Oh! Very well, then, you're right, I am a bad shot. What really fascinates me about the lookout is the sunset; the dimming light taking refuge in the water of the shining lakes, which transform the grey tint of the overcast sky into a fine shade of polished silver. I love the smell of the water, and the mysterious rustling of long leaves and insects in the reeds. Every so often, a darker note sounds and rolls across the sky like the sound of a conch shell. It's the boom of the bittern as it plunges its huge, wader's beak to the bed of the swamp…. Noisy crane flights startle me and I can hear the movement of their feathered, plumed wings. Then—nothing. It's the night, the deep, dark night, with just a glimmer of daylight left lingering on the water….
Suddenly, I feel sort of nervous unease, as if someone was behind me. I turn round and am reassured by the sight of that ubiquitous travelling companion of fine nights, the moon; a low, large, and full moon rising calmly and with a visible motion which slows gradually as it rises above the horizon.
A moonlit patch is already clearly visible nearby, then another, then one further off…. Eventually the whole marsh is bathed in moonlight, and the least tuft of grass gives a shadow. The lookout is over, the birds can see us—we have to return to base. We walk bathed in a dusting of weak, blue light; each step we make in the open water and the irrigation channels stirs the horde of reflected stars and the moonlight that penetrates the depths of the water.
IV
RED AND WHITE.
Within rifle range of the shack, there is another one similar, but more rustic. It's home to our keeper, his wife and their two eldest children. The girl is responsible for the men's meal, and doing repairs to the fishing nets, while the boy helps his father look into the keep nets, and maintain the sluice gates in the ponds. The two youngest children are in Arles, staying with their grandmother, until they have learned to read and have taken their first communion. It is too far to the school and the church from here, and the atmosphere of the Camargue is completely unsuitable for young children. The fact is that, come the summer, when the marshes are dry and the white mud of the irrigation channels cracks in the great heat, the islet isn't really habitable at all.
I experienced it once when I came in August to hunt ducklings and I will never forget the miserable and ferocious appearance of the burningly hot landscape. Here and there ponds were steaming in the sun like huge fermentation vats, keeping scant signs of life, perhaps just salamanders, spiders, and water insects looking for some moisture. There was a pestilential air about, a miasmic, brooding fog thickened by innumerable clouds of mosquitoes. At the keeper's house everybody had the shivers, everybody had the fever, and it was pitiful to see the yellowed, drawn faces, and the circled, popping eyes, of these unfortunates, who were condemned to drag themselves around for three months under this high, pitiless sun, which burnt, but didn't warm…. The life of a gamekeeper is miserable and hard in the Camargue. At least ours has his wife and children round him; but a little further on in the marsh, a horse-warden lives absolutely alone, from one year's end to the next, Robinson Crusoe like. In his home-made reed cabin, there isn't a single household utensil not made by him; the woven wicker-work hammock, the three black stones that form the hearth, the tamarisk roots made into stools, even the lock and key made from white wood that secures this unique accommodation.
The man himself is at least as strange as his dwelling. He is a sort of silent thinker like so many solitary people, hiding his peasant's wariness under thick bushy eyebrows. When not on the pasture land, he can be found sitting outside his door, and with touching, childlike, care, slowly fathoming out one of the little coloured leaflets which are wrapped around phials of medicines for his horses. The poor devil hasn't any recreation but reading these leaflets. Despite being neighbours, our keeper and he don't see each other. They actually avoid each other. One day when I asked the stalker the reason for this, he replied in a serious manner:
—It's because of a difference of opinion…. He is a red; I am a white.
Well, even in this wilderness, where solitude ought to have brought them close together, these two unsociable people, as ignorant and naïve as each other, these two cowherds of Theocritus, who barely go to town once a year, and the small cafés of Arles must seem like the Palace of Ptolemy to them, have managed to fall out about politics of all things.