At the thought that he would have to sit through the whole night in the cold and dark forest and hear nothing but the wolves , the echo , and the snorting of the scraggy mare , the surveyor began to have twinges down his spine as though it were being rasped with a cold file .
The river vareille flowed at the bottom , scraggy woods crowned the tops , in a four-house hamlet called glozel in an unknown corner of the allier 12 miles from vichy in the very middle of france .