IV
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.