een the night
before, and I saw that wonderful abbey rise up before me as I approached
it. After several hours' walking, I reached the enormous mass of rocks
which supports the little town, dominated by the great church. Having
climbed the steep and narrow street, I entered the most wonderful Gothic
building that has ever been built to God on earth, as large as a town,
full of low rooms which seem buried beneath vaulted roofs, and lofty
galleries supported by delicate columns.

I entered this gigantic granite jewel which is as light as a bit of
lace, covered with towers, with slender belfries to which spiral
staircases ascend, and which raise their strange heads that bristle with
chimeras, with devils, with fantastic animals, with monstrous flowers,
and which are joined together by finely carved arches, to the blue sky
by day, and to the black sky by night.

When I had reached the summit, I said to the monk who accompanied me:
"Father, how happy you must be here!" And he replied: "It is very windy,
Monsieur"; and so we began to talk while watching the rising tide,
which ran over the sand and covered it with a steel cuirass.

And then the monk told me stories, all the old stories belonging to the
place, legends, nothing but legends.

One of them struck me forcibly. The country people, those belonging to
the Mornet, declare that at night one can hear talking going on in the
sand, and then that one hears two goats bleat, one with a strong, the
other with a weak voice. Incredulous people declare that it is nothing
but the cry of the sea birds, which occasionally resembles bleatings,
and occasionally human lamentations; but belated fishermen swear that
they have met an old shepherd, whose head, which is covered by his
cloak, they can never see, wandering on the downs, between two tides,
round the little town placed so far out of the world, and who is guiding
and walking before them, a he-goat with a man's face, and a she-goat
with a woman's face, and both of them with white hair; and talking
incessantly, quarrelling in a strange language, and then suddenly
ceasing to talk in order to bleat with all their might.

"Do you believe it?" I asked the monk. "I scarcely know," he replied,
and I continued: "If there are other beings besides ourselves on this
earth, how comes it that we have not known it for so long a time, or why
have you not seen them? How is it that I have not seen them?" He
replied: "Do we see the hundred tho