Still windy. The wind frightens me; it annoys, I lose my hat and my temper, but it frightens too with the sheer force of this oppression of air. The air was grey, under heavy clouds for most of the day, so that I walken in a tempest twilight. Even the birds had mostly given up on the depressing day, and I heard no songsters but saw instead a great bird of prey as I came into Le Rouget, soaring into the wind from the ridge and crying oikk! oikk! and then a curious double cry with a sort of Hausa click at the start of it - X'aw! X'aw!
The trees do not seem bare, but they are, and their apparent leafiness a cruel deceit; the twigs are covered with a sort of coralline or lace-like lichen, a dead foliage. Dead and dry Aaron's rod along the fringe of the path.
For the third day I was in yet another new landscape, quite different from the gorges and open heath of the day before. The Montagnes de la Margeride are lumpen, almost Pennine; slopes are not so steep as interminable; there are no great gorges but huge wide and narrow valleys. The colours of wind-dried grass, yellow and tawn, have become a more furry brown, with here and there the dark purple of beech bark - even these trees denuded of their leaves, all but a few pointilles of dull copper.
The first part of the day was no fun at all. Up into the teeth of the wind, up along the ridge, with no shelter and no interest. One village merges into another, and you can see neither where you have come from nor where you are going to. The landscape is a chaos of humpy masses under the weltering sky. In Le Falzet a dog ran up, one of a pack of five, and bit me; not breaking the skin, but leaving an ugly little weal of purple. I remember the owner rushing up, beating the dogs away, tipping alcohol from a flask on to my skin; two people on a long dark road, and three dead trees, a vision of hell. Then down into the valley of the Virlange, a messy, marshy river carved deeply into rounded banks of mossy grass, brown and sere.
At La Caluze, the octagonal twelfth-century tower is so regular I would have believed it had I been told it was a Victorian water tower. Beneath are two decayed semicircular bastions, somehow irrelevant to the tower, not in the scheme of things at all. But more impressive than the meaningless bastions was the isolation of the tower; not a part of a castle, nor of a house, nor even (unless the village was drowned by the inundation of age) a settlement. Though its posturing, alone and severe against the landscape, seems seignurial, it could hardly have been used as an effective instrument of rule.
Finally the going became better, a path hanging on to the banks of the strean rising - at the end of the valley - up to a beechwood, whose deceptive blanket of rich beechleaf copper seemed a treasure of warmth in the otherwise bare landscape. How often it hid stones and potholes! But for the first time the sun came out, and ascending I had a view back over the day's toil, along the valley.
Soon that was over, too. Coming to the top of the rise, I came out on to a barren gash in the forest, marks of bulldozers rutted the ground. The road was high; I had to scramble up the rainwater gulley a good five feet to come out on to it. It was like a work of motiveless giants, a slash made in a moment of pique, quite without reason - for this massive autobahn of mud had never carried any other traffic; closing my eyes to the devastation, I was grateful for the friendly sound of water rushing in a nearby brook.
At St Roch, the fountain beside the roadside chapel has sweet water; not sugary, but gently sweet. In an imperceptible dip in the hill, which I would not recognise but for the fact that I am sheltered from the wind.
The singing of wind in telephone wires like a dying bird.
Although I had been rising for some while out of the marshy river bottom, I had not appreciated the height attained until suddenly, out in front of me, the land opened up into a bowl of patchy, shallow hills, and beyond higher, sharper, blacker mountains,. Rain streamed down from a cloud just to the left, light sliding down the shafts of rain; sunset was beginning to tinge the horizon - an infinitesimal space between dark cloud and black mountain - with gentle pink.
Descent, lone, bone weary. Coming down the very steep hill into St Alban; woodsmoke drifts from a lower chimney into my eyes, stinging, but the smell is a welcome to the traveller - it is a smell of the hearth, of warmth, of the valley. A cup of chocolate, milk frothy and foaming, in the café where I stay.