We beached the canoe beside a meadow, opposite a spot where about twenty women were washing clothes, their noses very near the water. They were mightily surprised to see us suddenly arrive in our swift boat. All the heads came up together, and the rest went down.
We walked into a riverside inn, and there I made friends with the innkeeper over one or two bottles of beer--there was an innocent liquor so called on sale at Aubeterre. The _aubergiste_ was rather down on his luck, for some mill at which he had been employed had gone wrong financially, and the wheels thought it no longer worth while to turn round. He therefore undertook to show us the way to everything that ought to be seen at Aubeterre.
He led us up a steep winding road where the sun smote furiously, where there was no shade, and where the dust was so hot that it might have roasted an egg, if the person waiting for it was in no great hurry. We had gone a very little way, when Hugh proposed to return and mount guard over the boat, for whose safety he had become unreasonably anxious. On reaching the steep little town there was more shade, because the streets were narrow, but the rough pitching of cobble-stones was very bad for feet so sore as ours, and so swollen that the boots into which we managed to force them before leaving the river were now several sizes too small.
We stopped at the parish church, but not so long as I should have, had I been a lonely wayfarer without anybody to guide me. It is a delightful example of a Romanesque style that is found much repeated in Périgord, Angoumois, and the Bordelais. The great interest lies in the façade, which dates from the eleventh century. Here we have a large central portal, and on each side of it, what the architectural design supposes to be a smaller one, but which in reality is only a sham doorway. The slender columns of the jambs, and the archivolts filled in with little figures, sacred, fantastic, and grotesque, are there, as in connection with the central arch; but all this has only an ornamental purpose. The spectator who is at all interested in ecclesiastical architecture will examine with much delight the elaborate mouldings and the strangely-suggestive forms of men, beasts, birds, shapes fantastic and chimerical, which ornament these Romanesque doorways.