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We can see their vine-trellised balconies and little gardens, and sometimes the pet cats run down to the water's edge to look at us. And all this time, from the beginning of our journey to the end, the river winds amid the great walls of the Causses to our left the spurs of the Causse Mejean; to our right those of Sauveterre.
Joanne now devotes an entire, volume to the Cevennes, and states in his preface that the new issue of the 'General Itinerary of France' contains an account of a region very little known to French tourists, yet well worth visiting, the region comprising the Causses, the Canon du Tarn and Montpellier-le-Vieux.
Often on the causses, where loose stones are inseparably mixed with the soil, the entire plough is of wood. We passed through the village of Marcillac, near the head of one of the valleys. The soil was much more fertile here, and a maize field was a sign that the climate was warmer. There were, moreover, pleasant gardens with fruit-trees and flowers.
Hereabouts the barren, stony, wilderness-like country betokens the region of the Causses. We are all this time winding round the rampart like walls of the great Causse de Larzac, which stretches from Le Vigan to Millau, rising to a height of 2,624 feet above the sea-level, and covering an area of nearly a hundred square miles. This Causse affords some interesting facts for evolutionists.
The existence of a chateau on the borders of a veritable desert need not surprise us. The entire department of the Lozere was devastated by religious and seigneurial wars, and although the Causses themselves were not invaded, offering as they did no temptation to the thirsters after blood and spoil, the feudal freebooters had their strongholds near.
Their story is of more ancient date than any of recorded time. The very Causses, stony, arid wildernesses, so unpropitious to human needs, so scantily populated in our own day, were evidently inhabited from remote antiquity. Not only have dolmens, tumuli, and bronze implements been found hereabouts in abundance, but also cave-dwellings and traces of the Age of Stone.
Unfortunately for the ancient custom, churches have frequently been struck by lightning at the time when the bells were being rung, and science is positive in declaring that the electric fluid is attracted by an artificial commotion of the atmosphere. On the causses of the Quercy, the peasants place bottles of holy water on the tops of their chimneys as a protection against lightning.
One thing is quite certain: The four thousand and odd wild, sheepskin- wearing inhabitants of the entire region of the Causses must erelong be nationalized like the Breton and the Morvandial, undergo a gradual and complete transformation. Travellers of another generation on this road will not be stared at by the fierce-looking, picturesque figures we now pass in the precincts of Sauveterre.
Prehistoric man was indeed more familiar with the geography of these regions than even learned Frenchmen of to-day. When, as I have before mentioned, in 1879 a member of the French Alpine Club asked the well- known geographer Joanne if he could give him any information as to the Causses and the Canon du Tarn, his reply was the laconic: 'None whatever. Go and see.
In Brittany and in Marne flints foreign to these granite districts are numerous; and Dr. Prunieres tells us that similar discoveries were made under the megalithic monuments of France, and that neither in the eroded limestone districts of Lozere, known locally as LES CAUSSES, nor under the dolmens of Haute-Vienne, were found any but implements made of rock not native to the country.
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