Page:A book of the Cevennes (-1907-).djvu/221

Rh out that which has poured over the gunwale, for it is over your ankles. Then, again, the growl of another rapid, more swinging down between rocks in races of water green as grass, then gliding over shallow portions where we can see the stones and gravel at the bottom and the fish darting; then over a depression, the water bottle-green, too deep for the sunlight to penetrate, close under an overhanging cliff.

A long green tongue of land shoots out with ruins on the summit, La Madeleine, a leper-hospital, where these unfortunates were nursed and kept in seclusion under the Templars. Again, huge fawn-coloured precipices, caves out of which the drip of water has hung stalactitic deposits like dropping veils, one in which it has built up a huge finger; and then, right before one, a Gothic cathedral with spires—Le Tour des Aiguilles. We are carried round, and the forms have completely changed.

Then after five hours or more the walls begin to sink, a stream breaks in through a doorway on the left, and we issue through a portal. The river runs more smoothly, and on the summit of the rock, creeping down its side, studded with ruins, is the imposing dead town of Aiguèze, long a subject of dispute between the counts of Toulouse and the bishops of Viviers. There were houses near the river bank, but all are now in ruins, destroyed by the great floods of 1890 and 1895. On the left bank is the little village of S. Martin, where we disembark, and think we have seen a succession of marvels the like of which are not to be seen elsewhere save—with a difference—on the Tarn. But just here, to spoil the last tableau, a company has erected huge and hideous factories for silk-weaving on the top of the