AN ASCENT OF MONT VENTOUX
Thanks to its isolated position, which leaves it freely exposed on
every side to atmospheric influence; thanks also to its height, which
makes it the topmost point of France within the frontiers of either the
Alps or Pyrenees, our bare Provençal mountain, Mont Ventoux, lends
itself remarkably well to the study of the climatic distribution of
plants. At its base the tender olive thrives, with all that multitude
of semiligneous plants, such as the thyme, whose aromatic fragrance
calls for the sun of the Mediterranean regions; on the summit, mantled
with snow for at least half the year, the ground is covered with a
northern flora, borrowed to some extent from arctic shores. Half a
day’s journey in an upward direction brings before our eyes a
succession of the chief vegetable types which we should find in the
course of a long voyage from south to north along the same meridian. At
the start, your feet tread the scented tufts of the thyme that forms a
continuous carpet on the lower slopes; in a few hours they will be
treading the dark hassocks of the opposite-leaved saxifrage, the first
plant to greet the botanist who lands on the coast of Spitzbergen in
July. Below, in the hedges, you have picked the scarlet flowers of the
pomegranate, a lover of African skies; above you will pick a shaggy
little poppy, which shelters its stalks under a coverlet of tiny
fragments of stone and unfolds its spreading yellow corolla as readily
in the icy solitudes of Greenland and the North Cape as on the upper
slopes of the Ventoux.
These contrasts have always something fresh and stimulating about them;
and, after twenty-five ascents, they still retain their interest for
me. I made my twenty-third in August 1865. There were eight of us:
three whose chief object was to botanize and five attracted by a
mountain expedition and the panorama of the heights. Not one of our
five companions who were not interested in the study of plants has
since expressed a desire to accompany me a second time. The fact is
that the climb is a hard and tiring one; and the sight of a sunrise
does not make up for the fatigue endured.
One might best compare the Ventoux with a heap of stones broken up for
road-mending purposes. Raise this heap suddenly to a height of a mile
and a quarter, increase its base in proportion, cover the white of the
limestone with the black patch of the forests, and you have a clear
idea of the general aspect of the mountain. This accumulation of
rubbish—sometimes small chips, sometimes huge blocks—rises from the
plain without preliminary slopes or successive terraces that would
render the ascent less arduous by dividing it into stages. The climb
begins at once by rocky paths, the best of which is worse than the
surface of a road newly strewn with stones, and continues, becoming
ever rougher and rougher, right to the summit, the height of which is
6270 feet. Greenswards, babbling brooks, the spacious shade of
venerable trees, all the things, in short, that lend such charm to
other mountains, are here unknown and are replaced by an interminable
bed of limestone broken into scales, which slip under our feet with a
sharp, almost metallic ‘click.’ By way of cascades the Ventoux has
rills of stones; the rattle of falling rocks takes the place of the
whispering waters.
We are at Bédoin, at the foot of the mountain. The arrangements with
the guide have been made, the hour of the start fixed; the provisions
are being talked over and got ready. Let us try to rest, for we shall
have to spend a sleepless night on the mountain to-morrow. But sleeping
is just the difficulty; I have never managed it and that is where the
chief cause of fatigue lies. I would therefore advise those of my
readers who think of making a botanizing ascent of the Ventoux not to
arrive at Bédoin on a Sunday evening. They will thus avoid the noisy
bustle of an inn with a café attached to it, those endless loud-voiced
conversations, those echoing cannons of the billiard-balls, the ringing
of glasses, the drinking-songs, the ditties of nocturnal wayfarers, the
bellowing of the brass band at the ball hard by, and the other
tribulations inseparable from this blessed day of idleness and
jollification. Will they obtain a better rest on a week-day? I hope so,
but I do not guarantee it. For my part, I did not close an eye. All
night long, the rusty spit, working to provide us with food, creaked
and groaned under my bedroom. A thin board was all that separated me
from that machine of the devil.
But already the sky is growing light. A donkey brays beneath the
windows. It is time to get up. We might as well not have gone to bed.
Foodstuffs and baggage are strapped on; and, with a ‘Ja! Hi!’ from the
guide, we are off. It is four o’clock in the morning. At the head of
the caravan walks Triboulet, with his Mule and his Ass: Triboulet, the
Nestor of the Ventoux guides. My botanical colleagues inspect the
vegetation on either side of the road by the cold light of the dawn;
the others talk. I follow the party with a barometer slung from my
shoulder and a note-book and pencil in my hand.
My barometer, intended for taking the altitude of the principal
botanical halts, soon becomes a pretext for attacks on the gourd with
the rum. No sooner is a noteworthy plant observed than somebody cries:
‘Quick, let’s look at the barometer!’
And we all crowd around the gourd, the scientific instrument coming
later. The coolness of the morning and our walk make us appreciate
these references to the barometer so thoroughly that the level of the
stimulant falls even more swiftly than that of the mercury. In the
interests of the immediate future, I must consult Torricelli’s tube a
little less often.
As the temperature grows too cold for them, first the oak and the ilex
disappear by degrees; then the vine and the almond-tree; and next the
mulberry, the walnut-tree and the white oak. Box becomes plentiful. We
enter upon a monotonous region extending from the end of the cultivated
fields to the lower boundary of the beech-woods, where the predominant
plant is Satureia montana, the winter savory, known here by its popular
name of pébré d’asé, Ass’s pepper, because of the acrid flavour of its
tiny leaves, impregnated with essential oil. Certain small cheeses
forming part of our stores are powdered with this strong spice. Already
more than one of us is biting into them in imagination and casting
hungry glances at the provision-bags carried by the Mule. Our hard
morning exercise has brought appetite and more than appetite, a
devouring hunger, what Horace calls latrans stomachus. I teach my
colleagues how to stay this rumbling stomach until they reach the next
halt; I show them a little sorrel-plant, with arrow-head leaves, the
Rumex scutatus, or French sorrel; and, practising what I preach, I pick
a mouthful. At first they laugh at my suggestion. I let them laugh and
soon see them all occupied, each more eagerly than his fellow, in
plucking the precious sorrel.
While chewing the bitter leaves, we come to the beeches. These are
first big, solitary bushes, trailing on the ground; soon after, dwarf
trees, clustering close together; and, finally, mighty trunks, forming
a dense and gloomy forest, whose soil is a mass of rough limestone
blocks. Bowed down in winter by the weight of the snow, battered all
the year round by the fierce gusts of the mistral, many of the trees
have lost their branches and are twisted into grotesque positions, or
even lie flat on the ground. An hour or more is spent in crossing this
wooded zone, which from a distance shows against the sides of the
Ventoux like a black belt. Then once more the beeches become bushy and
scattered. We have reached their upper boundary and, to the great
relief of all of us, despite the sorrel-leaves, we have also reached
the stopping-place selected for our lunch.
We are at the source of the Grave, a slender stream of water caught, as
it bubbles from the ground, in a series of long beech-trunk troughs,
where the mountain shepherds come to water their flocks. The
temperature of the spring is 45° F.; and its coolness is a priceless
boon for us who have come from the sultry oven of the plain. The cloth
is spread on a charming carpet of Alpine plants, with glittering among
them the thyme-leaved paronychia, whose wide, thin bracts look like
silver scales. The food is taken out of the bags, the bottles extracted
from their bed of hay. On this side are the joints, the legs of mutton
stuffed with garlic, the stacks of loaves; on that, the tasteless
chickens, for our grinders to toy with presently, when the edge has
been taken off our appetite. At no great distance, set in a place of
honour, are the Ventoux cheeses spiced with winter savory, the little
pébré d’asé cheeses, flanked by Aries sausages, whose pink flesh is
mottled with cubes of bacon and whole pepper-corns. Over here, in this
corner, are green olives still dripping with brine and black olives
soaking in oil; in that other, Cavaillon melons, some white, some
orange, to suit every taste; and, down there, a jar of anchovies which
make you drink hard and so keep your strength up. Lastly, the bottles
are cooling in the ice-cold water of the trough over there. Have we
forgotten anything? Yes, we have not mentioned the crowning side-dish,
the onions, to be eaten raw with salt. Our two Parisians—for we have
two among us, my fellow-botanists—are at first a little startled by
this very invigorating bill of fare; soon they will be the first to
burst into praises. Are we all ready? Then let us sit down.
And now begins one of those Homeric repasts which mark red-letter days
in one’s life. The first mouthfuls are almost frenzied. Slices of
mutton and chunks of bread follow one another with alarming rapidity.
Each of us, without communicating his apprehensions to the others,
casts an anxious glance at the victuals and asks himself:
‘If this is the way we are going on, shall we have enough for to-night
and to-morrow?’
However, the craving is allayed; we began by devouring in silence, we
now eat and talk. Our apprehensions for the morrow are likewise
relieved; and we give due credit to the man who ordered the menu, who
foresaw this hunger-fit and who arranged to cope with it worthily. The
time has come for us to appreciate the victuals as connoisseurs. One
praises the olives, stabbing them one by one with the point of his
knife; another lauds the anchovies as he cuts up the little
ochre-coloured fishes on his bread; a third waxes enthusiastic about
the sausage; and all with one accord extol the pébré d’asé cheeses, no
larger than the palm of a man’s hand. Pipes and cigars are lit; and we
stretch ourselves on our backs in the grass, with the sun shining down
upon us.
An hour’s rest and we are off again, for time presses. The guide with
the baggage will go alone, towards the west, skirting the edge of the
woods, which has a Mule-path. He will wait for us at the Jas, or
Bâtiment, on the upper boundary of the beeches, some 5000 feet above
the level of the sea. The Jas is a large stone hut, which is to shelter
us, man and beast, to-night. As for us, we continue the ascent to the
ridge, by following which we shall reach the highest peak more easily.
From the top, after sunset, we shall go down to the Jas, where the
guide will have arrived long before us. This is the plan proposed and
adopted.
We reach the crested ridge. On the south, the comparatively easy slopes
which we have just climbed stretch as far as the eye can see; on the
north, the scene is full of wild grandeur: the mountain, sometimes hewn
perpendicularly, sometimes carved into rough steps, alarmingly steep,
is little else than a sheer precipice a mile high. If you throw a
stone, it never stops, but falls from rock to rock until it reaches the
bottom of the valley, where you can distinguish the bed of the
Toulourenc looking like a ribbon. While my companions loosen masses of
rock and send them rolling into the abyss so that they may watch the
frightful fall, I discover under a broad flat stone one of my old
insect acquaintances, the Hairy Ammophila, whom I had always met by
herself on the roadside banks in the plain, whereas here, almost at the
top of the Ventoux, I find her to the number of several hundreds heaped
up under one and the same shelter.
I was beginning to investigate the reasons for this agglomeration, when
the southerly breeze, which already during the morning had inspired us
with a few vague fears, suddenly brought up a cohort of clouds which
melted into rain. Before we knew it, we were shrouded in a thick,
drizzling mist, which prevented us from seeing two yards in front of
us. By an unfortunate coincidence, one of us, my good friend Delacour,
had strayed aside in search of Euphorbia saxitalis, one of the
botanical curiosities of these heights. Making a speaking-trumpet of
our hands, we shouted as one man. No answer came. Our voices were lost
in the flaky thickness and the dull sound of the whirling mist. As the
wanderer could not hear us, we had to look for him. In the darkness it
was impossible to see one another at a distance of two or three yards;
and I was the only one of the seven to know the locality. So that
nobody might be left in the lurch, we took hands and I placed myself at
the head of the chain. For some minutes we played a regular game of
blind-man’s-buff, leading to nothing. No doubt, on seeing the clouds
drift up, Delacour, who knew the Ventoux, had taken advantage of the
last gleams of light to hasten to the shelter of the Jas. We resolved
to make for it ourselves as quickly as possible, for already our
clothes were streaming with rain inside as well as out. Our white-duck
trousers were sticking to us like a second skin.
A serious difficulty arose: the hurrying backwards and forwards, the
twisting and turning, while we looked about us, had reduced me to the
plight of a person whose eyes are bandaged and who is then made to spin
round on his heels. I had lost all sense of direction; I had not the
least idea which was the southern slope. I questioned this man and
that; opinions were divided and most uncertain. The upshot was that not
one of us could say where the north lay and where the south. Never in
all my life had I realized the value of the points of the compass as I
did at that moment. All around us was the mystery of the grey haze;
beneath our feet we could just make out the beginning of a slope here
and a slope there. But which was the right one? We had to make a choice
and to launch out boldly. If, by bad luck, we went down the northern
slope, we risked breaking our bones over the precipices the sight of
which had but now filled us with dread. Perhaps not one of us would
survive it. I passed a few minutes of acute perplexity.
‘Let’s stay here,’ said the majority, ‘and wait till the rain stops.’
‘That’s bad advice,’ replied the others, of whom I was one, ‘that’s bad
advice: the rain may last a long while; and, wet through as we are, we
shall freeze on the spot at the first chill of night.’
My worthy friend Bernard Verlot, who had come from the Paris Jardin des
Plantes on purpose to climb the Ventoux in my company, displayed an
imperturbable calmness, trusting to my good sense to get us out of our
scrape. I drew him a little to one side, in order not to increase the
panic of the others, and revealed my terrible fears to him. We held a
council of two and tried to make up by the compass of reasoning for the
absence of the magnetic needle.
‘When the clouds came,’ I asked him, ‘wasn’t it from the south?’
‘From the south, certainly.’
‘And, though one could hardly perceive the wind, the rain slanted
slightly from south to north?’
‘Yes, I noticed that as long as I could see anything. Isn’t that enough
to tell us the way? Let us go down on the side from which the rain
comes.’
‘I thought of that, but I have my doubts. The wind is not strong enough
to have a definite direction. It may be an eddying breeze, as happens
on a mountain-top surrounded by clouds. There is nothing to tell me
that the direction is still the same and that the wind is not now
blowing from the north.’
‘I have my doubts also. Then what shall we do?’
‘What shall we do? That’s the difficulty! But look here: if the wind
has not changed, we ought to be wetter on the left, because we got the
rain on that side until we lost our bearings. If it has changed, we
must be more or less equally wet all over. Let us feel ourselves and
decide. Will that do?’
‘Yes.’
‘And suppose I’m wrong?’
‘You’re not wrong.’
The matter was explained to our companions in a few words. All felt
themselves, not outside, which would not have been enough, but right
inside their underclothing, and it was with unspeakable relief that I
heard them unanimously declare their left side to be much wetter than
the right. The wind had not changed. All was well; and we determined to
go towards the rain. The chain was formed once more, with myself at the
head and Verlot in the rear, so as to leave no stragglers behind.
Before starting, I asked my friend, for the last time:
‘Well, shall we risk it?’
‘Yes, let’s risk it; I’ll follow you.’
And we plunged blindly into the formidable unknown.
We had not taken twenty strides, twenty of those strides which one is
not able to control on a steep slope, before all fear of danger was
over. Under our feet was not the empty space of the abyss but the
longed-for ground, the ground covered with small stones, which rolled
down in long torrents. To all of us, this rattling sound, denoting a
firm footing, was heavenly music. In a few minutes we reached the upper
edge of the beeches. Here the darkness was even greater than at the top
of the mountain: we had to stoop to the ground to see where we were
walking. How, in the gloom, were we to find the Jas, buried away in the
dense wood? Two plants, the assiduous haunters of places frequented by
man—the Chenopodium bonus-Henricus, or good-king-Henry, and the common
nettle—served me as a clue. I swept my free hand through the air as I
went along. Each sting that I felt told me of a nettle, in other words,
a landmark. Verlot, in the rear, also lunged about as best he could and
let smarting stings make up for the lack of vision. Our companions had
but little faith in this style of reconnoitring. They spoke of
continuing the furious descent, of going back, if necessary, all the
way to Bédoin. Verlot, more trustful of the botanical insight with
which he himself was so richly endowed, joined me in pursuing our
search, in reassuring the more demoralized and in showing them that it
was possible, by questioning the plants with our hands, to reach our
night’s lodging in spite of the darkness. They gave way to our
arguments; and, not long after, pressing on from one clump of nettles
to another, our party arrived at the Jas.
There we found Delacour, as well as the guide with our luggage,
sheltered betimes from the rain. A blazing fire and a change of clothes
soon restored our wonted cheerfulness. A block of snow, brought from
the valley near by, was hung in a bag in front of the hearth. A bottle
caught the water as the snow melted: this was the cistern for our
evening meal. And the night was spent on a bed of beech-leaves, rubbed
into powder by our predecessors; and they were numerous. Who knows how
many years had passed since that mattress, now a vegetable mould, was
last renewed!
Those who could not sleep were told off to keep up the fire. There was
no lack of hands to stir it, for the smoke, which had no other outlet
than a large hole made by the partial collapse of the roof, filled the
hut with an atmosphere fit to smoke herrings. To obtain a few mouthfuls
of breathable air, we had to seek them in the lower strata, with our
noses almost on the ground. And so we coughed and cursed and poked the
fire, but vainly tried to sleep. We were all afoot by two o’clock in
the morning, ready to climb the highest cone and watch the sunrise. The
rain had stopped, the sky was glorious, promising a perfect day.
During the ascent some of us felt a sort of seasickness, caused first
by fatigue and secondly by the rarefaction of the air. The barometer
had fallen 5·4 inches; the air which we were breathing had lost a fifth
of its density and was therefore one-fifth less rich in oxygen. Had we
been in good condition, this slight alteration in the air would have
passed unnoticed; but, coming immediately after the exertions of the
day before and a sleepless night, it increased our discomfort. And so
we climbed slowly, with aching legs and panting chests. More than one
of us had to stop and rest after every twentieth step.
At last we were there. We took refuge in the rustic chapel of
Sainte-Croix to take breath and counteract the nipping morning air by a
pull at the gourd, which this time was drained to the last drop. Soon
the sun rose. Ventoux projected to the extreme limits of the horizon
its triangular shadow, whose sides became brightly tinged with violet
by the effect of the diffracted rays. To the south and west stretched
misty plains, where, when the sun was higher in the heavens, we should
be able to make out the Rhône, looking like a silver thread. On the
north and east, under our feet, lay an enormous bank of clouds, a sort
of ocean of cotton-wool, whence peeped, like islands of slag, the dark
summits of the lower mountains. A few tops, with their trailing
glaciers, gleamed in the direction of the Alps.
But botany called our attention and we had to tear ourselves from this
magic spectacle. The time of our ascent, in August, was a little late
in the year; many plants were no longer in flower. Would you do some
really fruitful herborizing? Be there in the first fortnight of July;
above all, be ahead of the grazing herds: where the Sheep has browsed
you will gather none but wretched leavings. While still spared by the
hungry flocks, the top of the Ventoux in July is a literal bed of
flowers; its loose stony surface is studded with them. My memory
recalls, all streaming with the morning dew, those elegant tufts of
Androsace villosa, with its pink-centred white blooms; the Mont-Cenis
violet, spreading its great blue blossoms over the chips of limestone;
the spikenard valerian, which blends the sweet perfume of its flowers
with the offensive odour of its roots; the wedge-leaved globularia,
forming close carpets of bright green dotted with blue capitula; the
Alpine forget-me-not, whose blue rivals that of the skies; the Candolla
candytuft, whose tiny stalk bears a dense head of little white flowers
and goes winding among the loose stones; the opposite-leaved saxifrage
and the musky saxifrage, both of them packed into little dark cushions,
studded in the first case with purple flowers and in the second with
white flowers washed with yellow. When the sun’s rays are hotter, we
shall see fluttering idly from one tuft of blossom to another a
magnificent Butterfly with white wings adorned with four bright-crimson
spots, surrounded with black. ’Tis Parnassius Apollo, the beautiful
occupant of the Alpine solitudes, near the eternal snows. Her
caterpillar lives on the saxifrages.
Here let us end this sketch of the sweet joys that await the naturalist
on the summit of Mont Ventoux and return to the Hairy Ammophila, who
was lurking yesterday in her legions under the shelter of a stone when
the misty rain came and enshrouded us.