Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe | Page 9

flints of primeval man, a polished
celt, a scrap of Samian ware, and in a niche at the side sealed up with
stalactite, a tiny earthenware pitcher 2-1/2 inches high, a leaden
spindle-whorl, some shells, and a toy sheep-bell. Here a little
shepherdess during the stormy times, when the Routiers ravaged the
country, had her refuge while she watched her flock of goats, and here
made her doll's house.
The stalactite cavern of Han in the Ardennes is visited yearly by
crowds. You may see highly coloured illustrations of its interior
illumined by Bengal lights in all the Belgian and many of the French
railway stations. What is now a peepshow was in past ages a habitation
and a home. In it the soil in successive layers has revealed objects
belonging to successive periods in the history of mankind. Its floor has
been in fact a Book of the Revelation of the Past, whose seals have
been opened, and it has disclosed page by page the history of humanity,
from the present, read backwards to the beginning.
At the bottom of all the deposits were discovered the remains of the
very earliest inhabitants, with their hearths about which they sat in
nudity and split bones to extract the marrow, trimmed flints, worked
horn, necklaces of pierced wolf and bears' teeth; then potsherds formed
by hand long before the invention of the wheel; higher up were the
arms and utensils of the bronze age, and the weights of nets. Above
these came the remains of the iron age and wheel-turned crocks. A still
higher stratum surrendered a weight of a scale stamped with an effigy
of the crusading king, S. Louis (1226-1270), and finally francs bearing
the profile of a king, the reverse in every moral characteristic of Louis
the Saint--that of Leopold of Congo notoriety.

CHAPTER II
MODERN TROGLODYTES

Herodotus, speaking of the Ligurians, says that they spent the night in
the open air, rarely in huts, but that they usually inhabited caverns.
Every traveller who goes to the Riviera, the old Ligurian shore, knows,
but knows only by a passing glance, the Etang de Berre, that inland sea,
blue as a sapphire, waveless, girt about by white hills, and perhaps he
wonders that Toulon should have been selected as a naval port, when
there was this one, deeper, and excavated by Nature to serve as a
harbour. The rocks of S. Chamas that look down on this peaceful sheet
of water, rarely traversed by a sail, are riddled with caves, still
inhabited, as they were when Herodotus wrote 450 years before the
Christian era.
The following account of an underground town in Palestine is from the
pen of Consul Wetzstein, and describes one in the Hauran. "I visited
old Edrei--the subterranean labyrinthic residence of King Og--on the
east side of the Zanite hills. Two sons of the sheikh of the village-- one
fourteen and the other sixteen years of age--accompanied me. We took
with us a box of matches and two candles. After we had gone down the
slope for some time, we came to a dozen rooms which, at present, are
used as goat stalls and storerooms for straw. The passage became
gradually smaller, until at last we were compelled to lie down flat and
creep along. This extremely difficult and uncomfortable progress lasted
for about eight minutes, when we were obliged to jump down a steep
well, several feet in depth. Here I noticed that the younger of my two
attendants had remained behind, being afraid to follow us; but probably
it was more from fear of the unknown European than of the dark and
winding passages before us.
"We now found ourselves in a broad street, which had dwellings on
both sides, whose height and width left nothing to be desired. The
temperature was mild, the air free from unpleasant odours, and I felt
not the smallest difficulty in breathing. Further along there were several
cross-streets, and my guide called my attention to a hole in the ceiling
for air, like three others which I afterwards saw, now closed from
above. Soon after we came to a market-place, where, for a long
distance, on both sides of the pretty broad street, were numerous shops
in the walls, exactly in the style of the shops seen in Syrian cities. After

a while we turned into a side street, where a great hall, whose roof was
supported by four pillars, attracted my attention. The roof, or ceiling,
was formed of a single slab of jasper, perfectly smooth and of immense
size, in which I was unable to perceive the slightest crack.
"The rooms, for the most part, had no supports. The doors were often
made of a single square stone, and here and there I also noticed fallen
columns.