Beyond this village was a deep valley, the sides of which were covered with
chestnut-trees. On ascending the opposite hill, I took a by-path through a
steep wood, thinking to cut off a long turn of the hot and dusty road. It
led me into difficulties and bewilderment. The path disappeared, but I went
on. After climbing rocks densely overgrown with brambles, which left their
daggers in my skin, I reached the top of the hill, and saw before me a
desert of disintegrated rock or drift dotted over with low juniper bushes.
Although it was the middle of September, the sun blazed above me with the
ardour of July, and the rays were thrown back by the bare stones, on which
there was not a trace of moss, nor even lichen. These arid rocky places, so
characteristic of Southern France, have a poetry of their own that to me
is ever enticing. I love the stony wastes and their dazzling sun-glitter.
There I find something that approaches companionship in the prickly
juniper, the narcotic hellebore, and the acrid spurge. And these plants
likewise love the places where the world has remained unchanged by man. The
heat, however, was too great for me to linger upon this shadeless hill,
where every stone was warm, and the reflected glare was almost as blinding
as that of the sun itself, which seemed so near.

Having crossed another valley, after much casting about, I found the
highroad again. The altitude was considerable here, so that the view
embraced a wide expanse of the Correze and the department of the Lot, which
I was approaching. The scene was everything that an English landscape is
not. No soft verdure, no hedgerows setting memory astir with pictures of
the flowering may and the pink, clambering dog-rose gemmed with dew; no
lustrous meadow crossed by shadows thrown by ancient dreaming elms; no
flash from the briskly-flowing brook: no, nothing of this, but in its place
a parched and rugged land of hills or knolls, stony, wasteful, where for
countless ages the juniper, the broom, the gorse, and the heather have
disputed the sovereignty, the intervening valleys, timidly cultivated,