The SARAPHINA MOSEY Guest Writers Anthology

From A Cevennes Notebook

By R. Genn

A traveler trades his laptop for a backpack and a small notebook--and walks, with a friend, along the Robert Louis Stevenson Trail, in Central France.

My friend Robin Bridgeman and I had been planning this walking tour for some time. For the glory of France he started calling himself M Ponthomme. (Bridge man--Pont homme) He's wearing a blue beret and could pass as a son of De Gaulle. He's the easy going, one thing at a time, good to be alive type. We have hiked together in less civilized places, and his optimism and good nature leavens every step. For him, pretty well everything is perfect. He looks at the darkening skies and says: "Encroyable!"

*

We start our tour at the summit of Col de Finiels at 9 AM, on October 2. The elevation here is 1541 meters and it’s blowing hard. Bleak, sleet, lichens, moss, heather, old stone markers--these are the first words in my notebook. The wind pushes black clouds over the peak of Mt. Lozere to the west. An ice-fog explains that this trip is a poor idea. Ponthomme and I are in good spirits. We enter an old barracks--a stone building which at one time has undoubtedly offered shelter to escaping Protestants. This is the homeland of the Camisards, an early sect that was driven to sanctuary in remote places. We could stay here, get a fire going in the stern old fireplace--but we press on in the storm toward Le Chalet. We are heading down--the temperature improves, the climate becomes almost pleasant--then the sun comes out. At Malavielle a white Pomeranian dog follows us. After a while I tell the dog, in English, to go, and point back up the hill where it came from. The dog runs, looking back over his shoulder. He trots on home. It's not language--it's tone of voice and body language that matters.

*

There’s not many cars around here. Nowadays they seem to build cars for boulevards--cars that fit people like swoopy bathingsuits--all curvy and high on the thigh. Cevennes vehicles are most often farm ones, square--flashing-light tractors, their drivers sticking up and out of them and looking down at you with some condescension. They're into practical things--like manure spreaders.

*

Up on the Grand Raddonnee 44-68, we turn left onto GR 7. These are the code-names for the walking trails which crisscross all over France. We have a Dejeuner sur l'herbe on the silver groundsheet, protected from wind by high brooms--saucisse, cheese, apple. We are on the soft land above le Bleymard, fields plowed and fields fallow, copses, spinneys. Flocks of sheep move like amoebas on the distant hillsides. This requires a sketch, so I lay out my paints after lunch and make a small painting while Ponthomme takes a short walk. I realize I have far too much white paint for the trip--it’s a weight in my backpack--so I secretly squeeze out a bit under a bush.

*

Le Bleymard lies nestled in its private valley, its slate roofs glistening. There’s an ancient mine-site with caved-in Lozere slate roofs and hooks for ladders, home for a pair of magpies. On the way down to le Bleymard there’s a mouse-like Modestine in a field with some sheep. "A nice little ass," says M Ponthomme. We turn into the gloomy church and find it is heated by one votive candle, and ten degrees colder than outside.

There's a young man in silent communion, his skin translucent like wax, his fingers meet perfectly at their tips. It’s as if no one need know him, or touch him--his body seems armored, his soul attempting purity and peace. Perhaps he is trying to come to terms with his passions and their Creator. Who is there with him to understand?

*

More rain and sleet as we arrive cold and wet at the Hotel "la Remise" after four hours walking. The concierge and the bar are jumping with cats. It's 1.30 and the guests are dining--so we have to wait an hour in the bar for someone to have time to let us in the room. A pair of middle-aged Swiss hikers, full museli, come in, order grand cafe, cut up their own cheeses, apples, crunch noisy crackers. Cats watch us all, as if we are giving them a benefit.

Finally the room. No heat. "Vite, Vite," the owner says when I ask for the third time. "We are very busy at this time of day, don't you see--with our guests, it's a bad time."

"We too are guests," I point out, but it seems to lose something in the translation. The owner finally throws a switch somewhere in the bowels of the hotel and it's like a little old lady breathing on my leg. The bed is so cold it feels wet.

The mystery of the French toilet--it's central plunger with a mind of its own, and its stunning, delirious cascade.

I'm feeling quite mal. Shivering, chills, cold, running a temperature, everything stiff--pills and sleep. My Bulgarian hiking boots which saw me to the top of Mount Snowden in 1981 have given me hot-spots. Now I'm into spinning, a long-time floating, a wonderful thought comes to mind, then I lose it.

*

In the morning we leave le Bleymard at 9 am and I'm feeling fine. Cow bells in the foggy fields are all tuned differently so a farmer can watch the herd in his head. There are blue-bells on the Robert Louis Stevenson trail. Are they the result of seed scattered here by Scottish enthusiasts? Church bells ring from the village far below--and a loud flat one from the slates of the village of Les Alliers--where most, if not all of the women have left, they say, leaving only a few old men behind. As we pass one of the old men fiddles with a dead Peugeot, the car’s face still grinning from under a tarpaulin.

Up through the misty forest of Goudet to the highest altitude of 1413 meters by 1 PM, then over and down into the valley villages. Coniferous gives way to deciduous. A pine forestry--managed and tended. Wild mushrooms and the occasional gatherer slipping mysteriously away into the wood with his basket. The commonest fungi on this day (October 3) are the fly amanita, brilliant red-orange in the somber wood. There’s also inky caps, puffballs, boletes.

Now at the summit of the Foret de Goulet. This is the haunt of the "Beast of Gevaudin"--a deranged wolf which terrorized the area in the late seventeen hundreds, consuming, among other victims, children and the most beautiful shepherdesses. The beast was finally dispatched by the Royal Guards of Versailles--it's miserable body paraded around the countryside.

We decide we need walking sticks. M Ponthomme carefully selects his, cuts it down and fashions it to his liking. I wait for one to come along, and it does, and it works almost as well.

*

The backpack has a paint-box and panels, cheese, crackers, sausages, camera, notebook and pen, fresh water, chocolate, mystery emergency food for two days, bread, utensils, knife, change of underwear, honey, extra socks, moleskin, maps, reading, flashlight, medicine kit including pills, vitamins, iron, garbage bags, personal stuff, money.

When the owl and the pussycat went to sea in that beautiful pea-green boat, they took some money and plenty of honey, wrapped up in a five pound note. We're traveling light with extra money--in reaction, I guess, to times of traveling light with hardly any money at all. The honey has started to get the money sticky--but that doesn't bother anybody up here. Walking--you don't really need that much--unless there's an emergency. A

fangy dog with a serious growl tears out at us. With pleasantries we convince the dog to be pleasant. "You can buy a dog but you can't buy the wag of a dog's tail."

*

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to his friend Sidney Colvin in the introduction to Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes: "Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his meaning; they find private messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude, dropped for them in every corner."

*

We join the D120 and shortcut down the Moure de la Fontaine and, passing a gouffre (quarry) alive with wagtails, emerge out of the wood near the village of l'Estampe as a Mystere jet on low maneuvers cuts the sky into two pieces, its sound following like a clap of thunder. We stare into empty farmyards, deserted chicken-coops, vacant rabbit-pens. Cut hardwood lies in piles ready to bring life to the chimneys. A jogger, bobbling in his

plastic shorts, suddenly appears and passes us, as out of place as an alien, and as surprised to see us as we him.

*

Beside rolling fields of recently shorn wheat and dry corn we follow the route of the railway and on down an old cart-tracked draille into Mirandol--a village lying literally under the great arches of a railway bridge. Then we climb up under the tracks and puff steeply past a graveyard to the village of Chasserades where we find and move into the Hotel des Sources and meet a terrier the size and look of a furry caterpillar. Here, as at le Bleymard, we're the only guests, except for diners who materialize from somewhere and disappear after. Dinner is Terrine du Pays, Beef Bourbignon, leek, endive, lentil, creme caramel. Items in the dining room: prayer stool, cigar-mold, pepper grinder, ox yoke, rusted flintlock, fire-blower, powderhorn.

*

The waitress at the Hotel des Sources is a tall, almost awkward woman of about twenty-five, with unencumbered breasts and a plain and rather average, country-looking face, more crevassed than dimpled, which comes to life when she smiles. She stands erect, walks quickly, energetically tosses her head, pleases herself, calls coquettishly over her shoulder to special guests, and brings laughter to and from the unseen cooks. With the speed of Cotes du Tarn we get to know each other a bit. In French I inquire if she has any bad habits. She replies in English: "If you can become a not smoking, as I have, you can gradually overcome and make go away any of your bad habit." We establish that we are an artist and an airline pilot out for a walk. She’s quite interested in the pilot part.

"I'm a success at flossing," says M Ponthomme. He tells me he thinks he wants to learn to paint--he thinks it might prove to be a reasonable and enjoyable way to add to his income. With the aid of cognac I spend some time explaining the nuances of the color wheel. The waitress speaks quietly to some of the other guests and we notice them looking at us.

*

We depart the Hotel des Sources at 9.30 AM with fog rolling and blowing into the front door. The wind wails in the eaves. In seconds the hotel has disappeared. It's raining and we can't see anything but the road around our feet. Water drips from the end of my nose. My eyelashes are wet, the camera lens, my glasses--fogged. In the village of Cheballier, silent yellow lights, then a yellow Postes truck emerges slowly--practically in the windshield I wave it down--the woman stops and slides back a suspicious window. She accepts my postcards through the slots of her glass, checks each wet article for adequate postage, revs up, lurches, and disappears into the fog. "A person of insufficient intelligence would be liable to put on insufficient postage," I'm thinking she's thinking.

Further on, the fog clears enough to reveal yellow-suited mushroom gatherers moving in the bush a few feet away--their sticks knock the water off trees and onto us--they register their finds to one another with grunts. I identify Hyndnum imbricatum, Coprinus comatus,(inky cap) Rusula viricens, and three different Amanitas. Ironically, poisonous mushrooms are the most common here, having been neglected.

The moisture lends mystery and beauty to the autumnal wood beside the l'Allier's stream--its source not very far away in the hills. Jays and blackbirds sit in low branches, fluffed out in disgust. The fog is clearing and we contend with a dedicated rain through which I recognize a place I've been before--an arbor beside the river where once in the Alfa I stopped for a sun-speckled lunch. Now every leaf is wet.

We shoulder on through the day. It's wring-out-your-socks wet when we enter the bar of the hotel at La Bastide Puylaurens. The establishment is run by two similar, dull-eyed sisters, fortyish, one dyed red and one white. The floor of the bar is polished marble, the sisters slip and slide on the water we've brought in with us. They spill our coffee, mop up with little enthusiasm, and bring us replacements.

*

Ponthomme decides to hike up the hill to the monastery of Notre Dame des Neiges. I wander around La Bastide. Leaving my cigar in the wet vestibule, I drip into the church at the same time as an elderly, long-robed Trappist who has walked down from the monastery. Together, we remove our headgear, his lies easily behind like a day-pack. In turn, we both check the bulletin board and the itinerary of the local priests. There is not enough clergy to give more than one or two services a month in most of the local towns. Priests around here cover a lot of ground--I suspect the villages with several services are those with elderly populations.

The church is dark except for several small stained-glass windows with modern abstract designs which slowly disclose their figures. I begin to see the interior, a marble Mary stands above me--over there, a white Jesus, same size, teetering. From behind the altar, the ticking of a clock grows louder, then clearer. The monk, who has been sorting prayer-books at the back of the church now comes down the aisle and kneels in the pew in front of me. He does his rosary, prays briefly, sits back, scratches his small head a couple of times, strokes his bald patch with deliberation, unsmilingly notes my presence over his shoulder, and becomes still as if asleep. I feel he’s going to enter me into some great and permanent book. STRANGER FINDS SOLACE IN LOCAL CHURCH.

I rise and move slowly so as not to cause the floor to creak disrespectfully. I examine some of the dedications and memorials (Marie--merci). I dribble the center aisle, exit the groaning doorway, attempt to relight my moist cigar in the niche of the narthex, and drift back into sin.

*

Everything in La Bastide is for sale. An ancient hotel, its' sign "Le Gevaudin," fallen and caught on shutters, is in the grip of tall grasses and moss. A discotheque, all glass and glitz, a tarty afterthought hastily tacked on to the hotel's backside in the hope of revival, is silent, its windows rubbed white for the convenience of graffittists.

*

Out the window of our hotel, the kind of chirping noise a grandmother is permitted to make when she walks in the street with a toddler. Inside, the moist, musty odor of old bedding, toweling, the inside-smell of a well-used vacuum cleaner, bucherie drifting up from the kitchen. A cross-eyed cleaning-lady thumps in the warrens of the hotel, slamming doors, bashing a mop in and out of a bucket. It's hard to tell which way she's

looking as she passes my door.

I set up my paints on the radiator and paint what I see out the window.

*

I appreciate time alone and the vow of silence that goes with it. My eyes can be more selfish, indulgent. Time is to be measured. The formerly silent monks at Notre Dame des Neiges are of the Cistercian order--they rise at four and divide their day into clearly defined segments which are marked and begun by seven offices: Vigils, Lauds, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, Compline. They're dedicated to work in the fields, the preparation of wines and cheeses, and a certain amount of ecclesiastical study. When M Ponthomme returns from the monastery he says; "Those chaps up the hill have escaped from the world and lead a happy life of avoidance."

"They understand time," I say.

I think that rather than dividing life up into little time-things--it might also be possible to divide it into little thing-things, like paintings, or photographs, or paragraphs. All not need be brilliant--they need only to be.

They should have a distinct form, and some regularity, and be positive, beautiful, empowering, categorized and accessible.

*

At dinner we befriend a talkative and demonstrative lady at the next table. She is about 75, with good ankles and a swish yellow and black dress which makes her look like a thin bee. She has buried her husband several years back and is now regularly taking the baths up at les Bains. She stands up in front of our table and gives us a general idea of how and where they give her massages. I think she may sting, but she graciously points out that we are using the wrong forks.

*

I have a poor sleep at La Bastide. Perhaps I'm not getting enough exercise. Perhaps it's the moisture. My calves and thighs are stiff and sore. Tomorrow I'll buy some liniment. I miss my computer. For some reason I awake in the middle of the night and write in my notebook: "I now have a friend who travels along with me."

*

In the morning a Scottish couple are in the cafe. We exchange the usual pleasantries--it's nice to speak English to strangers. "We're doing the Robert Louis Stevenson Trail," I tell them. Their faces are blank. "Have you heard of Robert Louis Stevenson?" I ask the Scots with a smile. She makes an incredible face as if embarrassed for Scotland. "Of course," she says, "hasn't everybody?" It's the trail they haven't heard about. I keep talking, dedicated to the shedding of light. "In 1878 RLS came through here with a donkey by the name of Modestine, and wrote a book about it called `Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes.'"

"I've heard about it," she says. "He was kidnapped or something, wasn't he?"

M Ponthomme walks briskly by the window. "My friend is in good shape," I say.

The Scots welcome the change of subject.

"He's the kind of fellow who, after a days' hike, likes to go for a walk," I say.

"Goodness," she says. "Such a lot of trouble."

*

We take a taxi for 96 francs to the top of the hill beyond Luc, cutting about 20 km, much of it uphill, out of our walk. We emerge in the high country near the small farming community of Lespradels, where I have lingered and looked around on previous trips. The weather is now clearing and we head down into the gentle and deserted valley of the Langourou, one of my favorite spots.

*

I always felt there was a poem or a book in that pen. It was my first valuable pen--a Cross--I treasured it--I don’t think it worked any better than any other pen--but it was made of gold.

I lost it here when my son and I were striking camp in the dark early one morning three years ago. I didn't discover my loss until I had gone sixty kilometers, and, having a schedule, carried on.

Now, after three years, I'm searching the spot where the pen went missing. I was washing my dish that evening at the edge of the Langrouou, and I heard something like the sound of a falling spoon--I find the spot and kneel as I did before on the same rocky ledge and re-enact my movements. I lift up leaves from under the running water and shift small rocks and pebbles like a miner at paydirt, and, after some time, like many a disappointed miner, find only a few shiny stones--fool's gold.

Some fisher, laying in a line, has noticed and taken my pen. A thirsty shepherd or cowherd has it in the pocket of his overalls. What is its power now to me? Is it gold of my sentiment? If it were a Bic or a Scripto would I be so unhappy at its permanent loss? Perhaps, saddest of all, my book, wherever the pen now lies, has not yet been taken out of it.

*

On the hot climb up and away from the valley of the Langourou we are seen by gendarmes who pass us by in a truck, then pull over, and wait for us to come up to them. They look at our passports and punch us into their dashboard computer to no unpleasant result. "Bon marche," they tell us. They carry on. I should have reported "la plume perdue."

This is the place where Stevenson, on Wednesday September 25, 1878, going the other way with his bleeding and contrary Modestine, and after a miserable night lost and finally camped in the wet forest, wrote the quintessential lines of travel: "For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off the feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints."

Grey, blotchy-stemmed leafy trees spread their limbs for the black rooks to fuss at their crotches. I've noticed that in the poorer regions of France there are fewer birds, and those that are around are wary. In places like this they eat 'em--it's a simple as that. All the larks have been made into tongues.

*

We climb down from high places and enter the village of Cheylard l'Eveque, near where Stevenson lingered and warmed himself in a humble farmhouse. Today, it's not much different; rustic, punk slate, some nobler stone, smoke curling from a few chimneys, its three-pointed chapel shrine to Our Lady of all Graces atop a nearby hill. Workmen, cigarettes in their mouths, are amused at the presence of strangers. They are replacing the roof on an ancient building in the center of the village, and laugh and tell jokes about "les anglais." "A chicken coop," says the woman who serves us coffee on her porch. Her father ("Pere est 87 ans") sits, watching the roofers. He changes his position frequently as if he has something uncomfortable in his chest. Then he notices that we are studying our maps. "You don't need a map for anywhere around here," he says.

*

We proceed through wild high country, bush and heath with occasional Charloais cattle, a fork-tailed kite overhead, on through a dark Medieval deciduous forest, then a sun-spattered leafy pathway with Knights Templar on horseback and barefoot, brown-hooded monks on their way to the Holy Land. We come to Fouzilhic ("encroyable") and Fouzilhac ("formidable") where Stevenson was truly lost in the dark--these two villages by ancient lichened-bouldered walls under weatherworn wayside crosses. Bright sunshine with fresh cool winds and rolling cumuli to the east accompanied by distant thunder. We lunch beside old ox carts and watch falcons lazily pitch against the wind, then, like a shot, plummet out of sight--only to be seen a few minutes later crossing the same territory and doing the same thing.

Below Fouzilhac we are for a while lost in dense furze and a licheny pine forest. The thunder is nearer. Keeping the sun at our backs as best we can in the growing, towering clouds, we continue northing, and we come out of the forest to close and dramatic lightning. After an hour we arrive wet in St Flour de Mercoire. Barn doors and coops are being shut--ozone permeates the air, a condiment to the manure of the town. Shutters are drawn on great rippling thunder as we enter a primitive covered outdoor laundry to wait it out. Suddenly the sky opens and a terrific deluge begins. Buildings a hundred meters away disappear as hailstones the size of peas bounce on the roadway and down the roofs, filling potholes like bowls of white lentils. The culverts, which were relatively dry only a few minutes before, now run like rivers.

In a half hour it's all over. Like graduates we step out into the sun and convince a farm-woman (40 cows, 20 hectares) to phone a taxi to take us into Langogne. We wait at a sunlit statue depicting a saint with a dog with bread in its mouth. As the townspeople open their shutters we are picked up by a Mercedes.

The young taxi-man, all pimples and callow, turns out also to be the owner of a hotel and we soon find ourselves shown to a room with a bathtub--the first for a few days. I re-heat my bones while impervious Ponthomme goes for a brisk walk.

*

Dinner in Langogne is at a chanced-upon restaurant in the main street. A push-faced black pussycat works my leg and is watched by a marvelously languid bull-mastif in complete dishabille in the comfortable chair next to me. From time to time the dog groans with boredom or doleful disgust at the cats' presence, and shifts to another position. Aperitifs make us jolly as we review our gentlemen’s ramble. We enthusiastically consume our wild mushrooms and pork, with a variety of seasonable vegetables. We are loud with the wine of the monks. The women in this area, no matter how poorly their legs have turned out, wear tights--very often in leopard, and we

discuss this. We discuss the lower body and the leopard legs of our waitress, which requires some of the larger adjectives. In a lull in the frivolity I ask M Ponthomme if he knows who's face is on the 500 franc note--I hold one up for examination. He doesn't know, but, in soft unison, "Pascal" creeps from around the room. Everyone has been listening. We get out the cards and silently play a few hands of gin rummy as everyone else gradually pays and goes.

*

In the hotel room I pry open the clam of my notebook and crawl into my head. Then someone enters the next room. I hear the voices of a couple, loud at first, then modulated, he, low voiced, understanding, a bit abrupt. She, silly, perhaps a bit drunk, at times flaring loud--she laughs a lot. Then...relative quiet, water runs, taps shudder, music. He clears his throat several times. Then they become active--there's a lot of movement going on, falling on the bed, giggling, bumping against the wall--my wall. Now she makes some little bleating noises--interspersed with his persistently understanding tone--I can't make out their words--I feel the thrust of their engagement, their energy. They set to the nub of their business--thumping the bed against my wall for at least twenty minutes--her voice rises several times. Then for a few minutes all is quiet, except for his occasional murmur. Then things start again in earnest. This time it's heavy, hard--he makes loud noises along with her. I want to bang on the wall. I take out my copy of `Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes' and read it aloud. I read...

"The sleeping-room (at Bouchet) was furnished with two beds. I had one; and I will own I was a little abashed to find a young man and his wife in the act of mounting into the other. This was my first experience of this sort; and if I am to always feel silly and extraneous, I pray God that it may be my last as well. I kept my eyes to myself, and know nothing of the woman except that she had beautiful arms, and seemed no whit embarrassed by my appearance. As a matter of fact, the situation was more trying to me than to the pair. A pair keep each other in countenance; it is the single gentleman who has to blush. But I could not help attributing my sentiments to the husband, and sought to conciliate his tolerance with a cup of brandy from my flask. He told me that he was a cooper of Alais travelling to St. Etienne in search of work, and that in his spare moments he followed the fatal calling of a maker of matches. Me he readily enough divined to be a brandy salesman."

The banging on the other side of the wall has abated somewhat, but there are still murmurs from both. I wonder what her arms are like--and what the gentleman does in life when he's not doing this, and whether we will ever meet.

*

In the morning we taxi to Pradelles, a high old village of six hundred inhabitants, a castle in ruins, roman walls, dogs that bark from behind doors, a black wooden virgin, and a market in progress. We invest in goat cheese.

On the hills nearby the black sheep of the high elevation are folded and nipped by enthusiastic dogs into a manageable omelette. Goitered farmers with red faces and prominent chins guide and beat their balky Renaults like mules. We proceed on foot in balmy conditions in the direction of Landos, through la Fagette, les Uffernets, le Mouteyre, le Malzieu, manured communities all. Hawks command the valleys from the air, thrushes and tits become invisible in the hedgerows, a dozen partridge spin out of the wheat-stubble. In the green valleys, rivulets through fields are swollen onto the grass. An old Percheron horse watches us along the road, slowly moving its head. M Ponthomme says; "I could get addicted to this."

*

We sit at the edge of a recently ploughed field--I take the paint-box out of my back-pack, squeeze paint, and do a Vincent of the view. It's one of those patterny subjects, ochres and greens, with a brooding dark patch of forest giving solidity to the distance. The hills of Gevaudin wander indistinctly and unimpressively behind in a recessive ultramarine. Then I start a small panel out of my head of a village we have come through--la Fagette--tile roofs in orange and sophisticated greys in the walls--all held together with a lead-in road and a copse beyond. M Ponthomme watches out of the corner of his eye--looking for the secret--he thinks I'm not letting him see what I'm doing on the palette. He suggests bushes and rose-hips for color in the foreground, and I put them in. While he cuts the goat cheese he tells me he thinks I haven't been giving him the full story. I try to give him the full story, but I can’t--some of it just flows without verbal knowledge. This is the last painting of this trip.

I put my paints away and we continue walking. There is a feeling of termination in the air--our destination is on the near horizon--and the kind of knowledge we have when ends are imminent--marriages, contracts, lives. Some things just end. The key to our joy has been the Institut Geographique National Blue Series maps--one centimeter equalling 250 meters. They offer a continuum of minor accomplishments and satisfactions, wayside crosses passed, villages met, summits taken. It's been fun to go off the end of one, finishing it like a puzzle, and to find your spot on the next. Maps go on forever.

*

This journey ends in a cafe in Landos, in the straight and prosperous farmland of Velay. I ask the waitress to call a taxi to take us to le Puy. We've traveled about 75 kilometers on foot in five days. Stevenson went 112 miles in twelve days, without benefit of taxi. Like him we have been hot and cold, wet and hungry. Sometimes too, we were lost or couldn't see where we were. More than once I was inconvenienced by not having all of my stuff--the stuff that a car permits at hand. More than once I appreciated the limitations and the simplicity of my backpack. Curiously, we have met no other Stevenson walkers anywhere on the trail.

M Ponthomme and myself are still the best of friends. We are in good spirits. It’s been a draw as to which of us has been the greater Modestine.