The Valley of the Care? is picturesque and of no little grandeur. It is a prodigious V-shaped gash in the earth, some half a mile wide where it opens to the heavens, some few feet wide at its deepest depth where the torrent cuts its way. The colouring of its walls is beautiful in its simplicity. Below the blue of the sky is a cinder-grey slope of bare cliff that dips into the faded green of the olive belt and the sprightlier green of the pines; then comes a strip of claret-red tinged with yellow, which marks the terrace of the autumn vines, and at the very foot are the deep shadows by the banks of the stream.
The Care? follows the valley all the way. It begins among the vast silence of the everlasting hills and ends by running under the tramlines and the bandstand at Mentone. The road mounts up the west bank of the valley by spasmodic turns and twists. These are so repeated and so abrupt as to render any who live where paths are straight dazed and despairing.
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.
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.
The old Castillon is approached from the present village by a steep cart-road which winds round the rock, or by a still steeper mule-path which labours up with many zigzags. Both road and path are overgrown with grass. They lead to a flight of wide steps which ascends to the town. It forms quite a ceremonial entry. There is but a single street. It is a sorrowful street, because it is so forlorn and so still. It is as green with grass as a lane in a wood and around the doorsteps of the houses and in every court and alley nettles and brambles flourish with heartless luxuriance.
Half way along the street is the church. It is small and plain with a roof of tiles and a bell gable that lacks a bell. Over the door is the date 1712. The church is locked; but so far as can be judged from the outer walls it has escaped damage. The “pointed campanile,” however, which is described and figured in older accounts is now no longer to be seen. At the end of the street, on the point that looks towards Sospel, are the ruins of the castle. Only some vaults and some crumbling walls remain; but a gateway of stone with a pointed arch still stands unmoved amidst the chaos of destruction. Many houses are little more than a shell of bricks, but the greater number seem to have suffered little. They are closed. The doors, the window frames and the sun-shutters are grey, because in thirty-three years every trace of paint has vanished. Many of the windows are still glazed.
To one house clings a precarious balcony of wood with half of its rail intact. A few of the dwellings are doorless and it is possible to mount stairs laden with débris, to enter rooms which seem to have been but recently left and to climb down into hollow chambers echoing with mystery and suspicion. One front door has a slit for letters—open as if awaiting the postman. It is a trivial feature and yet it seems the most pitiable mockery in the whole of this street of dead things.
CASTILLON: THE MAIN STREET AND CHURCH DOOR.
The desolation of the little town is unutterable. If it were a total ruin the human element would be lost; but it is so little a ruin, so like a living village of to-day—with the ashes of the kitchen fire still on the hearth—that it remains even now a vivid embodiment of a place dumb with panic and the fear of death.