Page:Palæolithic Man and Terramara Settlements in Europe.djvu/183

 CHAPTER VII

The Valley of the Vézère.

M. Louis LARTET, in the preliminary remarks to his admirable description of the Cave of Cro-Magnon and its burial-place, thus writes :—

"Passing from Limoges to Agen by railway for the first time, and traversing the tortuous defiles of Périgord, we cannot but feel surprise and admiration on seeing the Vézère flow in the deep valley whose freshness is in marked contrast with its bare and rocky escarpments (Fig. 31). These picturesque cliffs, sharply limiting the river's course and not infrequently fantastic in shape, attract the traveller's attention, indifferent though he be, by a succession of unexpected and striking effects. Soon the eye becomes familiarised with the forms of the rocks, and we recognise a multitude of cavities in the cliffs. Some of them are natural; others have been carefully worked out by man, and are sometimes even now used as portions of the rural habitations. The Romans, Normans, and English have succeeded one another in this little Périgordian Petra; and the chronicles of the Middle Ages comprise curious documents relative to the part played in the wars of those times by the Roc de Tayac, where we still find cut in the limestone, rooms, galleries and stables, constituting indeed a veritable castle.

"The cave-dwellers, however, the oldest and strangest of all whom these rocks of Tayac have sheltered, were, without doubt, the hunters of the reindeer, who trod our soil when a crowd of strange animals existed here such as the mammoth, lion, reindeer, musk-ox, aurochs and others, now extinct or completely driven from our climate. The stations of these hunters are numerous on the banks of the Vézère :— and the natural caves which served them for