CHAPTER XVIII

THE SPIRIT OF THE WILDERNESS

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?"

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, Phoenician, 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.