This rough but fascinating road, passing now over broad, flat rocks, now over the fresh green sward, now over fine sand, and bordered by venerable chestnuts with furrowed trunks and enormous roots, conducted him to vast moors, where he rode slowly along, content to be alone at last in a desolate region. The road stretched before him, sometimes in zigzag fashion, sometimes straight up and down, through fields covered with broom and furze, and over sandy hillocks intersected by brooks that had no well-defined bed and no fixed course. From time to time a partridge skimmed along the grass at his feet, or a kingfisher flew like an arrow across a swamp, a flash of blue and fiery red. After an hour's ride, being still absorbed in his thoughts, he saw that the path became narrower, plunged into the bushes, and finally disappeared under his feet. He raised his eyes and saw before him, beyond steep precipices and deep ravines, the ruins of Crozant rising like a sharp arrow over curiously jagged peaks of such extent that one could hardly embrace the whole at a single glance. Emile had already visited that interesting fortress, but by a more direct road, and as his preoccupation had prevented him from taking his bearings, he was uncertain for a moment where he was. Nothing could be more consonant with his frame of mind than that wild locality and those desolate ruins. He left his horse at a hut and descended on foot the narrow path that led down to the bed of the torrent by a series of steps cut in the rock. Then he ascended by similar means and buried himself in the ruins, where he remained for several hours, a prey to an intensity of suffering which the aspect of a spot that was so horrifying and so sublime exalted at times almost to delirium. Few fortresses so advantageously situated as that of Crozant were erected in the first centuries of feudalism. The mountain on which it stands descends perpendicularly on all sides, to two mountain streams, the Creuse and the Sédelle, which unite tumultuously at the end of the peninsula and keep up a constant roaring as they leap over huge fragments of stone. The sides of the mountain are very peculiar, bristling everywhere with long, grayish rocks, which rise from the abyss like giants or hang like stalactites over the torrent. The ruins of the château have taken on so completely the color and shape of the surrounding rocks that in many places one can hardly distinguish them at a little distance. It is hard to say which was the bolder and the more tragically inspired in that spot, nature or man, and one cannot imagine, upon such a stage, other than scenes of implacable fury and unending despair.