ncreased, and became like the hissing of an enormous tea urn, and
at the same time breaths of cool air began to reach me from the
direction of the summit. At length I understood. It was blowing stiffly
from the south upon the other slope of the Lozere, and every step that I
took I was drawing nearer to the wind.

Although it had been long desired, it was quite unexpectedly at last
that my eyes rose above the summit. A step that seemed no way more
decisive than many other steps that had preceded it--and, "like stout
Cortez when, with eagle eyes, he stared at the Pacific," I took
possession, in my own name, of a new quarter of the world. For behold,
instead of the gross turf rampart I had been mounting for so long, a
view into the hazy air of heaven, and a land of intricate blue hills
below my feet.

The Lozere lies nearly east and west, cutting Gevaudan into two unequal
parts; its highest point, this Pic de Finiels, on which I was then
standing, rises upwards of five thousand six hundred feet above the sea,
and in clear weather commands a view over all lower Languedoc to the
Mediterranean Sea. I have spoken with people who either pretended or
believed that they had seen, from the Pic de Finiels, white ships
sailing by Montpellier and Cette. Behind was the upland northern country
through which my way had lain, peopled by a dull race, without wood,
without much grandeur of hill-form, and famous in the past for little
besides wolves. But in front of me, half veiled in sunny haze, lay a new
Gevaudan, rich, picturesque, illustrious for stirring events. Speaking
largely, I was in the Cevennes at Monastier, and during all my journey;
but there is a strict and local sense in which only this confused and
shaggy country at my feet has any title to the name, and in this sense
the peasantry employ the word. These are the Cevennes with an emphasis:
the Cevennes of the Cevennes. In that undecipherable labyrinth of hills,
a war of bandits, a war of wild beasts, raged for two years between the
Grand Monarch with all his troops and marshals on the one hand, and a
few thousand Protestant mountaineers upon the other. A hundred and
eighty years ago, the Camisards held a station even on the Lozere, where
I stood; they had an organization, arsenals, a military and religious
hierarchy; their affairs were "the discourse of every coffee-house" in
London; England sent fleets in their support; their leaders prophesied
and murdered; with colours a