now
roaring over the platform of the watershed, and great patches of
whirling snow lay to the right and left like sand upon the grassy dunes
of a coast.

Through all this loneliness and cold I went down, with the great road
for a companion. Majesty and power were imposed by it upon these savage
wilds. The hours uncalculated, and the long arrears of the night, had
confused my attention; the wind, the little arrows of the ice, the
absence of ploughlands and of men. Those standards of measure which (I
have said) the Causses so easily disturb would not return to me. I took
mile after mile almost unheeding, numbed with cold, demanding sleep, but
ignorant of where might be found the next habitation.

It was in this mood that I noticed on a distant swirl of rocks before me
what might have been roofs and walls; but in that haunted country the
rocks play such tricks as I have told. The moonlight also, which seems
so much too bright upon a lonely heath, fails one altogether when
distinction must be made between distant things, and when men are near.
I did not know that these rocks (or houses) were the high group of
Chateauneuf till I came suddenly upon the long and low house which
stands below it on the road, and is the highway inn for the mountain
town beyond.

I halted for a moment, because no light came from the windows. Just
opposite the house a great tomb marked the fall of some hero. The wind
seemed less violent. The waters of the marshy plain had gathered. They
were no longer frozen, and a little brook ran by. As I waited there,
hesitating, my fatigue came upon me, and I knocked at their great door.
They opened, and light poured upon the road, and the noise of peasants
talking loudly, and the roaring welcome of a fire. In this way I ended
my crossing of these sombre and unrecorded hills.

* * * * *

I that had lost count of hours and of heights in the glamour of the
midnight and of the huge abandoned places of my climb, stepped now into
a hall where the centuries also mingled and lost their order. The
dancing fire filled one of those great pent-house chimneys that witness
to the communal life of the Middle Ages. Around and above it, ironwork
of a hundred years branched from the ingle-nooks to support the drying
meats of the winter provision. A wide board, rude, over-massive, and
shining with long usage, reflected the stone ware and the wine. Chairs,
carved grotesquely, and as old almos