Page:Cliff Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe.djvu/61

 carry on their business in comparative obscurity. The superior stratum of rock is of so hard and tenacious a quality that it holds together with very few piers to support it. When a citizen wants to enlarge his premises, he merely digs deeper into the hill; he has no ground-rent to pay. Some caves open a hundred feet wide without a support.

Any one motoring or going by rail from Angoulême to Périgueux should halt half-way at La Roche Beaucourt, where the rock l'Argentine contains a nest of cave-dwellings, with silos in the floors and cupboards in the walls.

That the savage is not extinct in these out-of-the-way parts may be judged from this—that at Hautefaye near by, the peasants in 1870 laid hold of M. de Moneis, who objected to the prosecution of the war with the Prussians after Sedan, cruelly maltreated him, and threw him alive on a bonfire in which he expired among the flames.

The whole south-east angle of the Isle of Sicily is full of underground cities, of which that of the Val d'Ispica is the most famous. These excavations are vulgarly called Ddieri, but they are not in most cases tombs, but dwelling- places for the living, as is shown by the handmills for oil and corn that are found in them.

The Val d'Ispica is a narrow valley situated between Modica and Spaicaforno; and throughout its entire length of about eight miles, the rock walls are pierced on both sides with countless grottoes, all artificial, and showing the marks of tools on their walls. They are scooped in the calcareous rock. Some consist of as many as ten or twelve chambers in succession, and are seldom more than 20 feet deep by 6 feet high, and they are of the same breadth. At the bottom of the valley flows a little stream that supplied the inhabitants with water, and irrigates wild fig-trees and pink-flowered oleanders. On a higher level grow broad-leaved acanthi and wild artichokes, and thick festoons of cactus hang down from the top of the rock and