flint things as he found 'em in the hut." [Footnote: "Mad Shepherds, and other Human Studies," Lond. 1910, p. 137 _et seq_.] CHAPTER III SOUTERRAINS In the year 1866 the Prussian Army of the Elbe broke into Bohemia, when it was found that the inhabitants of a certain district had vanished along with their cattle and goods, leaving behind empty houses and stables. It had been the same during the Thirty Years' War, and again in the Seven Years' War, when the invaders found not a living soul, and contented themselves with destroying the crops and burning the villages and farms. Even the Government officials had disappeared. Whither had they gone? Into the rock labyrinths of Adersbach and Wickelsdorf, each accessible only through a single gap closed by a door. The mountain of what the Germans call Quadersandstein is four miles long by two broad, and was at one time an elevated plateau, but is now torn into gullies, forming a tangled skein of ravines, wherein a visitor without a guide might easily lose himself. The existence of this labyrinth was unknown save to the peasants till the year 1824, when a forest fire revealed it, but for some time it remained unexplored. [Footnote: It had indeed been mentioned by Dr. Kausch in his _Nachrichten über Böhmen_, 1794; but he lamented its inaccessibility.] As Adersbach and Wickelsdorf lie on the frontier of Bohemia and Silesia, the existence of this region of cliffs and natural refuges had been kept secret by the natives, who looked upon it as a secure hiding- place for themselves and their chattels when the storm of war swept over the Riesen Gebirge. But the fatal fire of 1824 betrayed their secret to the world, and after a little hesitation, thinking to make profit out of it as a show-place, paths were cut through it, and it was advertised in 1847. When, in 1866, the Prussians passed by, they incurred neither the risk nor the trouble of hunting out the refugees from their place of concealment. The rocks run up to 200 feet, the loftiest being 280 feet. They assume the most fantastic shapes. The passage through the fissures is so narrow that in some places it can be threaded by one man alone at a time, the others following in single file. A rivulet, clear as crystal, traverses the network of gullies, and in one place forms a tiny cascade. One nook is called the Southern Siberia, because in it the snow lies unmelted throughout the summer. At intervals the rocks fall back and form open spaces, and at one describe an amphitheatre upon a vista of rolling forest. But if this "petrified forest," as it has been called, served as a refuge for the peasants in troublous times, it has also been employed by brigands as their fastness whence to ravage the country and render the roads perilous. But of their exploits I shall have more to say in the chapter on robber-dens. Caverns, as well as chasms, have always served this same purpose.