The murmur of the rushing Dordogne mingled not unpleasantly with the impressions of dreams as I awoke. I got up and opened the small worm-eaten window-frame. High thatched roofs, not many yards in front, were covered with moss, which the morning rays, striking obliquely, painted the heavenly green of Beatrice's mantle. Down the narrow road goats were passing, followed by a sunburnt girl with a barge-like wooden shoe at the end of each of her bare brown legs. The pure, life-giving air that entered by the window made the blood glow with a better warmth than that of sparkling wine. I soon went outside to see something of the place which I had entered in the darkness.
I found that the village was built partly in the bottom of the gorge and partly on one of its craggy sides. Closely hemmed in by rocks and high hills overgrown with forest was a bright and fertile little valley, with abundance of pear and walnut trees, luxuriant cottage-gardens, and little fields by the flashing torrent, where shocks of lately-cut buckwheat stood with their heads together waiting for the warm September hours to ripen their black grain.
Many of the houses were half hidden in leafy bowers. I threaded my way between these towards some ivy-draped fragments of an ancient priory upon a mass of rock much overgrown with brambles glistening with blackberries and briars decked with coral-red hips. Before descending to the road and beginning the day's journey I indulged for a little while the musing mood of the solitary wanderer in the grassy burying-ground on the edge of the cliff.
I started for Bort ere the intensely blue sky began to pale before the increasing brilliancy of the sun. The road ran along the bottom of the deep valley, where there was change of scene with every curve of the Dordogne. A field of maize showed how different was the climate here from that of the bleak plateau above the deep rift in the rocks. I stopped beside a little runnel that came down from the wooded heights to pick some flowers of yellow balsam, and while there my eye fell upon a splendid green lizard basking in the sun. Here was another proof of the warm temperature of the valley, notwithstanding its altitude. As I went on I skirted long fields of buckwheat upon the slope, but reaching only a little way upwards. The white waxen flowers had turned, or were turning, rusty; but what a variety of beautiful colour was on the stems and leaves! Greens and yellows passed into carmine, purple, and burnt sienna. A field of ripening buckwheat has a charm of warm colour that gladdens the eye, especially when the morning or evening sunshine is upon it. But this glow of many tints was a sure sign of approaching autumn; so, too, were the reddened stalks of persicaria, filling the dry ditches by the wayside.
