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Updated: June 9, 2025
A little beyond this village a peasant woman, whom I met picking up walnuts from the road that was strewn with them, lifted her wide-brimmed straw hat to me as I passed. This was indeed polite. I now left the road, and followed a lane by the stream that flows out of the gouffre.
"I believe you'd pretend to be delighted if I told you we had plenty of time, and mustn't miss going," said he. "But don't be frightened; this isn't a Gouffre de Padirac day, though it really is a great pity to pass it by. What do you say to lunch instead?" And we rolled through a magnificent mediæval gateway into the ancient and unpronounceable town of Marvejols.
In the hollow under the dark cliffs was a little lake or pool forty or fifty yards from shore to shore. The water showed no sign of trouble save where it overflowed its basin on the western side, and formed the river that I had been keeping in sight for hours. The pool filled the Gouffre de St. Sauveur.
After leaving the pool now very sombre in the shadow of the wooded hill I crossed a ridge separating me from the Gouffre de Cabouy, out of which flows a tributary of the Ouysse. Thence I reached the deep and singularly savage gorge of the Alzou, which brought me to Roc-Amadour, when the after-light of sunset was lingering rosily upon the naked crags.
In the interior of the church is a fifteenth-century group of seven figures, representing the scene of the Holy Sepulchre; an admirable composition, showing to what a high degree of excellence French sculpture had attained even at the dawn of the Renaissance. Upon the stony plateau above Roc-Amadour is a cavern well known in the district as the Gouffre de Révaillon.
This sound reminded us that the sun would soon drop behind the hill, and that the Pomoyssin, to which we intended to pay a visit on our way home, was not a spot that gained attractiveness from the shades of night. I had heard the country-people speak of it as a peculiarly horrible and treacherous gouffre, and its name, which means 'unwholesome hole, corresponds to the local opinion of it.
And what but uncertainty, doubt, the voice of reason, was that abyss, that terrible gouffre, before which Pascal trembled? And it was that which led him to pronounce his terrible sentence, il faut s'abêtir need is that we become fools! All Jansenism, the Catholic adaptation of Calvinism, bears the same impress.
If they do, I should think the most likely places would be the wild gorse and heath-covered valleys leading down to the Gouffre and Petit Bo Bay, as there is plenty of water and soft feeding places in both; I have never seen one there, however, though I have several times walked both those valleys and the intervening land during the breeding-season, and I should think all these places were much too much overrun with picnic parties and excursionists to allow of Snipes breeding there now.
Less than an eighth of a league above there are two large rocks, perpendicular, and so near that they leave only space sufficient for a ship cleverly to pass. Gouffre. There is a depth of eighteen fathoms of water here. I think that I am the only one who has ever sounded at this place. The falls are no sooner passed than the river suddenly expands to nearly half a league.
This legend is to the effect that the conventual building was once inhabited by women who ate children, and that a certain mother, whose baby they had kidnapped and eaten, cursed them so heartily and to such purpose that the gouffre was formed, and their convent, or the greater part of it, was supernaturally carried down the hill and plunged into the bottomless water.
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