This gully was the precipitous bed of a stream; I clanked down
it - thousands of feet - warily; I reached the valley, and at last, very
gladly, came to a drain, and thus knew that I approached a town or
village. It was St Ursanne.
The very first thing I noticed in St Ursanne was the extraordinary
shape of the lower windows of the church. They lighted a crypt and ran
along the ground, which in itself was sufficiently remarkable, but
much more remarkable was their shape, which seemed to me to approach
that of a horseshoe; I never saw such a thing before. It looked as
though the weight of the church above had bulged these little windows
out, and that is the way I explain it. Some people would say it was a
man coming home from the Crusades that had made them this eastern way,
others that it was a symbol of something or other. But I say -
LECTOR. What rhodomontade and pedantry is this talk about the shape of
a window?
AUCTOR. Little friend, how little you know! To a building windows are
everything; they are what eyes are to a man. Out of windows a building
takes its view; in windows the outlook of its human inhabitants is
framed. If you were the lord of a very high tower overlooking a town,
a plain, a river, and a distant hill (I doubt if you will ever have
such luck!), would you not call your architect up before you and say -
'Sir, see that the windows of my house are _tall, narrow, thick_, and
have a _round top to them'?_
Of course you would, for thus you would best catch in separate
pictures the sunlit things outside your home.
Never ridicule windows. It is out of windows that many fall to their
deaths. By windows love often enters. Through a window went the bolt
that killed King Richard. King William's father spied Arlette from a
window (I have looked through it myself, but not a soul did I see
washing below). When a mob would rule England, it breaks windows, and
when a patriot would save her, he taxes them. Out of windows we walk
on to lawns in summer and meet men and women, and in winter windows
are drums for the splendid music of storms that makes us feel so
masterly round our fires. The windows of the great cathedrals are all
their meaning. But for windows we should have to go out-of-doors to
see daylight. After the sun, which they serve, I know of nothing so
beneficent as windows. Fie upon the ungrateful man that has no
window-god in his house, and thinks himself too great a philosopher to
bow down to windows! May he live in a place without windows for a
while to teach him the value of windows. As for me, I will keep up the
high worship of windows till I come to the windowless grave. Talk to
me of windows!
Yes. There are other things in St Ursanne. It is a little tiny town,
and yet has gates. It is full of very old houses, people, and speech.
It was founded (or named) by a Bear Saint, and the statue of the saint
with his bear is carved on the top of a column in the market-place.
But the chief thing about it, so it seemed to me, was its remoteness.
The gorge of the Doubs, of which I said a word or two above, is of
that very rare shape which isolates whatever may be found in such
valleys. It turns right back upon itself, like a very narrow U, and
thus cannot by any possibility lead any one anywhere; for though in
all times travellers have had to follow river valleys, yet when they
come to such a long and sharp turn as this, they have always cut
across the intervening bend.
Here is the shape of this valley with the high hills round it and in
its core, which will show better than description what I mean. The
little picture also shows what the gorge looked like as I came down on
it from the heights above.
In the map the small white 'A' shows where the railway bridge was, and
in this map, as in the others, the dark is for the depth and the light
is for the heights. As for the picture, it is what one sees when one
is coming over the ridge at the north or top of the map, and when one
first catches the river beneath one.
I thought a good deal about what the Romans did to get through the
Mont Terrible, and how they negotiated this crook in the Doubs (for
they certainly passed into Gaul through the gates of Porrentruy, and
by that obvious valley below it). I decided that they probably came
round eastward by Delemont. But for my part, I was on a straight path
to Rome, and as that line lay just along the top of the river bend I
was bound to take it.
Now outside St Ursanne, if one would go along the top of the river
bend and so up to the other side of the gorge, is a kind of subsidiary
ravine - awful, deep, and narrow - and this was crossed, I could see, by
a very high railway bridge.
Not suspecting any evil, and desiring to avoid the long descent into
the ravine, the looking for a bridge or ford, and the steep climb up
the other side, I made in my folly for the station which stood just
where the railway left solid ground to go over this high, high bridge.
I asked leave of the stationmaster to cross it, who said it was
strictly forbidden, but that he was not a policeman, and that I might
do it at my own risk.
