And now for a bit of the landscape. We have Gascony to our right, and Guienne to our left.
Here and there, then, particularly in Guienne, the Garonne is not unlike the tamer portions of the Rhine. The green vine-clothed banks rise into precipitous ridges, whitened by streaks of limestone cliff, cottages nestling in the crevices and ravines, and an occasional feudal tower crowning the topmost peak. The villages passed near the water's edge are doleful-looking places, ruinous and death-like; whitish, crumbling houses, with outside shutters invariably closed; empty and lonesome streets, and dilapidated piers, the stakes worn and washed away by the constant action of the river. Take Langon and Castres as specimens of these places: two drearier towns--more like sepulchres than towns--never nurtured owls and bats. They seem to be still lamenting the old English rule, and longing for the jolly times when stout English barons led the Gascon knights and men-at-arms on profitable forays into Limousin and Angoumais. Occasionally, however, we have a more promising and pleasing looking town. These, for the most part, are tolerably high up the river, and possess some curious and characteristic features. You will descry them, for instance, towering up from a mass of perpendicular cliffs; the open-galleried and bartizaned red houses, reared upon arches and pillars, rising from the rock; flights of stairs from the water's edge disappearing among the buildings, and strips of terraced gardens laid out on the narrow shelves and ledges of the precipice.
The ruins of old feudal castles are numerous on both sides of the river; and if the red mossy stone could speak, many a tale of desperate siege and assault it could, no doubt, tell--for these strongholds were perpetually changing masters in the wars between the French and the English and Gascons; and often, when peace subsisted between the crowns, were they attacked and harried by moss-trooping expeditions led by French Watts Fire-the-Braes, or by English Christies of the Clinthill. While, then, the steamer is slowly plodding her way up stream, turning reach after reach, and showing us another and yet another pile of feudal ruins, let us sit down here with Froissart beneath the awning, and try to gain some inkling into the warlike customs of the times when these thick-walled towers--no doubt built, as honest King James remarked, by gentlemen who were thieves in their hearts--alternately displayed the Lion Rampant and the Fleur-de-Lis.