In the vast caverns and grottoes of its walls, great quantities of
flint implements and fossils, human and animal, have been discovered. A
collection of these may be seen in the museum of Mende.

The Causses, owing to their isolated position, may be said to have
escaped a history. The great wave of religious warfare that devastated
the Cevennes in the Middle Ages passed them by. Only here and there on
the skirts of Sauveterre, near Mende, and of the Causse Noir, near
Millau, as we have seen, are relics of feudal times. Close around,
under the very shadow of these vast promontories, cresting the borders
of the Tarn and the green heights between Millau and Mende, ruined
strongholds and chateaux abound. The Causse itself enjoyed immunity
alike from ferocious seigneurs and still more ferocious theologian
bandits, seeking, as they put it, the salvation of their neighbours'
souls. The merciless Calvinist leader, Merle, who burnt, pillaged, and
depopulated Mende; the equally merciless quellers of the Camisard
revolt, emissaries of Louis XII., were tempted by no more prey to
penetrate these solitudes.

Were they, indeed, peopled at all? Was the so-called capital of
Sauveterre even in existence? Who can answer the questions? Nor is it
easy to determine when the entire region first fell under the
observation of French geographers, and found at last a name and a place
on the map of France.

Arthur Young, the most curious and accurate traveller of his time,
brought, moreover, into contact with the best informed Frenchmen of the
day, had evidently never heard of any portion of the Gevaudan, as the
Lozere was then called, at all answering to the Causses. But a French
traveller before alluded to--himself without doubt stimulated by the