THE SPIRIT OF THE WILDERNESS
"Sa desolation grandiose ... immense et caillouteuse comme
une steppe d'Orient."
PAUL MARIÉTON.
Fanfarigoule in the Crau[18] is the haunt of the ghouls.
Let any one wander alone in that extraordinary desert, and if he have
not nerves of steel or a cast-iron imagination he will understand how it
earns that reputation. As for disputing the existence of those ancient
beings, to what reasonable mind would it occur--especially at the hour
of sunset?
Immense silent world of stones--stones rounded by centuries of rolling
and wearing at the mercy of the Alpine torrents--a long range of far-away
mountains with Mont Ventoux as their highest point, an atmosphere thrilled
with the sunlight, with that strange purity that speaks of absolute
solitude--such is La Crau.
If one is disposed to imagine that Provence is a land all brilliancy
and gaiety, as first impressions would perhaps suggest, a sight of the
Crau and the Camargue is enough to correct the error.
When any place has gathered through long centuries a certain kind of
reputation, there will always be found particular potent influences that
hang about the spot. And sometimes these influences are very mysterious
and hard to account for.
This is the case with the Crau. The reflections of heat, and light from
the immense body of stones may produce peculiar conditions of atmosphere
and ether and so affect that delicately responsive instrument the human
brain.
In any case, in its power of stirring and impressing it is a place apart.
A strange story is told by Baring-Gould of his experience when a child,
of crossing the baking plain with his father, on a hot summer's day. He
was on the box watching the post horses. As he looked, he "saw a number
of little men with peaked caps running about the horses and clambering
up them." His father sent him inside the carriage out of the hot sun,
but for some time, he says, "I continued to see these dwarfs among the
pebbles of the Crau, jumping over the tufts of grass, or careering along
the road by the carriage side, making faces at me."
However, one must not attribute a monopoly of the power of evolving such
visions to the Field of Pebbles, for the author goes on to relate how in
after years, one of his boys, while picking gooseberries, "saw a little
man of his own height with a peaked cap, red jacket, and green breeches."
Moreover, strange to say, the same thing happened to his wife when a
girl of thirteen, so that one cannot account for the marvel by heredity,
that convenient explanation of mysteries. Sun on the head, the author
supposes, must have caused all these experiences.
"But why," he adds, "should the sun on the head superinduce a vision of
Kobolds? Is it because other people have suffered from the sun that the
fables of little men, brownies, pixies, gnomes, fairies, is to be found
everywhere? Or--is it possible that there is such a little creature only
visible to man when he is subject to certain influences?"
[Illustration: ON THE VERGE OF LA CRAU.
_By E. M. Synge._]
We first approached this forsaken region in the train, when the sun was
beginning to get low, and wonderful tragic lights were showing along the
western horizon. The olives and the pleasant farmsteads had been left
behind, and we found ourselves rushing on through the evening glow into a
limitless desolation. And suddenly there flashed past close to the train
a tall, dark shadow and a little station, and then another shadow and
another, till presently the shadow grew continuous except for recurrent
flashes of light, pulsing steadily as the train raced on; and we found
that the line was bordered on one side with an immense wall of cypresses,
and between their trunks one caught glimpses of the white wilderness
beyond. For miles this sombre rampart runs on and on beside the line
protecting it from the mistral which sweeps with terrible violence across
these huge spaces. The stones are described by many writers as gigantic,
but they look not more than about a foot in diameter in this southern
part of the plain, and in the neighbourhood of St. Martin-en-Crau they
appear rather smaller and of extraordinary uniformity of size and shape.
But not only is the eye amazed by this tremendous extent of water-worn
stones (there are really two other lesser Craus beside the Crau d'Arles):
the imagination is startled by the extraordinary depth of this strange
deposit, an average of from ten to fifteen metres; that is at the lowest
estimate over thirty feet, and at the highest forty-five feet.
Imagine that depth of vast pebbles being poured down from the Alps over
miles and miles of plains! No wonder the ancient tribes called in the
aid of their gods in trying to account for the stupendous catastrophe.
Among the distant mountains--many miles away--in the strange landscape
of the Luberon range lies Varigoule, the scene of the Provençal Sabat.
Valmasque, the Witch's Vale, was the home of the persecuted Vaudois.
Witches, wizards, dracs (or water spirits), and a hundred other uncanny
creatures have been associated by the people for unnumbered centuries with
these gloomier scenes: rivers springing out of unknown sources, black
cliffs, fantastic pinnacles whose names belong to forgotten tongues:
Ligurian, Gallic, Phœnician, one knows not what, bestowed one knows not
when; perhaps when Hercules fought the Ligurians on the Crau and his
father Jupiter came to his aid with a shower of enormous stones.
Æschylus makes Prometheus direct the footsteps of Hercules to the Crau,
where he tells him he will encounter the native Ligurians and be helpless
in their hands for want of a single stone, which the country cannot
supply. In this dilemma he will touch the pity of Jupiter who will cover
the sky with clouds and send down a hail of stones with which Hercules
can drive back the Ligurian hosts.[19]
The ancient Ligurian race of which one hears so much, occupied the country
from the Pyrenees to the Arno in the seventh or eighth century B.C., and
were not subdued till the reign of Augustus, who raised the well-known
monument at La Turbie, near Monaco, to celebrate his victory. As one
of their great tribes, the Salyans, had for their cities Marseilles,
Tarascon, Arles, Glanum (St. Remy), it is not improbable that the
natives of this district, now growing so familiar, were the descendants
of the Ligurians or Ligyens, "ce peuple harmonieux," as they have been
called. They are thought to be of Asiatic origin, and are described as
a small, dark-haired people, open to all the arts, particularly music,
and "sensitive to all the delicacies of life." They gave a high place to
their women, who had the _rôle_ of arbitress in all large affairs and who
have left behind them many traditions of their "heroism and largeness of
soul." Perhaps it is to this "harmonious people" that France and Italy
owe their brilliant artistic history.
If one may not regard the ordinary man and woman of the towns of Provence
as the direct representatives of this primitive people, they have surely
left living records in the peasants of the remoter nooks and corners of
Southern France.
In Languedoc, Provence, indeed everywhere in the great regions of the
Ligurians, notably on the hills of the Riviera, one comes upon a curious
brown-skinned, flat-featured type, not "plain," as a modern face may
be plain from failure in harmonious development, but merely roughly
fashioned. It is a type not without a harsh comeliness, a wholesome
success in its own archaic fashion.
The faces seem scarcely European. There is in them a singular look
of antiquity; something unfinished, half animal (in the sense of
unreflecting), with steady, open gaze, not intent but unswerving,
revealing very little that we understand by "human nature." One seems
to be looking at human nature in the making.
These people live in little vales by a mountain stream, in nooks in the
hills; fauns or satyrs one might fancy them in the twilight--cultivating
a few olives and keeping a few cocks and hens and perhaps a cow, and so
living as their ancestors must have lived for centuries while the great
tides of life and history were flowing and flowing past them.
Perhaps this was the dusky race that the Greeks and Romans actually took
for satyrs, or divinities of the woods, for the term "work like a satyr"
is the Provençal equivalent for "work like a nigger," and it is thought
likely, by some authorities, that the term thus became embedded in the
popular traditions.
There is a strange corroboration of the idea that in this rough-hewn type
we may really see the ancient inhabitants of Gaul, the predecessors of
the Gauls themselves, for near Aix was discovered among the remains of a
prehistoric village some primitive stone carving attributed to Ligurian
workmanship, and the features there so crudely wrought are practically
identical in type with those of the true _gens du pays_.
Any one who visits the little grey towns that cap so many mountain peaks
of the Maritime Alps, will encounter examples of this prehistoric face.
Without any reasonable doubt such people fought for their lives and
homes--probably caves and huts of mud and reeds in the fastnesses of
the hills--many and many a time, and the tradition of their combat with
Hercules is probably the echo of some monster battle between Greeks and
Ligurians on the plain of the Crau.
* * * * *
Why any one should desire to visit the Crau puzzles the gaiety-loving
Provençal not a little, and that a traveller should for that purpose
deliberately make a railway journey to a little, windy, solitary station
beyond Arles, where but few trains stop--that argued a form of madness
probably considered as peculiar to Britons.
At Arles unhesitating informants had insisted that from St. Martin-en-Crau
one could easily reach the Field of Pebbles, and on arrival there I
asked the porter in which direction it lay. He stared, and referred me
to the stationmaster, a majestic creature in blue and buttons.
"La Crau? les cailloux?" Ah! no, there was no one who could give me any
information about them here. "But at Miramas----"
Miramas! But that was miles along the line!
Monsieur le Chef de Gare looked at me pityingly. True, but he understood
I was inquiring about the stones of La Crau.
So I was----!
"Eh bien, il y a des entrepreneurs a Miramas----"
Then I understood. He thought I wanted to enter into negotiations for
buying stones for building or other purposes.
When at last he took in the situation he shook his head and shrugged
his shoulders as a French official shrugs when he regards your case as
at once foolish and hopeless.
To arrive _en pleine Crau_ one must go at least five kilometres. It
did seem hopeless indeed, for even if disposed for the lonely walk,
there would not have been time to go and return in time to catch the
only reasonable train back to Arles. I had made many efforts already to
accomplish this project, and all had failed through inaccurate directions
of this nature. Naturally there were no excursion trains to the Crau.
Still I could not resign myself to failure. Was there no trap, no inn
where I could hire something to drive in? I didn't care what it was.
This grand indifference seemed to strike an answering spark. Well, there
was a little _mas_ (farm) over the way. The farmer had an old dog-cart
that he drove in; perhaps I might make an arrangement with him.
Monsieur le Chef de Gare pointed to a barn opposite where I found an
old cart, the farmer, several labourers, and a lot of dogs.
They all looked on during the interview, which ended by the farmer's
agreeing to drive me where I wanted to go--_après tout c'était mon
affaire_. So off we started, the farmer himself driving and two of the
dogs following joyously.
Very exhilarating was our somewhat jolty progress across the large
level sunny district. It seemed more hushed than any inhabited district
I had ever visited; as if it felt the presence of the great desert a
few miles off. There were none of the little events of the country; no
cattle looking over walls, no children along the roadside, no coming and
going about the farmsteads, of which there were very few and those few
singularly small and lifeless. The trundle of the wheels and the sound
of the horse's hoofs on the road outlined themselves upon a blank sheet
of silence. It seemed unnatural; the more so as there was everywhere
such golden brightness.
The only scene of activity that we passed, soon after leaving the farm,
was a group of men cutting down some ancient olive trees, and the farmer
called out to them something in Provençal, to which there were some
shouted replies, and all caps went off in a friendly way to _le patron_.
He was a quiet, worthy sort of man, very little different from an English
farmer of the same condition. He was not unwilling to answer questions,
but it was curious how he contrived to reply without conveying the
slightest information, a peculiarity, be it remarked, of the type that
is called "worthy."
If one asked, for instance, whether the land was owned by the peasantry
themselves in the district, or whether it was in the hands of wealthy
proprietors, he would flick the point off a branch of bramble in the
hedge, and say with a shrug, implying that the inquiry was somewhat
trivial: "Oui, il y en a."
It was useless to press the matter further, for that merely produced a
still more effective barrier against the inquiring mind.
It is a fact, however, that in many districts of the South of France
(contrary to the usual belief) the land is by no means always held by
the peasants.
Again and again, in reply to inquiries, I have been informed that this
or that stretch of country belonged to Monsieur or le Baron So and So,
who was "enormement riche."
Questions about ancient customs were almost always futile. No promptings
could produce a description or even a clear admission that such things
existed. The true native is most damping to archæological enthusiasm.
The one thing he warms up about is the new village pump, or the hideous
crucifix in cast iron which the municipality has just erected on some
ancient stone pedestal where for centuries the discarded, moss-stained,
prayer-assailed image used to stand, in all its pathetic significance.
My friend seemed to know little or nothing about his own surroundings,
or perhaps he knew them so well and so exclusively that he could not see
that there was anything to tell about them. Besides, he could not tell
it; that was the way _le bon Dieu_ had made him.
Whenever we came to a very stony bit of land--and there was plenty of
it--he at once pointed it out. He took it that my hobby was stones, and
very insatiable in that respect he must have thought me, for nothing
would satisfy my cravings in that direction short of the unnumbered
millions of the Crau!
He seemed a kind-hearted man, and fond of his dogs. The illness of one
poor beast through apparently incurable eczema much concerned him. He had
often been urged to destroy the dog, but he never could bring himself
to put an end to "un aimi fidèle." The animal looked up and wagged his
tail, as if understanding he was being talked about.
My offer to write down the name of a remedy (Jeye's fluid) that
had effected a cure in a similar case I knew called forth something
approaching animation in my conductor for the first time.
Almost the only man-made object in the whole journey was a dynamite
factory with white glass retorts full of the explosive, actually ranged
in long rows by the public roadside. It seemed a fitting industry for
this forlorn district.
Last winter snow had fallen on the retorts and broken them in, and the
dynamite had exploded. But still they rested by the roadside!
Suppose there came along a shying horse or an unmanageable motor? The
farmer shrugged his shoulders.
"That would be a bad business!"
In this much-managed Republic that was how they managed things!
* * * * *
As we drew near our journey's end, the vegetation grew sparser till there
were only shrubs of diminishing size, growing in harder and harder soil.
Then the cart left the road--this strange "morose route"--and we began
to drive over grass: a rough sort of waste land with many pebbles; and
before us was a great light such as greets the traveller coming in sight
of the sea. It was the Crau!
"Nous y sommes," said the farmer, pulling up his horse to allow me to
get down, "nous sommes maintenant en pleine Crau."
* * * * *
I knew now for certain where the silence came from that had brooded over
the country all the way!
* * * * *
He thinks he knows what silence is who has lived in some remote spot
in the heart of the English country, who has stood, on some breezeless
evening, by the shores of an inland lake, or alone on far-away moorlands
when the birds have gone to their rest and the night is coming up over
the sky.
But _that_ is not silence!
In the woodlands there is the tremor of a leaf, not perhaps quite heard,
but not unknown to the finer consciousness; by the lake-side the water
noiselessly stirs against the bank; on the moors the creatures are
breathing in their holes and hiding places, the tiny bells of the heather
ring an inaudible chime----
But on the Crau----
To say that there is not a sound is meaningless. There are strata upon
strata of silence, deep as the deep sea; one hesitates on the verge,
half dreading to advance.
Here at last is a realm untouched by human passion. It belongs utterly
to the kingdom of physical "Nature," Nature in her heaviest mood, without
the smallest thrill of manifested life or emotion.
To understand this to the full one must tramp over its hard stones and
feel its lonely breath in one's face.
* * * * *
Turning one's steps humanwards again, one hastens with the eagerness
of an exile to claim as dear friend and brother the first, humblest
creature, animal or human, for sheer sympathy of the living with the
living, for sheer relief after the meeting face to face the cold white
Spirit of the Wilderness.