these
untenanted bare rocks. They strengthened and fortified the road. Its
grandeur in so empty and impoverished a land was a boast or a threat of
their power. The Republic succeeded the kings, the Armies succeeded the
Republic, and every experiment succeeded the victories and the breakdown
of the Armies. The road grew stronger all the while, bridging this
desert, and giving pledge that the brain of Paris was able, and more
able, to order the whole of the soil. So then, as I followed it, it
seemed to me to bear in itself, and in its contrast with untamed
surroundings, the history and the character of this one nation out of
the many which live by the tradition of Europe. As I followed it and saw
its exact gradient, its hard and even surface, its square border stones,
and, every hundred yards, its carved mark of the distance done, these
elaborations, standing quite new among the tumbled rocks of a vague
upland, made one certain that Paris had been at work. Very far back (how
far was marked on the milestone) the road had left the swarming gate of
Toulouse. Very far on (how far was marked on the milestone) it was to
cross the Saone by its own bridge, and feed the life of Lyons. In
between it met and surmounted (still civilised, easy, complete) this
barbaric watershed of the Margeride.

As I followed it, law--good law and evil--seemed to go with me up the
mountain side.

There was more sound than on the arid wastes of the Causse. There were
trees, and birds in the trees, moving faintly. The great moon, which had
now risen, shone also upon scanty grass and (from time to time) upon the
trickle of water passing in runnels beneath the road.

The torrent in the depth below roared openly and strong, and, beyond it,
the black wall of the Causse, immense and battlemented above me under
the moon, made what poor life this mountain supported seem for a moment
gracious by comparison. I remembered that sheep and goats and men could
live on the Margeride.

But the Margeride has rightly compelled its 'very few historians to
melancholy or fear.

It is a district, or a mountain range, or a single summit, which cuts
off the east from the west, the Loire from the Gironde: a long, even
barrow of dark stone. Its people are one, suspicious of the plains. Its
line against the sky is also one: no critical height in Europe is so
strict and unbroken. You may see it from a long way east--from the
Velay, or even from the last of the Forez, and w