Two Summers in Guyenne | Page 9

suddenly stands between us and the
sunshine. I was in no mood to linger at the table.
What a relief to be out again in the sunshine and the light air, to see the
Dordogne flashing through meadows where women were haymaking
with bare feet!
It was early in the afternoon when I entered the small but active town
of Bort. The burg is only interesting by its exceedingly picturesque
situation on the right bank of the Dordogne, under a very high hill,
capped by a basaltic table, which is flanked towards the town, or rather
a little to the south of it, by a long row of stupendous columns of basalt,
known as the Orgues de Bort, from their resemblance at a distance to
organ-pipes. The basalt here is of a reddish yellow. The table, with its
igneous crystallizations, lies upon the metamorphic rock.
I decided to climb to the summit of the prodigious organ-pipes, and to
look at the world from that remarkable point of view. For the greater
part of the distance the way lay up a tiresome winding road on the side
of the hill. A woman, who was tying buckwheat into sheaves, said the
distance was 'three small quarters of an hour.' It would have been
simpler arithmetic to have said 'half an hour,' but the peasant thinks it
safer not to be more explicit than he or she can help. Experience has
taught me that 'three-quarters of an hour,' whether they are called little
or not, mean an hour or more, and that 'five quarters of an hour' mean
an hour and a half, or even two hours. I passed a team of bullocks
descending from the moor with loads of dry broom for the bakers,
headed by a little old man in a great felt hat, with a long goad in his
hand, with which he tickled up the yoked beasts occasionally, not
because they needed it, but from force of habit. This goad, by-the-bye,
is a slender stick about six feet long, with a short nail at one end, so
fastened that the point is turned outwards. A bullock is not goaded from
behind, but from the front between the shoulder-blades, and it generally
suffices for the animal to see a man in front of him with a stick. Instead
of drawing back, as might be supposed, he steps forward at his best
pace. Cows and bulls are harnessed, to the wain and plough as well as

oxen; they have all to work for their living. English cattle are allowed
to grow fat in idleness, and their troubles do not begin until the time
comes for them to be eaten. It is otherwise in France.
On the banks were fragrant, mauve-coloured pinks, with ragged petals;
but at the foot of the Orgues was a rocky waste, where little grew
besides the sombre holly and fetid hellebore.
The view from the top of the cliff made me fully realize the wildness,
the sterility, the desolation of nature in this region. Beyond the valley
far beneath me where the Dordogne lay, a glittering thread, was the
department of the Cantal. The whole southern and eastern prospect was
broken up by innumerable savage, heath-covered or rocky hills, with
little green valleys or dense woods filling the hollows, the southern
horizon being closed by the wavy blue line of the Cantal mountains. To
the north-east the sky-line was marked by the Mont-Dore range, with
the highest peak of Auvergne, the Puy de Sancy, clearly visible against
the lighter blue of the cloudless air. The feeling that prevailed
throughout this wide expanse of country was solemn sternness.
I returned to Bort, and as there were still about two hours of light left, I
crossed the river and went in search of the cascades, two or three miles
from the town, formed by the Rue in its wild impatience to meet the
Dordogne. When I was skirting the buckwheat fields of the valley in
the calm open country, there was a sweet and tender glow of evening
sunshine upon the purple-tinted sheaves standing with their heads
together. The Titan-strewn rocks felt it likewise with all their heather
and broom. There was no husbandman in the plain, no song of the
solitary goat-girl, no creak of the plough, no twitter even of a bird. It
was not yet the hour when Virgil says every field is silent, but the
repose of nature had commenced.
The dusk was falling when I reached a silk-mill by the side of the Rue,
and passed up the deep gorge full of shadows, led by the sound of
roaring waters. A narrow path winding under high rocks of porphyritic
gneiss brought me to the cascade called the Saut de la Saule, where the
river, divided