From their present position, they overlooked the entire site: the ruins of Castelgard, the monastery, and on the far hill, La Roque. Clouds raced overhead, moving shadows across the landscape. The air was warm and soft, and it was quiet, except for the distant rumble of an automobile.

"Oh, Chris," she said, and kissed him again. When they broke, she looked away in the distance, and suddenly waved.

A yellow convertible was winding up the road toward them. It was some sort of racing car, low-slung, its engine growling. A short distance away, it stopped, and the driver stood up behind the wheel, sitting on the back of the seat.

"Nigel!" she cried happily.

The man in the car waved back lazily, his hand tracing a slow arc.

"Oh Chris, would you be a dear?" Sophie handed Chris the reins of her horse, dismounted, and ran down the hill to the car, where she embraced the driver. The two of them got in the car. As they drove off, she looked back at Chris and blew him a kiss.

The restored medieval town of Sarlat was particularly charming at night, when its cramped buildings and narrow alleys were lit softly by gas lamps. On the rue Tourny, Marek and the graduate students sat in an outdoor restaurant under white umbrellas, drinking the dark red wine of Cahors into the night.

Usually, Chris Hughes enjoyed these evenings, but tonight nothing seemed right to him. The evening was too warm; his metal chair uncomfortable. He had ordered his favorite dish, pintade aux cèpes, but the guinea hen tasted dry, and the mushrooms were bland. Even the conversation irritated him: usually, the graduate students talked over the day's work, but tonight their young architect, Kate Erickson, had met some friends from New York, two American couples in their late twenties - stock traders with their girlfriends. He disliked them almost immediately.

The men were constantly getting up from the table to talk on cell phones. The women were both publicists in the same PR firm; they had just finished a very big party for Martha Stewart's new book. The group's bustling sense of their own self-importance quickly got on Chris's nerves; and, like many successful business people, they tended to treat academics as if they were slightly retarded, unable to function in the real world, to play the real games. Or perhaps, he thought, they just found it inexplicable that anyone would choose an occupation that wouldn't make them a millionaire by age twenty-four.

Yet he had to admit they were perfectly pleasant; they were drinking a lot of wine, and asking a lot of questions about the project. Unfortunately, they were the usual questions, the ones tourists always asked: What's so special about that place? How do you know where to dig? How do you know what to look for? How deep do you dig and how do you know when to stop?

"Why are you working there? What's so special about that place, anyway?" one of the women asked.

"The site is very typical for the period," Kate said, "with two opposing castles. But what makes it a real find is that it has been a neglected site, never previously excavated."

"That's good? That it was neglected?" The woman was frowning; she came from a world where neglect was bad.

"It's very desirable," Marek said. "In our work, the real opportunities arise only when the world passes an area by. Like Sarlat, for instance. This town."

"It's very sweet here," one of the women said. The men stepped away to talk on their phones.

"But the point," Kate said, "is that it's an accident that this old town exists at all. Originally, Sarlat was a pilgrimage town that grew up around a monastery with relics; eventually it got so big that the monastery left, looking for peace and quiet elsewhere. Sarlat continued as a prosperous market center for the Dordogne region. But its importance diminished steadily over the years, and in the twentieth century, the world passed Sarlat by. It was so unimportant and poor that the town didn't have the money to rebuild its old sections. The old buildings just remained standing, with no modern plumbing and electricity. A lot of them were abandoned."

Kate explained that in the 1950s, the city was finally going to tear the old quarter down and put up modern housing. "André Malraux stopped it. He convinced the French government to put aside funds for restoration. People thought he was crazy. Now, Sarlat's the most accurate medieval town in France, and one of the biggest tourist attractions in the country."

"It's nice," the woman said, vaguely. Suddenly, both men returned to the table together, sat down, and put their phones in their pockets with an air of finality.

"What happened?" Kate said.

"Market closed," one explained. "So. You were saying about Castelgard. What's so special about it?"

Marek said, "We were discussing the fact that it's never been excavated before. But it's also important to us because Castelgard is a typical fourteenth-century walled town. The town is older than that, but between 1300 and 1400 most of its structures were built, or modified, for greater defense: thicker walls, concentric walls, more complicated moats and gates."

"This is when? The Dark Ages?" one of the men said, pouring wine.

"No," Marek said. "Technically, it's the High Middle Ages."

"Not as high as I'm going to be," the man said. "So what comes before that, the Low Middle Ages?"

"That's right," Marek said.

"Hey," the man said, raising his wineglass. "Right the first time!"

Starting around 40 B.C., Europe had been ruled by Rome. The region of France where they now were, Aquitaine, was originally the Roman colony of Aquitania. All across Europe, the Romans built roads, supervised trade, and maintained law and order. Europe prospered.

Then, around A.D. 400, Rome began to withdraw its soldiers and abandon its garrisons. After the empire collapsed, Europe sank into lawlessness, which lasted for the next five hundred years. Population fell, trade died, towns shrank. The countryside was invaded by barbarian hordes: Goths and Vandals, Huns and Vikings. That dark period was the Low Middle Ages.

"But toward the last millennium - I mean A.D. 1000 - things began to get better," Marek said. "A new organization coalesced that we call the feudal system - although back then, people never used that word."

Under feudalism, powerful lords provided local order. The new system worked. Agriculture improved. Trade and cities flourished. By A.D. 1200, Europe was thriving again, with a larger population than it had had during the Roman Empire. "So the year 1200 is the beginning of the High Middle Ages - a time of growth, when culture flourished."

The Americans were skeptical. "If it was so great, why was everybody building more defenses?"

"Because of the Hundred Years War," Marek said, "which was fought between England and France."

"What was it, a religious war?"

"No," Marek said. "Religion had nothing to do with it. Everyone at the time was Catholic."

"Really? What about the Protestants?"

"There were no Protestants."

"Where were they?"

Marek said, "They hadn't invented themselves yet."

"Really? Then what was the war about?"

"Sovereignty," Marek said. "It was about the fact that England owned a large part of France."

One of the men frowned skeptically. "What are you telling me? England used to own France?"

Marek sighed.

He had a term for people like this: temporal provincials - people who were ignorant of the past, and proud of it.

Temporal provincials were convinced that the present was the only time that mattered, and that anything that had occurred earlier could be safely ignored. The modern world was compelling and new, and the past had no bearing on it. Studying history was as pointless as learning Morse code, or how to drive a horse-drawn wagon. And the medieval period - all those knights in clanking armor and ladies in gowns and pointy hats - was so obviously irrelevant as to be beneath consideration.