Cliff castles and cave dwellings of Europe

Front matter

Oass.

Book.

CLIFF CASTLES AND CAVE DWELLINGS OF EUROPE

Preface

WHEN in 1850 appeared the Report of the Secretary of War for the United States, containing Mr. J. H. Simpson's account of the Cliff Dwellings in Colorado, great surprise was awakened in America, and since then these remains have been investigated by many explorers, of whom I need only name Holmes' "Report of the Ancient Ruins in South- West Colorado! during the Summers of 1875 and 1876," and Jackson's " Ruins of South- West Colorado in 1875 and 1877." Powell, Newberry, &c., have also described them. A summary is in " Prehistoric America," by the Marquis de Nadaillac, 1885, and the latest contribution to the subject are articles in Scribner's Magazme by E. S. Curtis, 1906 and 1909.

The Pueblc^ Indians dwell for the most part at a short distance fr6m the Rio Grande ; the Zuni, however, one of their best known tribes, are settled far from that river, near the sources of the Gila. In the Pueblos country are tremendous canons of red sandstone, and in their sides are the habitations of human beings perched on every ledge in inaccessible positions. Major Powell, United States Geologist, expressed his amazement at seeing nothing for whole days but perpendicular cliffs everywhere riddled with human dwellings resembling the cells of a honeycomb. The apparently inaccessible heights w^ere scaled by means of long poles with lateral teeth disposed like the rungs of a ladder, and inserted at intervals in notches let into the face of the perpendicular rock. The most curious of these dwellings, compared to which the most Alpine chalet is of easy access,

PREFACE

have ceased to be occupied, but the Maqui, in North-West Arizona, still inhabit villages of stone built on sandstone tables, standing isolated in the midst of a sandy ocean almost destitute of vegetation.

The cause of the abandonment of the cliff dwellings has been the diminished rainfall, that rendering the land barren has sent its population elsewhere. The rivers, the very streams, are dried up, and only parched water-courses show where they once flowed.

" The early inhabitants of the region under notice were wonderfully skilful in turning the result of the natural weathering of the rocks to account. To construct a cave-dwelling, the entrance to the cave or the front of the open gallery was walled up with adobes, leaving only a small opening serving for both door and window. The cliff houses take the form and dimensions of the platform or ledge from which they rise. The masonry is well laid, and it is wonderful with what skill the walls are joined to the cliff, and with what care the aspect of the neighbouring rocks has been imitated in the external architecture." ^

In Asia also these rock-dwellings abound. The limestone cliffs of Palestine are riddled with them. They are found also in Armenia and in Afghanistan. At Bamian, in the latter, " the rocks are perforated in every direction. A whole people could put up in the 'Twelve Thousand Galleries ' which occupy the slopes of the valley for a distance of eight miles. Isolated bluffs are pierced with so many chambers that they look like honeycombs." ^

That Troglodytes have inhabited rocks in Africa has been known since the time of Pliny.

But it has hardly been realised to what an extent similar cliff dwellings have existed and do still exist in Europe.

^ Nadaillac, "Prehistoric America," Lend. 1885, p. 205. 2 Reclus, "Asia," iii. p. 245.

PREFACE

In 1894, in my book, " The Deserts of Southern France," I drew attention to rock habitations in Dordogne and Lot, but I had to crush all my information on this subject into a single chapter. The subject, however, is too interesting and too greatly ramified to be thus compressed. It is one, moreover, that throws sidelights on manners and modes of life in the past that cannot fail to be of interest. The description given above of cliff dwellings in Oregon might be employed, without changing a word, for those in Europe.

To the best of my knowledge, the theme of European Troglodytes has remained hitherto undealt with, though occasional mention has been made of those on the Loire. It has been taken for granted that cave-dwellers belonged to a remote past in civilised Europe ; but they are only now being expelled in Nottinghamshire and Shropshire, by the interference of sanitary officers.

Elsewhere, the race is by no means extinct. In France more people live underground than most suppose. And they show rlo inclination to leave their dwellings. Just one month ago from the date of writing this page, I sketched the new front that a man had erected to his paternal cave at Villiers in Loir et Cher. The habitation was wholly subterranean, but then it consisted of one room alone. The freshly completed face was cut in freestone, with door and window, and above were sculptured the aces of hearts, spades, and diamonds, an anchor, a cogwheel and a fish. Separated from this mansion was a second, divided from it by a buttress of untrimmed rock, and this other also was newly fronted, occupied by a neat and pleasant-spoken woman who wa^ vastly proud of her cavern residence. " Mais c'est tout ce qu'on pent desirer. Enfin on s'y trouve tres bien.""

Chapter I Prehistokic Cavb-dwellees

PACES

Formation of chalk — Of dolomitic limestone — Where did the first men live — Their Eden in the chalk lands — Migration elsewhere — Pit dwellings — Civilisation stationary — Troglodytes — Antiquity of man — Les Eyzies — Hotel du Paradis — The first colonists of the Vezere Valley — Their artistic accomplishments — Painting and sculpture — Eock dwellings in Champagne — Of a later period — Civilisation does not progress uniformly — The earth — Book of the Revelation of the past — La Laugerie Basse — Blandas — Conduche — Grotte de Han — The race of Troglodytes not extinct 1-29

Chapter II

Troglodytes of the Etang de Berre — The underground town of Og, King of Bashan — Troo — Sanitation — Ancient mode of disposing of refuse — The talking well — Les Roches — Ch§,teau de Bandan — Chapel of S. Gervais — La Grotte des Vierges — Rochambeau — Le Roi des Halles — La Roche Corbon — Human refuse at Ezy — Saumur — Are there still pagans among them ? — BourrI — Courtineau — The basket-makers of Villaines — Grioteaux — Sauliac — Cuzorn — Brantdme — LaRocheBeaucourt — TheSwabian Alb — Sibyllen loch — Vrena Beutlers Hohle — Schillingsloch — Schlossberg Hohle — Rock village in Sicily — In the Crimea — In Egypt — In volcanic breccia — Balmes de Montbrun — Grottoes de Boissiere — Grottoes de Jonas — The rock Ceyssac — The sandstone cave-dwellings of Correze — Their internal arrangement — Cluseaux — Cave-dwellings in England — In Nottinghamshire — In Staffordshire — In Cornwall — In Scotland — The savage in man — Reversion to savagery — The Gubbins — A stone-cutter — Daniel Gumb — A gentleman of Sens — Toller of Clun Downs . 30-69

Chapter III Soutereains

Prussian invasion of Bohemia — Adersbach and Wickelsdorf labyrinths — Refuges of the Israelites— Gauls suffocated in caves by Caesar — Armenians by Corbulo — Story of Julius Sabinus — Saracen invasion — The devastation of Aquitaine by Pepin — Rock refuges in Quercy — The Northmen — Persecution of the

PAGES

Albigenses — The cave of Lombrive — The English domination of Guyenne — Two kinds of refuges — Saint Macaire — Alban — Refuge of Chateau Robin — Exploration — Methods of defence — Souterrain of FayroUe — Of Saint Gauderic — Of Fauroux — Of Olmie — Aubeterre — Refuges under castles — Enormous number of souterrains in France — Victor Hugo's account of those in Brittany — Refuges resorted to in the time of the European War — Those in Picardy — Gapennes — Some comparatively modern — Condition of the peasantry during the Hundred Years' War — Tyranny of the nobles — Their barbarities — Refuges in Ireland — In England — The Dene Holes — at Chislehurst — At Tilbury — Their origin — Fogous in Cornwall — Refuges in Haddingtonshire — In Egg — Slaughter of the Macdonalds — Refuges in the Isle of Rathlin — Massacre by John Norris — Refuges in Crete — Christians suffocated in one by the Turks — Lamorciere in Algeria 70-102

Chapter IV

Distinction between souterrain and cliff refuges — How these latter were reached — Cazelles — Peuch Saint Sour^ — Story of S. Sour — The Roc d'Aucor — Exploration — How formerly reached — Boundoulaou — Riou Ferrand — Cliff refuge near Brengues — Les M^es — Fadarelles — Buy Labrousse — Soulier-de-Chasteaux — Refuges in Auvergne — Meschers — In Ariege — The Albigenses — Caves in Derbyshire — Reynard's cave — Cotton's cave — John Cann's cave — Elford's cave on Sheep's Tor .... 103-116

Chapter V

CLIFF CASTLES. THE EOUTIERS

The seigneural castle — Protection sought against the foes without and against the peasant in revolt — Instance of the Chateau Les Eyzies — Independence of the petty nobles — Condition of the country in France — In Germany — Weakness of the Emperor — The Raubritter — Italy — The nobles brought into the towns — Their towers — Division of the subject — Difference between the English manor-house and the foreign feudal castle — The English in France — The Hundred Years' War — Hopeless condition of the people — The Free Companies — How recruited — Crusade against , the Albigenses — Barons no better than Routiers — Death of chivalry — Routiers were rarely Englishmen — Had no scruples as to whom they served — Disregarded treaties — The captains were Gascons or French — The nobles of the south on the English side — Nests in the rock — Depopulation and devastation — Insolence of the Companies — Bigaroque — Roc de Tayac — Corn — Roquefort — Brengues — The Bishop of Cahors dies there — Chateau du Diable at Cabrerets — Ddfild des Anglais — Peyrousse — Les Roches du Tailleur — Trosky — The scolding women — The

English not forgotten in Guyenne 117-141

CHAPTER VI CLIFF CABTLiiS— Continued

PAGES

The difference between feudal castles and those of the Routiers — Illustration of the character of the nobles — Two Counts of Perigord — The nobles in Auvergne — " Les grands Jours " — La Roche Saint Christophe — Surprised and destroyed — Reoccupied by the Huguenots — Final destruction — La Roche Gageac — Its history — Jean Tarde — Ravages of the Huguenots — Gluges — La Roche Lambert — Habichstein — Burgstein — The spy — Kronmetz — Covolo — Puxerloch — The shadowless man — Nottingham Castle — Arrest of Mortimer — Outmost castles — La Grotte de Jioux — Clovis crosses the Vienne — Le Qn6 du Loir — Antoine de Bourbon — Calvin at Saint Saturnin — His cave — La Roche Corail — Cave in which the " Institute of the Christian Religion" was written — Effects produced by this work — Preparation of jmen's minds for reform — Havoc wrought to art by the Calvinists — La Rochebrune — A cave-colander — Necessity for outlook stations — Frontier fortifications 142-172

Chapter VII Subtbkranban Churches

Basilicas and catacumbal churches — Preference of the people for the latter — The cult of martyrs encouraged this — Crypts — Elevation of relics — Church of SS. John and Paul on the Coelian Hill — Temples were originally sepulchres — Basilican churches converted into mausoleums — Dedications — Altars of wood changed for altars of stone — At first the bodies of martyrs were not dismembered — But dismemberment was made necessary by the transformation — The Martyrium of Poitiers — S. Emilion — Carvings — Crypt — Aubeterre — A Huguenot stronghold — Orders issued by Jeanne d'Albret — Her extended powers — The monolithic church — Menaced by ruin — Rocamadour — Lirac — Mimet — Caudon — Natural caves used as churches — Gurat — Lanmeur — Story of S. Melor — Dolmen Chapel of the Seven Sleepers — Another at Cangas-de-Ones — Confolens — Subterranean churches in Egypt — In Crete — The sacred caves in Palestine — Revival of cave sanctuaries by the Crusaders — Springs of water in crypts . 173-195

Chapter VIII

Tibetian recluses — Christian hermits in Syria and Egypt — The Essenes and Therapeutas — Description by Philo of the latter — Buddhist and Manichaean influence — Difference in motive — Likeness superficial — Possible necessity for the adoption of asceticism — Instance of extravagant asceticism in Syria — ■

Extravagances in Ireland — In England — Early European solitaries — The Beatus Hohle — G-rotto of S. Cybard — Decadence — Hermits in Languedoc — In Germany — A grocer hermit — Hermitage at S. Maurice — The Wild Kirchlein — The cave of S. Verena at Soleure — That of Magdalen at Freiburg — Oberstein — Hermitage at Brive — La Sainte Beaume — Soug^ — Villiers — Montserrat — Subiaco — La Vernia — Warkworth — Knaresborough — Robin Hood's stable — Roche — Anchor Church — Royston cave — Its carvings — Kindly remembrance of the hermit — The hermit a loss 196-227

Chapter IX Eock Monasteeies

The hermits self-excommunicate — Liability to create a schism — S. Paul — S. Mary of Egypt — S. Anthony — Enormous number of solitaries compels organisation into monasteries — Causes inducing flight to the desert — S. Athanasius at Treves — Writes the "Life of S. Anthony" — Impulse given to flight from the world in the West — S. Martin — Desires to imitate the Lives of the Fathers of the Desert — At Poitiers — Founds Ligugd — Rock cells — Later history and ruin — Martin becomes Bishop of Tours — Founds Marmoutier — History and ruin — Martin and the masqueraders — Present state — Baptistry — The Seven Sleepers — Brice elected bishop — Obliged to fly the see — Return and penance — Cave of S. Leobard — Abbey of Brantome — Underground church — Other caves — '* Papists' Holes " at Nottingham — Rock monastery of Meteora — Der el Adra — Inkermann . 228-245

Chapter X Cave Oeacles

Polignac — Greek oracles — Charonion — Cave'of the Nymphs — Exhalations — Delos — Care of Trophonios — Experiences of Pausanius — Cave at Acharaca — Sibylline oracles — Destruction — Forged oracles — Oracles among the Jews — Story of Hallbjorn — Sounds issuing from caves — Echo — JEolian cave of Terni — Purgatory of S. Patrick — The Knight Owain — Visit by Sir William Lisle — By a monk of Eymstadt — Prohibited by Alexander VL — Prohibition rescinded by Pius III.— Destroyed in 1622— Revival of pilgrimages — Description by Gough — Friar Conrad — Lazarus Aigner — Roderic, King of the Goths — Sortes Sacras — Condemned by the Church — Nevertheless practised — Instances from Gregory of Tours — Incubation in pagan shrines — The cave of Cybele — Temples of Isis and Esculapius — Churches founded by Constantine dedicated to S. Michael — Incubation practiced in them — Instances — Churches of S. Cosmas and Damian— Practice at Caerleon — Superstition hard to kill— Grotto of Lourdes . 246-268

Chapter XI Eobbees' Dens

MPAGES

Humphrey Kynaston — His adventurous life — Cave at Ness Cliff — Chinamen — David at Adullam — Bandit caves in Palestine — Lombrive — Surtshellir — Feruiden's cave — Gargas — La Crouzate — The haunts of Grettir — Dunterton — Precautions against burglary — Story of K. F. Masch — His capture — The Leichtweishohle — Adersbach retreats — Babinsky — His capture . , 269-294

Chapter XII Kock Sepulchebs

Difference between the tombs of the Israelites and those of the Egyptians — The reason for this — Jewish catacombs at Eome — Christian catacombs — Puticoli — Numerous catacombs — Those of Syracuse — Those of Paris^ — Crypts became vaults for kings and nobles — Desecration — That of Louis XI. — The instinct of immortality — Cave burials — In the Petit Morin — Scandinavian burials — Death regarded as suspended animation — Hervor at the cairn of Angantyr — The cairn-breaking of Gest — The barrow of Gunnar — Sigrun visits her husband in his cairn — The story of Asmund and Asvid — The same ideas in Christian times — Mamertinus and Corcodemus — ** De Miraculis Mortuorum " — Ancestor worship — Persistence of usages derived from a remote antiquity — Neglect of thought of the dead — Double nature of man — The spiritual world — A walking postman — Conclusion 295-318

CLIFF CASTLES AND CAYE DWELLINGS OF EUROPE

Chapter I

IN a vastly remote past, and for a vastly extended period, the mighty deep rolled over the surface of a world inform and void, depositing a sediment of its used up living tenants, the microscopic cases of foraminiferas, sponges, sea-urchins, husks, and the cast limbs of crustaceans. The descending shells of the diatoms like a subaqueous snow gradually buried the larger dejections. This went on till the sediment had attained a thickness of over one thousand feet. Then the earth beneath, heaved and tossed in sleep, cast off its white featherbed, projected it on high to become the chalk formation that occupies so distinct and extended a position in the geological structure of the globe. The chalk may be traced from the North of Ireland to the Crimea, a distance of about 11,140 geographical miles, and, in an opposite direction, from the South of Sweden to Bordeaux, a distance of 840 geographical miles.

It extends as a broad belt across France, like the sash of a Republican mayor. You may travel from Calais to Vendome, to Tours, Poitiers, Angouleme, to the Gironde, and you are on chalk the whole way. It stretches through Central Europe, and is seen in North Africa. From the

B

Crimea it reaches into Syria, and may be traced as far as the shores of the sea of Aral in Central Asia.

The chalk is not throughout alike in texture ; hard beds alternate with others that are soft — beds with flints like plum -cake, and beds without, like white Spanish bread.

We are accustomed in England to chalk in rolling downs, except where bitten into by the sea, but elsewhere it is riven, and presents cliifs, and these cliffs are not at all like that of Shakespeare at Dover, but overhang, where hard beds alternate with others that are friable. These latter are corroded by the weather, and leave the more compact projecting like the roofs of penthouses. They are furrowed horizontally, licked smooth by the wind and rain. Not only so, but the chalk cliffs are riddled with caves, that are ancient water-courses. The rain falling on the surface is drunk by the thirsty soil, and it sinks till, finding where the chalk is tender, it forms a channel and flows as a subterranean rill, spouts forth on the face of the crags, till sinking still lower, it finds an exit at the bottom of the cliff, when it leaves its ancient conduit high and dry.

But before the chalk was tossed aloft there had been an earlier upheaval from the depths of the ocean, that of the Jurassic limestone. This was built up by coral insects working indefatigably through long ages, piling up their structures, as the sea-bottom slowly sank, straining ever higher, till at length their building was crushed together and projected on high, to form elevated plateaux, as the Causses of Quercy, and Alpine ranges, as the Dolomites of Brixen. But in the uplifting of this deposit, as it was inelastic, the strain split it in every direction, and down the rifts thus formed danced the torrents from higher granitic and schistous ranges, forming the gorges of the Tarn, the Ardeche, the Herault, the Gaves, and the Timee, in France.

It has been a puzzle to decide which appeared first, the egg out of which the fowl was hatched, or the hen which laid the egg ; and it is an equal puzzle to the anthropologist to say whether man was first brought into existence as a babe or in maturity. In both cases he would be helpless. The babe would need its mother, and the man be paralysed into incapacity through lack of experience. But without stopping to debate this question, we may conclude that naked, shivering and homeless humanity would have to be pupil to the beasts to learn where to shelter his head. Where did man first appear ? Where was the Garden of Eden ? Indisputably on the chalk. There he found all his first demands supplied. The walls of cretaceous rock furnished him with shelter under its ledges of overhanging beds, flints out of which to fashion his tools, and nodules of pyrites wherewith to kindle a fire. Providence through aeons had built up the chalk to be man's first home.

Incontestably, the great centres of population in the primeval ages were the chalklands, and next to them those of limestone. The chalk first, for it furnished man with flints, and the limestone next when he had learned to barter.

He could have lived nowhere else, till, after the lapse of ages, he had developed invention and adaptability. Besant and Rice, in "Ready-money Mortiboy," speak of Divine Discontent as the motive power impelling man to progress. Not till the chalk and the limestone shelters were stocked, and could hold no more, would men be driven to invent for themselves other dwellings. The first men being sent into the world without a natural coat of fur or feathers, would settle into caves or under overhanging roofs of rock, and with flint picked out of it, chipped and pointed, secure the flesh of the beast for food and its hide for clothing. Having accomplished this, man would sit down complacently for long ages. Indeed, there are certain branches of the human family that have progressed no further and display no ambition to advance.

Only when the districts of chalk and limestone were overstocked would the overflow be constrained to look elsewhere for shelter. Then some daring innovators, driven from the favoured land, would construct habitations by grubbing into the soil, and covering them with a roof of turf. The ancient Germans, according to Tacitus, lived in underground cabins, heaped over with dung to keep them warm during the long winter. With the invention of the earthenware stove, the German Bauer has been enabled to rise above the surface; but he cherishes the manure round his house, so to speak, about his feet, as affectionately as when it warmed his head.

For a long time it was supposed that our British ancestors lived in pit dwellings, and whole clusters of them were recorded and mapped on the Yorkshire Wolds, and a British metropolis of them, Caer Penselcoit, was reported in Somersetshire. Habitations sunk deep in the rock, with only a roof above ground. But the spade has cracked these archaeological theories like filberts, and has proved that the pits in the wolds were sunk after iron ore, or those in Somerset were burrowings for the extraction of chert.^ But the original paleolithic man did not get beyond the cavern or the rock-shelter. This latter was a retreat beneath an overhanging stratum of hard rock, screened against the weather by a curtain of skins. And why should he wish to change so long as these were available.? We, from our advanced position, sitting in padded arm-chairs, before a coal fire, can see that there was room for improvement ; but

^ Atkinson, "Forty Years in a Moorland Parish." Lond. 1891, p. 161, et seq. Some pits are, however, ^not so dubious. At Hurstbourne, in Hants, pit habitations have been explored ; others, in Kent and Oxfordshire, undoubtedly once dwelt in. In one of the Kentish pits 900 flakes and cores of flint were found. The Chysoyster huts in Cornwall and the " Picts houses " in Scotland were built up of stones, underground.

he could not. The rock-dwelling was commodious, dry, warm in winter and cool in summer, and it cost him no trouble to fashion it, or keep it in repair. He had not the prophetic eye to look forward to the arm-chair and the coal fire. Indeed, at all periods, down to the present day, those who desire to lead the simple life, and those who have been reared in these nature-formed dwelling-places, feel no ambition to occupy stone-built houses. In North Devon the cottages are reared of cob, kneaded clay, and thatched, A squire on his estate pulled down those he possessed and built in their place brick houses with slated roofs. The cottagers bitterly resented the change, their old mud-hovels were so much warmer. And in like manner the primeval man would not exchange his ahris for a structural dwelling unless constrained so to do.

, The ancients knew that the first homes of mankind were grottoes. They wrote of Troglodytes in Africa and of cave-dwellers in Liguria. In Arabia Petraea, a highly civilized people converted their simple rock-dwellings into sumptuous palaces.

I might fill pages with quotations to the purpose from the classic authors, but the reader would skip them all. It is not my intention to give a detailed account of the prehistoric cave-dwellers. They have been written about repeatedly. In 1882, Dr. Buckland published the results of his exploration of the Kirkdale Cave in Yorkshire in Reliquice Diluviance, and sought to establish that the remains there found pertained to the men who were swept away by Noah^s flood. The publication of Sir Charles LyalPs "The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man,"" in 1863, was a shock to all such as clung to the traditional view that these deposits were due to a cosmic deluge, and that man was created 4004 B.C.

At first the announcements proving the antiquity of man were received with orthodox incredulity, because, although the strata, in which the remains were found, are the most modern of all earth's formations, still the testimony so completely contravened traditional beliefs, that the most conclusive evidence was required for its proof. Such evidence has been found, and is so strong, and so cumulative in character as to be now generally accepted as conclusive.

Evidence substantiating the thesis of Lyall had been accumulating, and ^the researches of Lartet and Christy in the Vezere valley, published in 1865-75, as Reliquice Aquitanicce, conclusively proved that man in Perigord had been a naked savage, contemporary with the mammoth, the reindeer and the cave-bear, that he had not learned to domesticate animals, to sow fields, to make pots, and that he was entirely ignorant of the use of the metals.

Since then, in the valley of the Vezere, Les Eyzies in the Department of Dordogne, has become a classic spot. I have already described it in another work,^ but I must here say a few more words concerning it. On reaching the valley of the Vezere by the train from Perigueux, one is swung down from the plateau into a trough between steep scarps of chalk-rock that rise from 150 to 300 feet above the placid river. These scarps have been ploughed by the weather in long horizontal furrows, so that they lean over as though desirous of contemplating their dirty faces in the limpid water. Out of their clefts spring evergreen oaks, juniper, box and sloe-bushes. Moss and lichen stain the white walls that are streaked by black tricklings from above, and are accordingly not beautiful — their faces are like that of a pale, dirty, and weeping child with a cold in its head, who does not use a pocket-handkerchief. Jackdaws haunt the upper ledges and smaller caves that gape on all sides chattering like boys escaped from school, and anon a raven starts forth and hoarsely calls for silence.

At the foot of the stooping crags, bowing to each other

^ " The Deserts of Southern I^rance." Lond., Methuen, 1894. 22 across the stream, lie masses that have broken from above, and atop and behind these is to be seen a string of cottages built into the rock, taking advantage of the overarching stratum of hard chalk ; and cutting into it are russet, tiled roofs, where the cottagers have sought to expand beyond the natural shelter : they are in an intermediate position. Just as I have seen a caddis-worm emancipating itself from its cage, half in as a worm, half out as a fly.

Nature would seem to have specially favoured this little nook of France, which must have been the Eden of primeval man on Gallic soil. There he found ready-made habitations, a river abounding in fish, a forest teeming with game ; constrained periodically to descend from the waterless plateaux, at such points as favoured a descent, to slake their thirst at the stream, and there was the nude hunter lurking in the scrub or behind a stone, with bow or spear awaiting his prey — ^his dinner and his jacket.

What beasts did he slay ? The wild horse, with huge head, was driven by him over the edge of the precipice, and when it fell with broken limbs or spine, was cut up with flint knives and greedily devoured. The reindeer was also hunted, and the cumbersome mammoth enabled a whole tribe to gorge itself.

The grottoes perforating the cliff, like bubbles in Gruyere cheese, have been occupied consecutively to the present day. Opposite to Les Eyzies, hanging like a net or skein of black thread to the face of the precipice, is a hotel, part gallery, part cave — FAuberge du Paradis ; and a notice in large capitals invites the visitor to a " Course aux Canards."