But
It Was Not Without A Pang That I Had So Decided.
For although I had
purchased a new cord, and made all as fast as I was able, I was yet
jealously uneasy lest the flaps should tumble out and scatter my effects
along the line of march.
My way lay up the bald valley of the river, along the march of Vivarais
and Gevaudan. The hills of Gevaudan on the right were a little more
naked, if anything, than those of Vivarais upon the left, and the former
had a monopoly of a low dotty underwood that grew thickly in the gorges
and died out in solitary burrs upon the shoulders and the summits. Black
bricks of fir-wood were plastered here and there upon both sides, and
here and there were cultivated fields. A railway ran beside the river;
the only bit of railway in Gevaudan, although there are many proposals
afoot and surveys being made, and even, as they tell me, a station
standing ready built in Mende. A year or two hence and this may be
another world. The desert is beleaguered. Now may some Languedocian
Wordsworth turn the sonnet into patois: 'Mountains and vales and floods,
heard YE that whistle?'
At a place called La Bastide I was directed to leave the river, and
follow a road that mounted on the left among the hills of Vivarais, the
modern Ardeche; for I was now come within a little way of my strange
destination, the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of the Snows.
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