T. xix. 1892.]

This bluff is called La Roche S. Christophe. It arrests attention at
once, for half-way up it is furrowed horizontally as though worked by a
giant's tool. If the visitor approaches the cliff, he will find that
the masses of rock that have fallen from above, as well as others that
have formed spurs, have been extensively worked to form town walls,
gateways, a church, a monastery, and dwelling-houses.

One gateway, bored through the rock, has a guard-room or sentinel's
watch-chamber scooped out of a pinnacle. But not a roof remains, not a
living soul is to be seen in the street, not a huxter's stall in the
market-place, only tiles strewn about and white rocks blackened with
smoke show that man lived there.

By a flight of stairs cut in the rock, the visitor can ascend to the
furrow in the face of the cliff, and there he finds that the whole has
been elaborately utilised. There are chambers excavated in the chalk
that were formerly closed by wood partitions, with recesses for beds,
cupboards, seats--clearly the bedrooms of ladies. The grooves into
which the planks were fitted can be made out. Doors were fitted into
rocky rebates to move on their hinges, the hinges being round
prolongations of the door frame turning in holes sunk in floor and
roof. The kitchen is there, the bakehouse with its oven; the guard-room
with its benches for the troopers, cisterns, store-chambers, closets,
cellars, a chapel, and the latrines. All but the last are on a level in
one long row, with the cliff descending precipitately from the gallery
that precedes the apartments and gave communication between them and
which, in part, had been widened by means of a wooden balcony and
railing. The chapel, if that be the walled structure in a hole of the