They became associated with the mission of St. Martial, the first Bishop of Limoges, and at a later period Zaccheus, hearing of a rocky solitude in Aquitania, a little to the south of the Dordogne, abandoned to wild beasts, proceeded thither, and chose a cavern in the escarped side of a cliff for his hermitage.

A path led me up the steep hillside to the foot of a long line of high rocks of yellowish limestone, so escarped and so forbidding to vegetable life that I did not see even a wild fig-tree hanging from a crevice.

Its walls are so escarped that the topmost crags in places overhang the path that winds about their base far below.

The houses were clustered near the foot of an escarped hill, where thinly-scattered pines relieved the glare of the naked limestone.

As I approached Montbrun, the next village, the rocks which hemmed in the valley became more boldly escarped.

So I found the auberge at Saint-Géry, where I waited long hours for the weather to change, after having received a soaking while climbing the escarped cliffs which rise so grandly on one side of the little town.

The fortified cavern is in the escarped cliff above the castle, with which there was, perhaps, a secret communication.

On either side of the gorge rose abrupt stony hills thinly wooded, chiefly with stunted oak, or escarped craggy cliffs pierced with yawning caverns.

I knew, from what I had been told, that Murcens lay somewhere above the escarped cliff on my left, and at no great distance, but the difficulty was to reach it.

On the tops of the escarped hills lived a fugitive black people speaking a vile dialect of Hottentot, and families of yellow Bushmen were found in the lowlands wherever the country was unsuited for the pastoral Damaras.