s rendering to us the panorama of
mountains and towns and castles that continuously opened before us for
the delectation of our souls.

Off to the right, hidden behind the factory-smoke of La Voulte, was the
sometime home of Bernard de Ventadour, a troubadour whom the world still
loves to honour--quite one of ourselves; off to the left, commanding the
valley of the Drome, were Livron and Loriol, tough little Huguenot nuts
cracked all to pieces (as their fallen ramparts showed) in the religious
wars; and a little lower down we came to Cruas: a famous fortified
Abbey, surmounted by a superb donjon and set in the midst of a
triple-walled town, whereof the Byzantine-Romanesque church is one of
the marvels of Southern France. Cruas was founded more than a thousand
years ago, in the time of Charlemagne, by the pious Hermengarde, wife of
Count Eribert de Vivarais; being a thank-offering to heaven erected on
the very spot where that estimable woman and her husband were set upon
in the forest by a she-wolf of monstrous size. But the fortified Abbey
was a later growth; and was not completed, probably, until the sixteenth
century. It was toward the end of that century, certainly, that the
Huguenots attacked it--and were beaten off finally by Abbot Etienne
Deodel and his monks, who clapped on armour over their habits and did
some very sprightly fighting on its walls.

Below Cruas, around the bend in the river, Rochemaure the Black came
into sight: a withered stronghold topping an isolated rock of black
basalt six hundred feet above the stream. It is a grewsome place: the
ruin of a black nightmare of a basalt-built castle, having below and
around it a little black nightmare of a basalt-built town--whereof the
desperately steep and crooked streets are paved with black basalt, and
are so narrowed by over-hanging houses as to show above them only the
merest strip of sky. It is a town to which, by preference, one would go
to commit a murder; but 'tis said that its inhabitants are kindly
disposed. Only a step beyond it lies Le Teil: a briskly busy little
place tucked in at the foot of a lime-stone cliff--town and cliff and
the inevitable castle on the cliff-top all shrouded in a murky white
cloud, half dust, half vapour, rising from the great buildings in which
a famous hydraulic cement is made. Not a desirable abiding place,
seemingly; but in cheerful contrast with its lowering neighbour up the
stream.

And then, passing beyond a maz