But, "after all," the reader may ask, "Why climb Beuvray? When you are up there, what is to be seen but a view; and what mean these twenty miles of Gaulish roads through a wilderness of boughs?" To which pertinent question I reply, that in all France there is but one Beuvray. You will find more romantic peaks in the Alpines of Provence, you will find grander, more striking mountains in volcanic Auvergne; in the Alps you will see summits, clothed in eternal snow, beside which the Mount is but a molehill; but nowhere will you find such a hill as this, whose flanks have echoed to the tramp of Cæsar's legions, whose crest, the council chamber of kings and generals, has flamed through long nights with the beacon fires of a great city. Nowhere else will you find a hill that the centuries have so peopled with dragon and saint, with phantom hound and spectre horseman, and have made as harmonious with legendary poetry and immemorial voices, as nature has made her woods vocal with whispering fern and wandering wind, with the ripple of the brook, and the stir of creeping things in the grass.[3] For this Beuvray is no other than Bibracte, the Gaulish oppidum that Cæsar speaks of as "Oppido Aeduorum longe maximo et copiosissimo."[4] Tradition, as I have said, had rumoured it for centuries as the site of an ancient city; but many had supposed that Autun was the place referred to, until the researches of M. Bulliot, the Antiquary of Hamerton's delightful work "The Mount," settled the problem once for all. Of the history of the last days of the town I will say something in the next chapter; for the present, let us be content to mount the rocky, rain-washed, Gaulish road that leads up, through interlacing boughs, to the "Grand Hotel des Gaulois," or, in other words, the little house and sheds near the summit, which the antiquary occupied while making his researches and excavations. The path runs beside many of the most interesting discoveries, though nothing of the remains is to be seen, the owner having stipulated that all "fouilles" should be covered up, a precaution necessary in any event, if the primitive Gaulish homes of stones and wood, with mud for mortar, are ever to be preserved to a later posterity.[5] After passing the huts, you come, by a grassy woodland path winding up through ferns and bracken, to the terrace on the summit of the hill, now mercifully clear of the ubiquitous trees. Here, on the site of the ancient temple to the Dea Bibracte, one of the many Gaulish gods, M. Bulliot has erected a little chapel in Romanesque style, dedicated to St. Martin. Here, also, is a granite cross, with a carving of St. Martin performing an act of charity at the gate of Amiens; not far away is a memorial to M. Bulliot himself.