With the help of a local pork-butcher, who kept the key, I was able to
enter the towers of this gateway. In each was a guard-room of considerable
size, and the men-at-arms while on duty there evidently found that in time
of peace the hours lagged, for some of them had carved upon the wall with
their knives or daggers crucifixes and representations of the Virgin and
Child, all closely imitated from church sculpture, painting or window
decoration of the Gothic period. Many names are cut in Gothic character on
the same walls; a further proof that the vanity of man has ever sprouted in
much the same way as now. The antiquary, because he has his own prejudices,
perceives an abyss between the act of the Cockney tourist of to-day who
carves his name upon an old tower or a menhir, and that of a man who five
centuries ago, for no better reason than the other, left upon a guard-room
wall a similar record of his passage. The man of the present is a vulgar
defacer of interesting monuments, whereas he of the past added to their
interest, and prepared a pleasant little surprise for the archaeologist who
might walk that way a few centuries later.

Enough of the fortifications of Domme remains to show what a very strong
place it was in the Middle Ages. Much of the wall where the town was not
naturally defended by the high naked rock, forming a frightful precipice
that no besiegers would have attempted to scale, has been well preserved.
Standing upon some bastion of this rampart, with the deep valley far below
him and the sky above him, the wanderer may allow his fancy almost to
convince him that he is really standing upon some 'castle in the air.'
Of the many rock-perched towns of the South, this is one of the most
remarkable; although, with the exception of the fortifications, little
remains of archaeological interest.

According to the chronicles of Jean Tarde, a canon of the neighbouring
town of Sarlat, who wrote at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the