The sweat that
streamed from his face was brine upon his lips. For hours it was thus
with Duchemin, and in all that time he met never a soul. Once he saw
from a distance a lonely chateau overhanging another ravine; but it was
apparently only one more of the many ruins indigenous to that land, and
he took no step toward closer acquaintance.
Long after noon, sheer fool's luck led him to a hamlet whose mean
auberge served him bread and cheese with a wine singularly thin and
acid. Here he enquired for a guide, but the one able-bodied man in
evidence, a hulking, surly animal, on learning that Duchemin wished to
visit Montpellier-le-Vieux, refused with a growl to have anything to do
with him. Several times during the course of luncheon he caught the
fellow eyeing him strangely, he thought, from a window of the auberge.
In the end the peasant girl who waited on him grudgingly consented to
put him on his way.
In a rocky gorge, called the Rajol, a spot as inhumanly grotesque as a
nightmare of Gustave Dore's, with the heat of a pit in Tophet, he
laboured for hours. The hush of evening and its long shadows were on
the land when finally he scrambled out to the Causse again.
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