Free What the Traveller Saw by Eric Newby Page B

past deserted villages and abandoned terrace fields to the mouth of the Tunnel du Marquaires, which burrows through the Cévennes watershed. This was the divide for the weather, too. Overhead it was as if the master chef was stirring a pot au feu. From it a long descent to Racoules on the Tarnon where there was a pleasant-looking camping place and an equally pleasant little inn close by.
    Then on down the Tarnon to the little town of Florac at itsjunction with the Tarn, with the cliffs of the high plateau of the Causse Méjean ( causse being a high plateau) looming over it – a good place for shopping but too many cars (even in 1965). Then up the Tarn, now very beautiful and peaceful with many unorganized places for camping which you would not be allowed to use today; and then up the valley of the Mirals river with heather-covered hills rising above it.
    Here, we met a young woman who said we could camp down by the river, where there was a water meadow with apple trees growing in it. Hidden under a cliff, there was a disused mill house with the date 1718 over the door, built with huge blocks of stone, the interior all shrouded in cobwebs.
    Weather now very threatening, with clouds like giant black puffballs dead overhead. Pitched tent on little mound in the water meadow. No point in being washed away. In the mill house Wanda cooked duck in wine, ratatouille from previous evening and stewed blackberries with windfall apples, followed by a goat cheese from a village at the head of the valley. Fine if you like goat’s cheese.
    SATURDAY Woke to find that the mound with the tent on it was now an island. Waded to mill for breakfast. Then set off on foot in showery weather up the steep side of a ridge between the valleys of the Mirals and the Briançon. Strong wind at the top. To the southwest black rain clouds were pouring over the edge of the Causse Méjean. Deep down below us, in the valley of the Briançon, there was a minute village, its houses built of brown stone and with slate roofs, now shiny with rain. Higher up, the tributaries of the Briançon reached up to stony crests like long green veins and to the east-northeast the Mirals fell away into the valley in a long, white plume; while from north to south the Cévennes rose and fell, more like a rough sea than a mountain range.
    We climbed round the head of a valley to a village set amongst tor-like rocks. Inside the houses, some of which hadonly recently been abandoned, there were fireplaces with cowled chimney pieces, huge dressers, old cordial bottles bearing the names of long-extinct firms, mid-nineteenth-century religious books and tracts (the people in this region were ardent Protestants), calendars of the 1900s, little round boxes full of buttons, old coats with braided lapels and suits of velveteen (one with a family of mice living in its pockets) and, upstairs, mounds of bedding, all surprisingly clean, mountain boots and strange wardrobes that resembled the bodies of old stage coaches.
    Every house was deserted, except one. Inside it a woman of fifty or sixty was sitting by an open fire. She and her husband were the last occupants. Before the last war forty people had lived here. She was lonely, she said, but she didn’t like towns or cities.
    A white-washed rock, part of the mountain, protruded into the room. In one corner there was a big double bed. Homemade sausages hung from hooks in the ceiling. Outside, on a wooden platform, undercover, was all their gear: saws, felling axes and sledges for bringing the wood in from the forests.
    Back at the camp we ate sausages made with herbs, beans with oil and vinegar, goat’s cheese and a fruit tart bought in Florac.
    SUNDAY An impressive, windswept dawn, then rain. Breakfast was scrambled eggs, stewed apples, bread and the black honey.
    Then we climbed to one of the villages we had seen the previous day. Only three houses were occupied in this one. Some of the children had curious pop-eyes.
    After this, in the Land