Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe | Page 4

MONOLITHIC CHURCH (Photo by DELAGE) ROCAMADOUR (Photo by BAUDEL, S. CéRé) AUBETERRE, CHARENTE (Photo by DELAGE) SUBTERRANEAN CHURCH, AUBETERRE (_Photo by_DELAGE) DOLMEN CHAPEL OF THE SEVEN SLEEPERS PLAN OF DOLMEN CHAPEL NEAR PLOUARET PLAN OF CHAPEL OF S. AMADOU SCULPTURE IN ROYSTON CAVE (Photo by R.H. CLARK, ROYSTON) SCULPTURE IN ROYSTON CAVE (Photo by R.H. CLARK, ROYSTON) ROYSTON CAVE (Photo by R. H. CLARK, ROYSTON) CHATEAU DE RIGNAC LE TROU BOUROU ROCK BAPTISTERY OF ST. MARTIN TRIUMPH OF CHRIST OVER DEATH (Photo by LACROIX) CAVES OF LIGUGé NESS CLIFF KYNASTON'S CAVE

CLIFF CASTLES AND CAVE DWELLINGS OF EUROPE

CHAPTER I
PREHISTORIC CAVE-DWELLERS
In a vastly remote past, and for a vastly extended period, the mighty deep rolled over the surface of a world inform and void, depositing a sediment of its used up living tenants, the microscopic cases of foraminifer?, sponges, sea-urchins, husks, and the cast limbs of crustaceans. The descending shells of the diatoms like a subaqueous snow gradually buried the larger dejections. This went on till the sediment had attained a thickness of over one thousand feet. Then the earth beneath, heaved and tossed in sleep, cast off its white featherbed, projected it on high to become the chalk formation that occupies so distinct and extended a position in the geological structure of the globe. The chalk may be traced from the North of Ireland to the Crimea, a distance of about 11,140 geographical miles, and, in an opposite direction, from the South of Sweden to Bordeaux, a distance of 840 geographical miles.
It extends as a broad belt across France, like the sash of a Republican mayor. You may travel from Calais to Vend?me, to Tours, Poitiers, Angoulême, to the Gironde, and you are on chalk the whole way. It stretches through Central Europe, and is seen in North Africa. From the Crimea it reaches into Syria, and may be traced as far as the shores of the sea of Aral in Central Asia.
The chalk is not throughout alike in texture; hard beds alternate with others that are soft--beds with flints like plum-cake, and beds without, like white Spanish bread.
We are accustomed in England to chalk in rolling downs, except where bitten into by the sea, but elsewhere it is riven, and presents cliffs, and these cliffs are not at all like that of Shakespeare at Dover, but overhang, where hard beds alternate with others that are friable. These latter are corroded by the weather, and leave the more compact projecting like the roofs of penthouses. They are furrowed horizontally, licked smooth by the wind and rain. Not only so, but the chalk cliffs are riddled with caves, that are ancient water-courses. The rain falling on the surface is drunk by the thirsty soil, and it sinks till, finding where the chalk is tender, it forms a channel and flows as a subterranean rill, spouts forth on the face of the crags, till sinking still lower, it finds an exit at the bottom of the cliff, when it leaves its ancient conduit high and dry.
But before the chalk was tossed aloft there had been an earlier upheaval from the depths of the ocean, that of the Jurassic limestone. This was built up by coral insects working indefatigably through long ages, piling up their structures, as the sea-bottom slowly sank, straining ever higher, till at length their building was crushed together and projected on high, to form elevated plateaux, as the Causses of Quercy, and Alpine ranges, as the Dolomites of Brixen. But in the uplifting of this deposit, as it was inelastic, the strain split it in every direction, and down the rifts thus formed danced the torrents from higher granitic and schistous ranges, forming the gorges of the Tarn, the Ardêche, the Herault, the Gaves, and the Timée, in France.
It has been a puzzle to decide which appeared first, the egg out of which the fowl was hatched, or the hen which laid the egg; and it is an equal puzzle to the anthropologist to say whether man was first brought into existence as a babe or in maturity. In both cases he would be helpless. The babe would need its mother, and the man be paralysed into incapacity through lack of experience. But without stopping to debate this question, we may conclude that naked, shivering and homeless humanity would have to be pupil to the beasts to learn where to shelter his head. Where did man first appear? Where was the Garden of Eden? Indisputably on the chalk. There he found all his first demands supplied. The walls of cretaceous rock furnished him with shelter under its ledges of overhanging beds, flints out of which to fashion his tools, and nodules of pyrites wherewith to kindle a fire. Providence through aeons had built up the chalk to be man's first