There is a huge buzzing at the chateau. The messenger has just brought
word from the keeper, half in French and half in Provencal, announcing
that there had already been two or three fine flights of herons, and
water-fowl, and that the season's first birds weren't in short supply.
"You're coming hunting with us", my friendly neighbours wrote to me;
and this morning, at the unearthly hour of five o'clock, their large
wagon, loaded with rifles, dogs, and provisions, came to pick me up at
the bottom of the hill. Off we go on the road to Arles, which is a bit
dry and the trees have mostly lost their leaves by this time in
December. The pale green shoots of the olive trees are hardly visible,
and the garish green of the oaks is a bit too wintry and artificial.
The stables are beginning to stir into life, while very early risers
light up the windows in the farms before day break. In the gaps in the
stones amongst the ruins of Mont-Majeur abbey, the sea eagles, still
drowsy, stretch their wings. Despite the hour, the old peasant women
are coming from the Ville-de-Beaux, trotting along in their donkey
carts. We pass them alongside the ditches. They have to go six country
kilometres to sit on the steps of St. Trophyme to sell their small
packets of medicinal herbs collected on the mountain....
The low, crenellated ramparts of Arles appear, just as you see them on
old engravings, which show warriors with lances larger than the talus
they are standing on. We gallop through this marvellous, small town,
surely one of the most picturesque in France, with its rounded
sculptured, moucharaby-like balconies, jutting out into the middle of
the narrow streets. There are old black houses with tiny doors, in the
Moorish style, gothic and low-roofed, which take you back to the time
of William the Short-Nose and the Saracens. At this hour there's nobody
about yet, except the quay on the River Rhone. The Camargue boat is
steaming up at the bottom of the steps and is ready to sail. The tenant
farmers are there in their red serge jackets. So are some young women
of La Roquette, out looking for farm work, and standing on the deck
amongst us, chatting and laughing, with their long brown mantles turned
down because of the sharp morning air. The tall Arles' headdresses
makes their heads look small and elegant with an attractive pertness,
and they feel the need to stand on tip toe, so that their laughter and
banter can be heard by everybody. The bell rings and off we go. What
with the fast flow of the Rhone, the propeller, and the mistral, the
two river banks speed by. On one side, there is the Crau, an arid,
stony plain. On the other we have the Camargue, much greener, with its
short grass and swamps full of reeds stretching all the way to the sea.
From time to time the boat pulls in at a landing stage, on the right or
left bank, or on the _Empire_ or the _Kingdom_, as it was known in the
middle ages, in the time when Arles was a Kingdom. The old Rhone
sailors still use these same words today. At every stop there was a
white farm, and a clump of trees. The workmen getting off with their
tools, and the women with their baskets under their arms, go straight
onto the gangway. Little by little the boat empties, first on the
Empire side and then on the Kingdom, and by the time we get off at
Mas-de-Giraud, there's hardly anybody left on board.
The Mas-de-Giraud is an old farm of the Lords of Barbentane, and we
went in to await the keeper appointed to come and meet us. In the main
kitchen, all the farm hands, ploughmen, winegrowers, and shepherds are
sitting at the table, solemnly, silently, and slowly eating their meal
and being served by the women who have to wait to eat until the men are
finished. Presently the keeper arrives with the cart. He is a real
Fennimore-Cooper type, a trapper on land and water, fish-warden, and
gamekeeper, known locally as the Stalker, because he can always be
found in the morning mists or at nightfall stalking amongst the reeds,
or stock still in his small boat watching over his keep nets on the
open water and the irrigation channels. It may be this work of
perpetual lookout that makes him so silent and focussed. And yet, as
the cart full of rifles and baskets trundles along in front of us, he
gives us news of the hunt, the number of over-flights, and the location
where the birds of passage have been brought down. As he talks, he
melts into the landscape.
The cultivated earth gives way to the true, untamed Camargue, amongst
the pasture and the marshland, and the irrigation channels shine in
amongst the goose-foot plants as far as the eye can see. Bunches of
tamarisks and reeds form little islands on a calm sea. There are no
tall trees; the immense evenness of the plain is unbroken. The animal
sheds have roofs that slope down almost to ground level. The roaming
flocks, lying in the salt grass or making their way as they nuzzle
around the shepherd's red cape, don't disturb the landscape's regular
flow, dwarfed, as they are, by the endless space of blue horizons and
open sky. Just as a rough sea is still the sea, so a sense of solitude
and immensity emerges, heightened by the relentless mistral, which,
with its powerful breath, seems to flatten yet enlarge the landscape.
Everything bows down before it. The smallest shrubs bear the imprint of
its passage, and stay twisted and bent over southwards in an attitude
of perpetual flight....