“Let us get in, Numa. We can talk just as well as we drive along.”
CHAPTER V.
VALMAJOUR.
It takes hardly more than two hours to drive from Aps to Cordova Mountain provided the wind is astern. Drawn by the two old horses from the Camargue, the carriage went almost by itself, propelled by the mistral which shook and rattled it, beating on its leather hood and curtains or blowing them out like sails.
Out here it did not bellow any more as it did round the ramparts and through the vaulted passages of the town; but, free of all obstacles, driving before it the great plain itself, where a solitary farm and some peasant manses here and there, forming gray spots in the green landscape, seemed the scattering of a village by the storm, the wind passed in the form of smoke before the sky, and like sudden dashes of surf over the tall wheat and olive orchards, whose silvery leaves it made to flutter like a swarm of butterflies. Then with sudden rebounds that raised in blond masses the dust that crackled under the wheels it fell upon the files of closely pressed cypresses and the Spanish reeds with their long rustling leaves, which made one feel that there was a river flowing beside the road. When for one moment it stopped, as if short of breath, one felt all the weight of summer; then a truly African heat rose from the earth, which was soon driven off by the wholesome, revivifying hurricane, extending its jovial dance to the very farthest point on the horizon, to those little dull, grayish mounds which are seen on the horizon in all Provençal landscapes, but which the sunset turns to iridescent tints of fairyland.
They did not meet many people. An occasional huge wagon from the quarries filled with hewn stones, blinding in the sunlight; an old peasant woman from Ville-des-Baux bending under a great couffin or basket of sweet-smelling herbs; the robe of a mendicant friar with a sack on his back and a rosary round his waist, his hard, tonsured head sweating and shining like a Durance pebble; or else a group of people returning from a pilgrimage, a wagon-load of women and girls in holiday attire, with fine black eyes, big chignons and bright-colored ribbons, coming from Sainte Baume or Notre-Dame-de-Lumière. Well, the mistral gave to all these people, to hard labor, to wretchedness and to superstition the same flow of health and good spirits, gathering up and scattering again during its rushes the hymn of the monk, the shrill canticles of the pilgrims, the bells and jingling blue glass beads of the horses and the “Dia! hue!” of the carters, as well as the popular refrain that Numa, intoxicated by the breeze of his native land, poured forth with all the power of his lungs and with wide gesticulations that were waved from both the carriage doors at once:
“Beau soleil de la Provence,
Gai compère du mistral!”
(Splendid sun of old Provence,
Of the mistral comrade gay!)
Suddenly he cried to the coachman: “Here! Ménicle, Ménicle!”