The Babylon rite

37

Domme Castle, France

‘Et ici, le graffiti du diable…’

The guide was brisk to the point of rudeness, evidently keen to get the job done. And Adam could see why.

A howlingly cold wind was scouring down the Dordogne Valley, surrounding the walls of ancient Domme, besieging the town on the rock. There were very few tourists in all Domme, as they had already discovered: the Hotel de Golf was shut, the famous ‘grotte’ was shut. The Cafe de Dordogne was so shut it looked as if it would never reopen. The only tourists for many kilometres were huddled here, in the castle. Doing the rudimentary tour.

Adam tried to understand the fat female guide as she talked in relentlessly fast French. But he didn’t have enough of the language to even begin to understand.

It wasn’t much of a castle anyway. More of a glorified medieval gatehouse with bulging walls and plain stone rooms These were the two large notoriously severe cells, in which dozens of Templars had been incarcerated for several years after the arrest of the entire Order in