As the col is approached Castillon stands up against the sky line like a piece of dead bone sticking out of the mound of a grave. Few habitations of man occupy a position quite so surprising as this silent and deserted village. It is the village of a nightmare, of a fairy story, of the country of the impossible. “The town,” writes the author of “A Winter at Mentone”, “is as unlike a town as possible . . . so that we should scarcely believe it to be a town at all.” It stands on the summit of a pinnacle of stone which is, in turn, balanced on the knife edge of a dizzy col. From this isolated crag a horrible ridge of rock trails down the valley towards Sospel like the backbone of some awful reptile. It is a very ancient place for it was occupied in the time of the Romans. People have lived in Castillon for over 2,000 years and yet on a certain day not long ago it was suddenly deserted and not a human being has ever returned to make a home in it since that dire occasion. [Illustration: CASTILLON: THE MAIN STREET.] On February 23rd, 1887, Castillon was shaken by an earthquake and reduced in great part to ruin. No one appears to have been killed in the crash, but such was the terror of the inhabitants that they fled down the cliff side and never came back to the town again. It has remained ever since as empty as a skull. In the Middle Ages Castillon was maintained as a fortified place by the governor of Sospel. It guarded the pass that led to the town and stood in the way of Sospel’s most restless enemy, the Count of Ventimiglia. During the wars of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines the fortress of Castillon suffered much. It was a woeful day when Charles of Anjou obtained possession of it in 1261 and a still more dismal day when he sold it to that detested ruffian, Pierre Balbo of Ventimiglia, since, in the eyes of Sospel, Castillon was the keeper of the pass, the angel with the flaming sword that stood in the way. For no vain reason did the ridge gain the name of the Col de la Garde. Castillon did not remain long in the hands of Ventimiglia. It shared in the vicissitudes of endless conflicts, was in due course taken by the Genoese and then retaken by the redoubtable seneschal of Provence. Castillon was ever a sturdy little place; for even in its earliest days, when it was captured by the Saracens, the hardy natives turned upon the invaders, cast them out and threw them headlong down the hill. It was not always so very little, since there was a time when it could boast of no fewer than seventy-five houses and five churches. Where these buildings found a foothold it is hard to say. They must have clung to one another with linked arms, like a crowd of men caught by a rising tide on a steep and very meagre rock.