In the interior of the church is a fifteenth-century group of seven
figures, representing the scene of the Holy Sepulchre; an admirable
composition, showing to what a high degree of excellence French
sculpture had attained even at the dawn of the Renaissance.




WAYFARING UNDERGROUND.


Upon the stony plateau above Roc-Amadour is a cavern well known in the
district as the Gouffre de Révaillon. It had for me a peculiar
attraction on account of the gloomy grandeur of the scene at the
entrance. When I saw it for the first time I understood at once the
supernatural horror in which the peasant has learnt to hold such
places. It responds to impressions left on the mind of the 'Stygian
cave forlorn,' the entrance to Dante's 'City of Sorrow,' and that
other cave where Aeneas witnessed in cold terror the prophetic fury of
the Sibyl.

This effect of gloom, horror and sublimity is the result of geological
conditions and the action of water, which together have produced many
similar phenomena in the region of the _causses_, but in no other
case, I believe, with such power in composing the picturesque. Imagine
an open plain which in the truly Dark Ages whereof man has had no
experience, but of whose convulsions he has learnt to read a little
from the book whose leaves are the rocks, cracked along a part of its
surface as a drying ball of clay might do, the fissure finishing
abruptly and where it is deepest in front of a mass of rock that