Over Strand and Field: A Record of Travel through Brittany

intervals. They diminish in size as they recede from the ocean. Cambry asserts that there were four thou

ir use? Was

n he thought of changing them all into stone, and forthwith the men were petrified. But this expla

rished in battle; that those disposed in a circle are family graves, while those that form corners or angular figures are the tombs of horsemen or foot-soldiers, and more especially of those fighters whose party had triumphed. All this is quite clear, but Olaüs Magnus has forgotten to tell us how two cousins who killed each other in a duel on horseback could have been buried. The fact of the duel required that the ston

, in the very place where they died." As if, usually, they were carted to the cemetery! And he builds his hypothesis on the follo

n one; it is quite certain! In Egypt they are sphinxes; here they are rocks; but in both instances they are of stone. So it would seem that the Egyptians (who never travelled), came to this coast (of the existence

n the road from Thebes to Elissonte, was called "the serpent's head," and especially because the rows of stones at Carnac present the sinuosities of a serpent. People fond of cosmography discovered a

who founded Venice, as everybody knows. Another man wrote that these Venetians, conquered by C?sar, erected all those rocks solely in a spirit of humility and in or

ast silence." And as Carnac is situated on the coast, and surrounded by a barren country, where nothing but these gentlemen's fancies has ever grown, the first grenadier of France, but not, in my e

he conclusion that the Druids not only officiated at the sanctuaries, but that they also lived and taught in them. "So the monument of Carnac being a sanctuary, like the Gallic forests," (O power of induction! where are you leading Father Mahé, canon of Vannes and correspondent of the Academy of Agriculture at Poitiers?), there is reason to believe that the intervals, which break up the rows of stones, held rows o

camp, and, strangely enough, the rests of one of the camps of C?sar, who had had these stones upreared only to serve as support for the tents

t which never belonged to C?sar), was a former pupil of l'école Polytechnique, an engineer, a M. de la Sauvagère. The col

s, one is confronted by a "lichaven" or a "trilithe." Often two enormous rocks are put one on top of the other, and touch only at one point, and we read that "they are balanced in such a way that the wind alone is sufficient to make the upper rock sway perceptibly," an assertion which I do not dispute, although I am rather suspicious of the Celtic wind, and although these swaying rocks have always remained unshaken in spite of the fierce kicks I was artless enough to give them; they are called "rolling or rolled stones," "turned or transported stones," "stones that dance or dancing stones," "sto

of silica and soil are called "barrows" in high-flown la

e Druids were held in the "cromlechs." M. de Cambry saw in the "swaying rocks" the emblems of the suspended world. The "barrows" and "gals-gals" have undoubtedly been tombs; and as for the "men-hirs," peo

h all its might and journeys straightway towards infinite regions. But when it applies itself to a subject devoid of plastic art and history, and tries to extract a science fr

sistible, irrefutable, incontestable one, which would make the tents of M. de la Sauvagère stagger, blanch the face of the Egyptian Penho?t

etites. We were served by the hostess, who had large blue eyes, delicate hands, and the sweet

imly in its cup filled with yellow oil; overhead, through the open windows of the darkened vault, came broad rays of white light and the sound of the wind rustling in the tree-tops. A man came in to put the chairs in order, and placed two candles in an iron chandelier riveted to the stone pillar; then he pulled into the middle of the aisle a sort of stretcher with a pedes

sed corpses. The crowd around was silent. The men bared their heads; the priest shook his holy-water sprinkler and mumbled orisons, and the pair of oxen swung their heads to and fro under the heavy, creaking yoke. The church, in the bac

nto the church and placed it on the stretcher. A crowd of men and women followed. They knelt on the flo

uched me and I drew aside to let a bent woman pass. With her clenched fists on her breast, and face averted, she advanced without appearing to move her feet, eager to see, yet trembling to behold, and reached t

ed as if they had been scalded, so red were they; her idiotic and contracted mouth,

had been lost at sea; he had been wash

cold; the earth was slippery and the grave-diggers who had not completed their task, found it hard to raise the heavy soil, for it stuck to their shovels. In the background, the women kneeling

gan again, and the sobs broke out anew, an

have thought it the repressed explosion of some overwhelming joy or the paroxysm of a delirious happiness. It was the widow, weeping. Then she w

nch to a companion: "Heavens! didn't the fellow stink! He is almost completely

elms and the sloping meadow where the day before we had seen a little girl chasing cattle to the

unwale and let his peaceful boat go its own way. There was hardly any wind; the blue sea was calm and the narrow track the rudder ploughed in the waters could be seen for a long time. The old fellow was talkative; he spoke of the priests, whom he disliked, of meat, whi

, in spite of a hilly and sandy road, and the sun, which made our shoulders smart beneat