Wonderful was that walk round the walls passing through the long procession of the towers. It was a veritable city of towers, moving like living figures as we moved, appearing in new groups between the houses, opening into vistas, falling back and reappearing.
It seemed as if those silent sentinels were trying to keep us always in view, stealing out cautiously from behind the buildings, crossing, falling back, making way for one another, with a sort of secret movement round the whole circle of their orbit.
There were great flights of steps corbelled out on the inner side of the ramparts, apparently to provide a means of descending to the city, and also of reaching certain points of the fortifications. There were gateways, barbicans, turrets, and a marvellous everchanging series of architectural groupings; walls, bulwarks, battlements.
Below were the outer walls, within which was a spacious grassy enclosure where the men-at-arms used to keep guard.
Citywards, there was the castle, and the cathedral. And at the foot of the ramparts, backing into them, were the little gardens of the citizens of Carcassonne. Boughs would sway against the masonry--Merovingian some of these splendid blocks of stone!--while the bright, quiet sun of a November afternoon poured with broad, equal glow into the silent city.
And far away on the horizon, miles and miles beyond the sweeping plains of Languedoc, the faint white peaks of the Pyrenees!
Our guide was the most singular of men. Whether he had a patriotic hatred of the English I cannot tell, but he did his best to ignore our presence altogether.
Having reeled off his stock information--(not to us, but to the universe generally)--he would retire and lean gloomily over the battlements as if he were taking a stroll on his own account and were contemplating life from the pessimist standpoint. Perhaps he was resisting an inclination to dispose of us mediævally in one of the oubliettes.
Sometimes he would gaze down into the gardens below as if he were watching some one at whose folly he was thoroughly disgusted. Yet not a soul was to be seen. An attempt at geniality on our part was met in the most freezing manner. There was something really extraordinary about the man, and I incline to think he was either a patriot sustaining his country's honour by this simple means, or a person suffering from melancholy madness of a very aggravated type.