I took the Aiguiers road. The going was good--not too slippery, not
too hard. My horse was trotting cheerfully along, at an easy swinging
canter.
He was a fine animal and I loved him--a perfect Arles thoroughbred,
high in the withers, short in the cropper, with a fine spread of neck
and shoulders. A courageous fellow, too, and so good-natured! I had
picked him out at my leisure and just to my taste, during a turn of
duty at the ministry in Paris. There you have facilities for such
things that officers in garrison never dream of.... I called him
_Siegfried_. We had come to know each other very well; and, in all
our intimacy as comrades, I never discovered a defect in him worth
mentioning.
Siegfried took me to Aiguiers without stopping once for breath.
Aiguiers is a little cluster of houses backed up against one of the
last foot-hills of the Maurras chain. Beyond there, the road began to
get more difficult. It ran along a hillside above a ravine cut deep by
the Gapeau. There were sharp turns conforming to the twists in the bed
of the little torrent, where the water mirrored gray with the pallor
of the leaden clouds.
It now began to rain again, in huge drops that made visible circles in
the silent pools of the stream. I suggested a gallop to Siegfried. Away
off to the right, the bell-tower of Solliès-Toucas pierced a clump of
cherry trees. Then the road turned sharp to the left hiding the distant
village from view. Now there was nothing ahead but a deserted country,
on which the sky was raining in a thick, dispiriting drizzle.
Halfway up a steep fold in the ground, Siegfried slowed down to a walk.
The other side was a more gradual slope, the inner rim of the great
bowl of Valaury--a sort of crater, half filled, and perhaps two miles
in diameter. Now the Grand Cap, hitherto concealed by the Maurras
ridge, was in plain view. It came forward, as it were, out of the rain,
sullenly dominating all the smaller hills around it. But its peaks were
quite invisible, lost in the ceiling of clouds. It was nothing but a
truncated cone, a huge pillar propping up the leaden architecture of
mist and sky above it. Stray flecks of fog were wandering here and
there along its sides, drifting slowly down to the break between the
heath and the farm lands. For a second time the danger of going forward
into that thick and sticky gloom occurred to me. Even if I found the
trail, it might be hard, if not impossible, to keep to it.... But, for
the moment, the floor of the basin was clear and the path before me
broad and level. A word to Siegfried and he joyfully resumed his gallop.
Madeleine had often gone with me on early morning rides. There in the
pine groves, which drape the Points of Cépet and Sicie in gorgeous
green, we would trot along side by side inhaling the cool, resinous
air. The memory came to me at just this moment; for the evening breeze
was rising and I had breathed it deeply in. It felt damp and musty to
my lungs, polluted with a strange odor of rotting leaves and oozing
ground. I straightened up in my saddle for a deeper breath, a keener
sense, of the uncanny smell. Yes, it was the same as before--and the
queer notion came to me that it was the breath of the mountain, close,
cadaverous, nauseous. A creeping, disagreeable chill ran over me!
Siegfried, meanwhile, was galloping on; but in a moment or two I reined
him in. We were well across the bowl, and the other slope, steep and
slippery, was before us. At the top of a knoll four huts were gathered
in jumbled array. No one seemed to be living in them, but a dog came
out and sniffed at Siegfried’s heels, without, however, barking.
We came to a fork in the trail. I stopped to consult my military map
and get my bearings. Straight in front of me, the Grand Cap blocked
the horizon with a formidable chaos of precipitous rocks. Its first
foothills were perhaps a mile and a half ahead. Now this was East;
so North would be on my left hand. I studied the map for a while.
It was not so very clear, but I did make out the fork where I then
was standing and the two paths between which I had to choose. So
far as I could see, they both led up to the battery; the one to the
right, by way of the old convent of Saint Hubert and the village
of Morière-la-Tourne; the one to the left, through the hamlet of
Morière-les-Vignes and Morière itself. I decided to take the latter
route.
Had I selected the other, Adventure doubtless would have missed me!
As I went on again, I thought I could make out a sort of pinkish cast
to the clouds heaped up along the mountain. I was headed west now. That
radiance must be, therefore, a shaft from the setting sun making its
way through the bank of mist and fog. Before long it would be pitch
dark. Instinctively, I looked back to the eastward, better to gauge the
approach of night; and frank uneasiness came over me as I thought of
the long distance still to go. Darkness, indeed, had already settled
on the plains. It was climbing the heights of Solliès, engulfing
the basin of Valaury, and striding rapidly, stealthily, along up the
mountain trail behind me. Now it was passing us, reaching the dangerous
slopes of the mountain far ahead. The path was barely perceptible, and
Siegfried kept slipping alarmingly.
For the first time, I clearly realized that my mission involved far
greater risks that an uncomfortable night of wandering out in the cold
and rain.
V
It must have been somewhere on the northernmost spur of the Maurras
range that I lost my way. It was not yet night, exactly, but it was
far from broad daylight. The trail seemed to come to an end in a
tangled clump of bushes, that looked like all the other underbrush on
the solitary heath. Siegfried went courageously in, however, slipping
about, but shrewdly feeling the ground with a forefoot before he rested
his weight upon it. I relied mostly on his instinct to determine what
was path and what was heather. Unfortunately I had forgotten that at
the northern tip of the ridge the Tourris trail makes off to the left
from the route to the Grand Cap. I should have remembered this, I
suppose; for the Tourris trail makes a well-known tramp from Toulon--up
to the famous Col de la Mort de Gauthier. Strangely significant name!
My horse turned off on that trail, a fact of which I was not at once
aware, because I had not even noticed the fork when we came to it.
If the path hitherto had been bad, it now became positively dangerous.
The ground was rough, broken by boulders and ledges and with deep
ravines and rain-courses. We had left the rolling knolls about the
basin of Valaury and were skirting the first rocky escarpments of
the mountains. Siegfried went down on his knees a number of times.
Meanwhile long streamers of cloud kept reaching down from the ceiling
of mist above us, a ceiling that was closer and closer to our heads as
we reached the higher land. Eventually we found ourselves in a sort of
transparent, almost luminous, haze, which I knew was the forerunner
of the bank of thick fog I had been watching as it drifted along some
thirty feet above our heads.
“Provence always was a dirty hole!” I swore, as I well remember.
But at just this moment, the trail, if trail it could be called, took
a sharp descent. Now we should have been going up-grade all along, and
this sudden drop surprised me. Nothing of the kind had been indicated
on my chart. I thought for a moment of consulting the map again, but
the annoyance of unfolding the unwieldy paper and of studying in such
wretched light all that maze of ditches and indentations deterred me.
Besides, the drop soon came to an end and we were going uphill again,
across a sort of hollow thickly overgrown with brush. The path was now
a thing of the past decidedly. We were in a thicket of cat-briar which
scratched Siegfried’s belly and sides and cut my hands as I tried to
keep the nettles off my own face. I could not get a good look at the
ground, so thick was the undergrowth, but I observed that Siegfried was
advancing with greater and greater reluctance. That much was evident.
He did not like this going blindly into a territory where he scented
danger.
Now there was another sharp drop followed by a third up-grade.
This convinced me that I was certainly off the road. I had been
crossing a sort of saddle with three humps in line. No such ground
figured on the trail to the Grand Cap. I thought I would keep on,
however, to the top of the next rise. From there, perhaps, I could get
a look around.
And it turned out as I had hoped.
From the top of the grade ahead, I could see a broad plain shut in
on all sides by mountains. These were lost in the distance; but even
in that heavy weather their outlines were characteristic enough.
This massive barrier to the West could be nothing but the Faron--the
“Sleeping Dog” as it is sometimes called from its unusual contour. Over
here was the Coudon, just as surely; there was no mistaking its eastern
spur, sharp-pointed like the prow of a vessel cutting into the plain.
Where was I then? There could be no doubt. I had made the summit of
“Walter’s Death” itself! So then, I must hurry back, and make as good
time as possible! I must try to find the fork where I had gone astray
and take the trail that went out to the right from there. Time was an
important matter. I might still have a half hour left before complete
nightfall.
Siegfried was loathe to plunge back into the maze of cat-briar from
which we had just so painfully emerged. His nose had been scratched in
a number of places. I pressed my knees into his sides to intimate that
speed was a consideration. Pluckily he went back down the incline, and
at the bottom, indeed, he broke into a trot.
And he trotted on--but not for long.
Just before we were reaching the second grade, I suddenly felt my
saddle give way beneath me. I fell, and so did Siegfried. I remember
the rough scratch of the brambles as I shot through them and the thud
with which I struck on a stone. I lay stunned for the fraction of a
minute; then I jumped to my feet, bleeding, bruised, torn, but unhurt,
all in all. Not so with Siegfried! I knelt beside my poor, poor horse.
His left forefoot had caught in a crevice between two stones, and his
leg had snapped like a pipe-stem at the ankle. Never again would
Siegfried take me on my morning gallop! Never would he leave that fatal
gully into which he had gone so much against his will!