well, sunk in successive layers of secondary rock, looks as if it had
been regularly quarried; but men could never have had the motive for
giving themselves so much trouble. Did the rock fall in here? No
explanation is satisfactory. How it fills one with awe to look into
the depth while lying upon a slab of stone that stretches some
distance beyond the side of the pit! Bushes with twisted and fantastic
arms, growing, they or their ancestors, from time immemorial in the
clefts of the rock, reach towards the light, and the elfish
hart's-tongue fern, itself half in darkness, points down with frond
that never moves in that eternal stillness which all the winds of
heaven pass over, to a thicker darkness whence comes the everlasting
wail and groan of hidden water.

This horrid gulf being in the open plain, with not even a foot of
rough wall round it as a protection for the unwary, I asked the old
man if people had never fallen into it.

'Yes,' he answered, 'but only those who have been pushed by evil
spirits.'

He meant that only self-murderers had fallen into the Puit de Padirac.
'Pushed by evil spirits.' Perhaps this is the best of all explanations
of the suicidal impulse. Strong thoughts are sometimes hidden under
the simplicity of rustic expression. He told me the story of a man
who, having gone by night to throw himself into the Puit de Padirac,
came in contact with a tough old bush during his descent which held
him up. By this time the would-be suicide disliked the feeling of
falling so much that, so far from trying to free himself from the bush
and begin again, he held on to it with all his might and shrieked for
help. But as people who are not pushed by evil spirits give the Puit