Page:The lives of celebrated travellers (Volume 2).djvu/16

 that in these vast solitudes he should find no subsistence, except such as the most austere anchorets might have partaken, and that the wretched inhabitants from whom even this was to be obtained were not more numerous than the robbers who might deprive him of it. In fact, he was more than once attacked and plundered by Spanish outlaws; and the contrivance by which he succeeded on such occasions in concealing a small quantity of money is sufficiently ingenious. He thrust a number of reals into the coarse black bread which he carried about with him as his only food, and this the robbers considered so utterly worthless that, although by no means fastidious, they invariably relinquished it to the traveller with extreme contempt.

Tournefort, having thus overreached the dull-*headed banditti of Spain, roamed about at leisure through the wild regions of the Pyrenees, climbing the most abrupt and apparently inaccessible pinnacles. New plants, however, were found at almost every step, and the pleasure derived from this circumstance, which none but a discoverer can conceive, amply compensated him for the fatigues and dangers he underwent. One day during this tour he narrowly escaped with his life: a miserable house, in which he had taken shelter, fell down upon him, and for two hours he lay buried under the ruins, but was at length dug out by the peasantry.

Towards the end of the year 1681 he returned through Montpellier to Aix, where he classed and arranged all the plants which he had collected in Provence, Languedoc, Dauphiny, Catalonia,the Alps, and the Pyrenees; and the pleasure afforded him by the sight of his collection was an ample reward for all the fatigue and danger which he experienced in procuring it.

Tournefort's reputation now began to diffuse itself. M. Fagon, principal physician to the queen, a man who ardently desired to advance the interests of