I returned to Bort, and as there were still about two hours of light left,
I crossed the river and went in search of the cascades, two or three
miles from the town, formed by the Rue in its wild impatience to meet the
Dordogne. When I was skirting the buckwheat fields of the valley in the
calm open country, there was a sweet and tender glow of evening sunshine
upon the purple-tinted sheaves standing with their heads together. The
Titan-strewn rocks felt it likewise with all their heather and broom. There
was no husbandman in the plain, no song of the solitary goat-girl, no creak
of the plough, no twitter even of a bird. It was not yet the hour when
Virgil says every field is silent, but the repose of nature had commenced.

The dusk was falling when I reached a silk-mill by the side of the Rue,
and passed up the deep gorge full of shadows, led by the sound of roaring
waters. A narrow path winding under high rocks of porphyritic gneiss
brought me to the cascade called the Saut de la Saule, where the river,
divided into two branches by a vast block, leaps fifteen or twenty feet
into a deep basin to whirl and boil with fury, then dashes onward down the
stony channel, to leap again into the air and fall into another basin.

[Illustration: THE VALLEY OF THE RUE.]

I reached a rock in the channel by means of a tree that had been laid
between it and the bank, and stood in the midst of the seething, broken
torrent, from which arose that saddening odour which water in wild
commotion gives forth when daylight is dying and the darkened trees stand
like mourning plumes. On either hand the forest-covered sides of the ravine
and their savage crags seemed to reach higher as they grew darker. Where
was I? There was a tree hard by that looked very like the infernal elm
beneath whose leaves the vain dreams cluster; but it was probably an oak.