V
LAKE VACCARES
One of the finest sights in the Camargue is lake Vaccares. I often leave the hunt to sit down by the shore of this beautiful, brackish lake, this baby inland sea, which seems a true daughter of the ocean. Being locked indoors, so to speak, she is made all the more appealing through her captivity. There is none of the dryness and aridity that often bedevils the seaside, around our Vaccares. On its high banks, it boasts a fulsome covering of fine, velvet-smooth grass, a perfect showcase for unique and charming flora. There are centauries, clover, gentians, and those lovely flowers that are blue in winter, and red in summer, apparently changing their clothes to suit the weather, and, when they have an uninterrupted flowering season, show their full range of colours.
About five o'clock in the evening, as the sun is going down, these three watery delights, without boat and sail to cover and change them, open out into an amazing scene. No longer is it just the intimate charm of the open-water and the irrigation channels appearing here and there between folds of marl, where the smell of water pervades, and is likely to emerge at the least depression in the ground. Here, lake Vaccares gives an impression of size and space. The radiant waves attract flights of scoter ducks from far away, and herons, bitterns, and white-flanked, pink-winged flamingos, lining up to fish all along the banks, in many-coloured strands. Then there are ibis, the sacred ibis of Egypt, truly at home in this splendid sunshine and silent landscape. From where I am, I can hear nothing but the lapping of water and the ranger calling his horses from around the lakeside. Each animal on hearing its name, rushes in, mane flowing in the wind, and takes hay from his hand….
Further on, still on the same bank, there is a herd of beef cattle free ranging like the horses. Sometimes, I notice their bony, curved backs hunched over a clump of tamarisk, and their small, immature horns just visible. Most of these Camargue cattle are bred to run in the branding fêtes in the villages, and some of them are already famed in the circuses of Provence and Languedoc. In one herd of the neighbourhood, there was a terrible fighter amongst them called the Roman, who has been the undoing of I don't know how many men and horses at the bullfights at Arles, Nîmes, and Tarascon. His companions also made him the leader, for in these strange herds the animals organise themselves around an old bull which they adopt as their leader. When there is a storm on the Camargue, it is truly terrifying on the great plain, where there is nothing to divert or stop it. It's an amazing sight to see the herd group themselves behind their leader, all their heads down and turned into the wind, their whole strength behind their foreheads. Shepherds in Provence call this manoeuvre: turning the horn to wind.
Perish the herd that doesn't do it. Blinded by the rain, and carried away by the storm, the herd turns in on itself, becomes panicky, scatters, and is overwhelmed. To escape the storm, they have been known to dash headlong into the Rhone, the Vaccares, or even the sea.