THE CRAU.
The Basin of Berre--A neglected harbour--The diluvium--Formation of the
Crau--The two Craus--Canal of Craponne--Climate of the Crau--The Bise and
Mistral--Force of the wind--Cypresses--A vision of kobolds.
On leaving Marseilles by train for Arles, the line cuts through the
limestone ridge of the Estaque, and the traveller passes from the basin of
Marseilles into the much more extensive basin of Berre, surrounded by hills
on all sides, a wide bowl like a volcanic crater, with the great inland
salt lake of the Etang de Berre occupying its depths. This is a great
natural harbour, seven times the size of the port of Toulon, and varying in
depth from 28 to 32 feet; it is perfectly sheltered from every wind, and
entire fleets might anchor there in security, not only out of reach, but
out of sight of an enemy, for the chain of l'Estaque intervenes between it
and the sea. It would seem as though Nature herself had designed Berre as a
safe harbour for the merchant vessels that visit the south coast of France.
It is almost inconceivable how this sheet of water, communicating with the
sea by the channel of Martignes, can have been neglected; how it is that
its still blue waters are not crowded with ships, and its smiling shores
not studded with a chain of industrial and populous towns. "The neglect of
this little inland sea as a port of refuge," says M. Elisée Reclus, "is an
economic scandal. Whilst on dangerous coasts harbours are constructed
at vast expense, here we have one that is perfect, and which has been
neglected for fifteen centuries." But though the Romans or Greeks had a
station here, they did not utilise the lagoon. At S. Chamas are remains of
the masters of the ancient world, but no evidence that they had there a
naval station.
The line cuts again through the lip of the basin, and we are in the Crau.
At a remote period, but, nevertheless, in one geologically modern, the
vast floods of the diluvial age that flowed from the Alps brought down
incredible quantities of rolled stones, the detritus of the Alps. This
filled up a great bay now occupied by the mouths of the Rhone, and spread
in a triangle from Avignon as the apex, to Cette in the west, and Fos in
the east. This rubble, washed down from the Alps, forms the substratum
of the immense plain that inclines at a very slight angle into the
Mediterranean, and extends for a considerable distance below the sea. Not
only did the Rhone bring down these boulders, but also the Durance, which
enters the Rhone above Arles, and formed between the chain of Les Alpines
and the Luberon another triangular plain of rolled stones, with the apex at
Cavaillon and the base between Tarascon and Avignon. But the Durance did
more. There is a break in the chain on the south, between the limestone
Alpines and the sandstone Trévaresse; and the brimming Durance, unable to
discharge all her water, choked with rubble, into the Rhone, burst through
the open door or natural waste-pipe, by Salon, and carried a portion of her
pebbles into the sea directly, without asking her sister the Rhone to help
her. Now the two great plains formed by the delta of the Rhone, and that
of the Durance into the Rhone, are called the great and little Craus. They
were known to the ancients, and puzzled them not a little. Strabo says of
the Great Crau: "Between Marseilles and the mouth of the Rhone, at about a
hundred stadia from the sea, is a plain, circular in form, and a hundred
stadia in diameter, to which a singular event obtained for it the name of
the Field of Pebbles. It is, in fact, covered with pebbles, as big as the
fist, among which grows some grass in sufficient abundance to pasture herds
of oxen."
Then we are given the legend that accounts for it. Here Hercules fought
against the Ligurians, when the son of Jove, having exhausted his arrows,
was supplied with artillery by a discharge of stones from the sky, showered
on his enemies by Jupiter.
This desert, a little Sahara in Europe, occupies 30,000 acres. "It is
composed entirely of shingle," says Arthur Young, "being so uniform a mass
of round stones, some to the size of a man's head, but of all sizes less,
that the newly thrown up shingle of a seashore is hardly less free from
soil; beneath these surface-stones is not so much a sand as a cemented
rubble, with a small admixture of loam. Vegetation is rare and miserable,
some of the absinthium and lavender so low and poor as scarcely to
be recognised, and two or three miserable grasses, with _Centaurea
calycitropes_ and _solstitialis_, were the principal plants I could
find." A mineralogical examination of the rolled stones presents peculiar
interest. In the Little Crau, the mouth of the Durance, are found
prodigious numbers of green and crystalline rocks, granite and variolite
brought down from the Alps of Briançon, but nine-tenths of the pebbles of
the Great Crau are white quartz brought from the great chain of the Alps,
together with mica-slate and calcareous stones, and only a few of the
variolites of Mont Genèvre. One may say that the Great Crau is a complete
mineralogical collection of all the rocks that form the chain of the Alps,
whence flow the Rhone and its tributaries.
The aspect of the Crau is infinitely desolate, but it is no longer as
barren as it was formerly. It is in fact, undergoing gradual but sure
transformation. This is due to a gentleman of Provence, named Adam de
Craponne, born in 1525 at Salon, who conceived the idea of bringing some
of the waters of the Durance through the gap where some of its overspill
had flowed in the diluvial epoch, by a canal, into the Great Crau, so that
it might deposit its rich alluvium over this desert of stones. He spent
his life and his entire fortune in carrying out his scheme, and it is
due to this that year by year the barren desert shrinks, and cultivation
advances. There are to-day other canals, those of Les Alpines, of Langlade,
and d'Istres, besides that of Craponne that assist in fertilising the
waste. Wherever the water reaches, the soil is covered with trees, with
pasture-land, with fields of corn; and in another century probably the
sterility of the Crau will have been completely conquered.
In its present condition, the Crau may be divided into two parts, that
which is watered, and which has been converted into a garden, and that
which is not as yet reached by the rich loamy waters of the Durance, and
is therefore parched and desolate, overrun by herds of sheep and cattle,
driven down in winter from the Alps, when a certain amount of herbage is
found on the desert, which in summer is utterly dry and barren. These
migrations date back to a remote epoch, for they are mentioned by Pliny.
Previous to the construction of the canal by Craponne, who began it in
1554, the desert reached to Arles; the whole of the plain south of the
chain of the Alpines was either marsh lagoon, or a waste of stones, where
now grow and luxuriate mulberries, olives, almond trees and vines. The
canal of Craponne was carried by the originator for thirty-three miles,
sending out branches at Salon, Eyguières, and elsewhere. In winter the
meadows are green as those of Devon in spring, and the fields yield heavy
crops. Indeed, the Durance acts to this region in the same way as does the
Nile to Egypt. "The meadows I viewed," says Young, "are among the most
extraordinary spectacles the world can afford in respect to the amazing
contrast between the soil in its natural and in its watered state, covered
richly and luxuriantly with clover, chicory, rib-grass, and _Avena
elatior_."
The climate of the Crau presents contrasts most extreme. In winter the
thermometer falls and remains below zero for many nights in succession, and
the glacial _bise_ sweeps over the face of the desert, curdling the blood;
the flocks and herds seek shelter from this blast behind the long walls of
dry stones, which sometimes the violence of the wind throws down upon them.
During the summer the phenomenon of the mirage is almost continuous. The
bed of air in contact with the surface of stones scorched by the blazing
sun becomes rarified and dilated, so that the horizon appears to be fringed
on all sides with lakes of rippling water, most deceptive and tantalising
to the eye of the traveller.
The troops of wandering bulls and wild horses, flights of rose-coloured
flamingoes, of partridges and wild ducks give this region a pronounced
oriental physiognomy, and however painful it may be at such a time to
traverse this burning plain, it affords a curious picture of the Sahara in
miniature nowhere else to be seen in Europe.
The great scourge of the Crau is the north-west wind, the _bise_, the black
boreas of the ancients, so violent as to roll over the pebbles, and to blow
away the roofs of houses, and tear up trees by the roots. In fact, the Crau
may be regarded as the Home of the Winds.
It is easy to explain the origin of these furious gales, _bise_ and
_mistral_. The low sandy regions at the mouth of the Rhone, denuded of all
vegetation, and the great stony plain of the Crau, heated by the direct
rays of the sun, rarify the air over the surface of the soil, and this
rises, to be at once replaced by the cold air from the Alps and Cevennes;
the air off the snow pours down with headlong violence to occupy the vacuum
formed by the heated ascending column of air off the plain, sweeping the
valley of the Rhone, and reaching its maximum of intensity between Avignon
and the sea, where it meets, and is blunted in its force by the equable
atmosphere that covers the surface of the Mediterranean.
The violence of the wind is consequently due to the difference of
temperature between the hot air of the plain and the cold air of the
mountain.
An old saying was to this effect:--
"Parlement, Mistral et Durance
Sont les trois fléaux de Provence."
Parlement exists no longer, or rather is expanded into a National Assembly
that is a discredit to all France, and not Provence alone; the Durance has
become, thanks to Adam de Craponne, an agent of fertilisation and wealth.
But the _mistral_ (_magistral_, the master-wind) remains, and still
scourges the delta of the Rhone. In 1845 it carried away the suspension
bridge between Beaucaire and Tarascon; the passage of the Rhone is often
rendered impossible for days, through its violence. It has been found
necessary to plant rows of cypress on each side of the line that crosses
the Crau, to break the force of the wind upon the trains. Indeed,
throughout the district, the fields will, in many places, be found walled
up on all sides by plantations of cypresses from thirty to fifty feet high,
as screens against this terrible blast, to protect the crops from being
literally blown out of the ground.
When I was a child of five years my father's carriage with post horses was
crossing the Crau. It was in summer. I sat on the box with my father and
looked at the postilions. Presently I saw a number of little figures of men
with peaked caps running about the horses and making attempts to scramble
up them. I said something about what I saw, whereupon my father stopped the
carriage and put me inside with my mother. The heat of the sun on my head,
he concluded, had produced these illusions. For some time I continued to
see these dwarfs running among the pebbles of the Crau, jumping over tufts
of grass, or careering along the road by the carriage side, making faces at
me. But gradually their number decreased, and I failed finally to see any
more.
One June day in the year 1884, one of my boys, then aged eight, was picking
gooseberries in the fruit garden at home, when, standing between the
bushes, he saw a little man of his own height, with a brown peaked cap, a
red jacket, and green breeches. He had black hair and whiskers and beard.
He looked angrily at the boy and said something. The child was frightened,
ran indoors and told his elder brother and sister. They brought him to
me, and his elder brother repeated the story, but purposely varied the
description of the apparition, so as to see whether the lad held to the
same account, but the child at once corrected him, and told me his story,
which his brother informed me agreed exactly with what in his alarm, he had
first told. The little boy was looking white, and frightened. Again a case
of sun on the head.
Now for another. A lady whom I know very well indeed, and who never
deviated from the truth in her life--save when she swore at the altar to
honour and obey me--was walking one day, when a girl of thirteen, beside
a quickset hedge; her brother was on the other side. I believe they were
looking for birds' nests. All at once she saw a little man dressed entirely
in green, with jacket, breeches, and high peaked hat, seated in the hedge,
staring at her. She was paralysed with terror for a moment, then recovering
herself, she called to her brother to come round and see the little green
man. When he arrived the dwarf had disappeared.
Now these are funny stories, and are to be explained by the fact that the
sun was hot on the head. But it does not strike me that the explanation is
wholly satisfactory. _Why_ should the sun on the head superinduce visions
of kobolds? Is it because other people have suffered from a hot sun, and
that the hot sun reproduces year after year the same phenomenon, that the
fable of little men, pixies, gnomes, brownies, fairies, leprechauns is
to be found everywhere? Or--is it possible that there is such a little
creation only visible to man when he is subject to certain influences?
Sir Charles Isham, of Lamport, has collected a good deal of evidence of a
similar nature. I do not venture to express an opinion one way or another.
I can remember still, with vividness, the impression produced on me by
what I saw that hot day on the Crau, when but a child of five years; but I
cannot for the life of me explain it satisfactorily to myself.