A few kilometres beyond Clermont the road curves, and suddenly one is confronted with a vast cliff of yellowish-cream limestone, containing a cavern of gigantic dimensions, into which the green waters of the Arize pour tumultuously. At the side of the cavern’s mouth a small hole has been bored, and into this the road unhesitatingly plunges. The lofty roof of limestone is delicately coloured with mauve, emerald, and pink tints near the mouth, but farther in the darkness is so great that the road is lighted with oil-lamps. Birds fly in and out of the yawning mouth of the cavern, but the sound of their wings is drowned by the roar of the river on its rock-strewn bed. A suppressed excitement fills the mind of the motorist who for the first time drives into this subterranean way, but all too soon there is a glimmer of white light round a bend, and the roof of rock, which has lowered to within a yard or two of his head, suddenly comes to an end, as the car runs out into the dazzling sunshine just beyond the cavern. The little town of Le Mas-d’Azil has an hotel in the dusty market-place, which can provide a capital _déjeuner_. The church is of uncertain age from a casual glance, and the offensive smell of its interior, combined with the cobwebs, dirt, and damp, make one inclined to hurry away. Protestantism flourished in the town in the seventeenth century, and some of the people still adhere to the reformed faith. In 1625 the Calvinists were obliged to seek refuge in the cavern when attacked by the Catholics. They would have been forced to abandon it through their enemies having dammed up the river and reduced them to extremes of thirst, if the obstruction the Catholics had built had not been broken through by a party of Protestant soldiers. From Le Mas-d’Azil the road goes through Sabarat and Menay to Pailhès, on the Lèze, where a picturesque château, dating from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, stands on a wooded spur above the village. The road to Pamiers goes to the right and then to the left, and winds for about fifteen kilometres through a very picturesque hilly country, with superb views of the Pyrenees across up-and-down country, chequered with growing corn, pale brown ploughed fields, and purple woods. Sowing seed in the old broadcast method still prevails here. PAMIERS More bends in the road follow, and then Pamiers appears down below, on the margin of a fertile plain watered by the broad Ariège. Although having an interesting story, Pamiers does not make many appeals to the visitor. The original town was called Mas St. Antonin, but it has decayed so much that there is scarcely anything to be seen even of its abbey, which gave birth to the town which has vanished.