ROCAMADOUR

Of all that strange limestone country which forms the southern part of the central French mountain group I suppose the best known point is Rocamadour, yet travel does not reach it very largely even now, and probably such travellers as do go to it carry away with them the impression that it is unique. For the railway or the car takes them for the most part to other lands immediately, and few of them indeed go northward and eastward up into that high, half-desert country with its deep cañons and ancient mountain towns.

To face page 145.]

Yet Rocamadour is only one of perhaps half-a-hundred examples of the way in which man, for innumerable centuries, has used the physical character of the upper Dordogne basin; and if you wander about that part of the world on foot—which is much the best way—you will carry away the impression of one village and castle and shrine after another, clinging to precipitous crags which overhang the waters in every valley.

To go down the Dordogne itself and make any excursion to right or left is a sufficient experience, and from such a position Rocamadour is only a few miles up a lateral valley to the south; but, as I shall say, it is not the best way. Originally Rocamadour—in historical times at least—was not a fortress but a shrine. As a fortress it would have had no very great value, for, sheerly precipitous as it is on the western side, the approach from the east is over an open plain without defensive value. In other words, Rocamadour is nothing but the jutting cape of a cliff; but the fact that it began as a shrine has made it what it is. The fact that the shrine was half-way up the precipice, beginning presumably as a hermitage, roughly sheltered by the overhanging rock, compelled the building of inns for pilgrims, and the establishment of shops for providing their necessities, and all that goes with them. They were compelled to choose the very boulders of the cliff face, clinging to them precariously, having steep steps for their village ways, and for their only street one very narrow levelled edge of mountain road, perhaps a third of the way up the steep.

It is this display of miniature miracles in construction and primitive engineering on a cliff face which lends all its character to the famous village—for village it now is, though in the Middle Ages it must rather have been a small town during the height of its fame.

TRADITION), ON THE TERRACED PLATFORM OF THE SHRINE.

To face page 146.]

The shrine is dedicated to Our Lady and has been so as far back as we can go; but a legend, historically unsupported, gives it an origin either earlier or later than the true one. As the legend runs, the Zaccheus of the Gospels wandered here after persecution in Palestine and built his hermitage half-way up the sheer side of the rock. The certain truth is, that you find a shrine widely visited, and with the name of St. Amadour attached to it, just as the Dark Ages break into the light of the Middle Ages at the time of the Crusades, and that its origin is then already lost in an immense antiquity. It is possible that this antiquity stretches back for years beyond the beginnings of our civilisation—or that of Rome. The heart of the shrine is a subterranean chapel—as at Chartres, and as at the Souterraine, some days away to the north; and we know how, all over Europe, the shrines of pagan antiquity were taken on by Christendom. Although we have the name, Amadour, it tells us nothing. A vague guess has been made that it corresponds with a real historical personage, St. Amator, but of this there is no proof. It is to me half the fascination of Rocamadour that it goes back to the beginning of things—and beyond.

It is one of the places in Europe whose name has been revived, and such a thing is always pleasant to discover. An endless stream of pilgrims, kings, saints—among them was St. Dominic, came to give thanks long after for the victory of Muret—and populace passed through it during the vigour of the Middle Ages. It dried up with the final corruption of mediæval civilisation. The site became deserted and half forgotten. But in our own time, just within living memory, a Bishop of Cahors revived it, and his efforts had a more far-reaching result than he had hoped for. It was as though a lamp, in which the oil was believed exhausted, being relighted, should burn with a brilliant flame. Nothing pictorial, certainly nothing descriptive in writing, can give fully the individual effect of the place. The platform in front of the three superimposed chapels, the tall building of the monastery above, plastered to the rock, the castle well towards the summit, the narrow town hanging far below, the whole thing resembling a ladder on a natural outline of broken rock against the sky rather than the work of man.

Since the first effect of that vision is one of the most remarkable in Europe, I advise everyone who visits it to approach it in the particular manner which has been made most feasible through the advent of the railway. The approach should be across the edge of the _causse_ or plateau from the east, whether you journey on foot or by car, until you come to the little hamlet called Hospitalet at the edge of the cliff. There halt a moment, and instead of going forward to the edge (as yet you see nothing) turn somewhat to the left above the highroad which runs down to its tunnel through the rock. There, before you get to the tunnel, or just above it, the valley opens before you and the precipice of Rocamadour rises against the green distant hills: a cascade of building, or a clambering of stones, one upon the shoulders of another, mingling with and fretting the sheer rock, as the details of a Gothic ruin against the sky fret the main perpendicular line of it: a sight that no one who has seen it will forget, and which no one will feel so keenly who has come upon Rocamadour from the west or north. Most of the great shrines in Europe have this natural appeal of landscape—as you may test at Chartres if, again, you come in the right way from the Beauce by the William Gate—and perhaps it is only in our own age that this appeal has been overlooked. Perhaps in some future day it will be recaptured.