent gorge closed, now flows amid sunny hills, quitting the wild Lozere for the more placid Aveyron; immediately around us are little farmsteads, water-mills, and gardens, whilst opposite, like a black thundercloud threatening a summer day, the Causse Noir looms in the distance!
For some hours I had been walking chiefly over the stony causse, searching for a so-called castle that was not worth the trouble of finding. I had seen spurge and juniper, and ribs of rock rising everywhere above the short turf, until I grew weary of the sameness.
Penetrating the upper valley of the Cernon, the railroad skirted the southern boundary of the Causse Larzac, then laboriously climbed up to the plateau itself; and Lanyard roused to the fact that he was approaching familiar ground from a new angle: the next stop would be Combe-Redonde. The day was still in its infancy when that halt was made.
It was a burning afternoon of late summer when I walked across the stony hills which separate the valley of the Lot from that of its tributary the Célé, between Capdenac and Figeac. I did not take the road, but climbed the cliffs, trusting myself to chance and the torrid causse. I wished that I had not done so when it was too late to act differently.
We lost the spirit-lamp and the best dinner knife, and, what was far more precious to me, the most companionable of sticks one that had walked with me hundreds of miles. It was once a young oak growing upon the stony causse. A friendly baker hardened it over the embers of his oven, and a cunning blacksmith put a beautiful spike at one end of it, which became the terror of dogs throughout Guyenne.
As we wind slowly upwards we see an old, bent woman filling a sack with the flowery spikes for sale. Thus the Causse, not in one sense but many, is the bread-winner of the people.
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