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It had opened the great feast of colour that brings the year to its gray, sad close. But the sky was brilliantly blue when I left St. Pierre-Toirac. The next village was Laroque-Toirac. The houses were clustered near the foot of an escarped hill, where thinly-scattered pines relieved the glare of the naked limestone.
A little beyond where the double line of rocks ended, I saw a round tower of unusual height with machicolations and embattlements, in apparently perfect preservation, rising from the midst of what once must have been a fortress of great strength, which on the side of the river had no need of a moat, for it was there defended by the escarped rock, to the edge of which the outer ramparts were carried.
The stations successively occupied were situated near watercourses or copious springs, and, where possible, on isolated escarped plateaux surrounded by ravines. Hastedon, about a mile and a quarter from Namur, is one of the best examples we can quote. The camp, first made out in 1865, formed a long square, covering some thirteen hectares, or about thirty-two acres.
The map showed no village within five or six leagues of Agreda, and it was impossible that the regiments could be quartered in the mountains, far from any inhabited place. So I kept on my guard, and before going any farther reconnoitred the position. Agreda stands in a rather broad valley. It is built at the foot of a lofty hill, deeply escarped on both sides.
The inclined red sandstone stands in a ridge more than 75 miles in length, with an escarped face presented to the west and a face of inclined rock to the east. The western side is carved into beautiful alcoves and is buttressed with a magnificent talus, and the red sandstone stands in fractured columns of giant size and marvelous beauty.
The valley became again so narrow that the road was cut into the escarped side of the cliff, for the river ran close under it. A woman with bare legs and bare chest really half naked trudged by with a heavy bundle of maize upon her head, followed by a couple of red-haired children, their perfectly-shaped little legs browned by the sun and powdered with dust.
Martial, the first Bishop of Limoges, and at a later period Zaccheus, hearing of a rocky solitude in Aquitania, a little to the south of the Dordogne, abandoned to wild beasts, proceeded thither, and chose a cavern in the escarped side of a cliff for his hermitage.
It was hard to tear one's self away from such a wonderful structure as this, the most striking feature of its kind on the whole river. Farther on, escarped banks, consisting of boulders and pebbles imbedded in tenacious clay, rose to a great height, their tops clothed with rich moss, and wooded with a close growth of pine, the hollows being full of delicious raspberries, now dead ripe.
The bazaar-master would not let us tarry as long as we could have wished, for he was anxious for us to arrive before the midday heat at a rocky cave in the 'mountain of mist, in the centre of the island. We dismounted from our camels, and proceeded to examine Jebel Dukhan, an escarped mass of limestone rocks with rugged outline and deep caves.
Unrelieved by the green foliage of bush or palmtree, it rose from the bare, stony, sandy soil, with its wooden palisades, its rampart, its escarped walls, and its lookout, with broad, flat roof, swarming with armed warriors.
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