ought by
choice the loneliest paths that looped its quiet hills; such as passed
the time of day with him were few and for the most part peasants, a
dull, dour lot, taciturn to a degree that pleased him well. So that he
soon forgot to be forever alert for the crack of an ambushed pistol or
the pattering footfalls of an assassin with a knife.

It was at Florac, on the Tarnon, that he parted company with the trail
of Stevenson. Here that one had turned east to Alais, whereas Duchemin
had been lost to the world not nearly long enough, he was minded to
wander on till weary. The weather held, there was sunshine in golden
floods, and by night moonlight like molten silver. Between beetling
ramparts of stone, terraced, crenellated and battlemented in motley
strata of pink and brown and yellow and black, the river Tarn had
gouged out for itself a canyon through which its waters swept and
tumbled, as green as translucent jade in sunlight, profound emerald in
shadow, cream white in churning rapids. The lofty profiles of its
cliffs were fringed with stunted growths of pine and ash, a ragged
stubble, while here and there chateaux, forsaken as a rule, and
crumbling, reared ruined silhouettes against the blue. Eighteen hundred
feet below, it might be more, the Tarn threaded lush bottom-lands,
tilled fields, goodly orchards, plantations of walnut and Spanish
chestnut, and infrequent, tiny villages that clung to precarious
footholds between cliffs and water.

On high again, beyond the cliffs, stretched the Causses, vast, arid and
barren plateaux, flat and featureless save for an occasional low,
rounded mound, a menhir or a dolmen, and (if such may be termed
features) great pits that opened in the earth like cold craters, which
the countryfolk termed avens. A strange, bleak land, inhospitable,
wind-harried, haunted, the home of seven howling devils of desolation...

Rain at length interned the traveller for three days in a little place
called Meyrueis, which lies sweetly in the valley of the Jonte, at its
confluence with the Butezon, long leagues remote from railroads and the
world they stitch together--that world of unrest, uncertainty and
intrigue which in those days seemed no better than a madhouse.

The break in the monotony of daily footfaring proved agreeable. It
suited one well to camp for a space in that quaint town, isolate in the
heart of an enchanted land, with which one was in turn enchanted, and
contemplate soberly the gr