"But if there come rain?"
"Not much fear of that in this part of the world. There may be a shower, but the salt is so hard and compacted, that it will do little more than wash the dirt off."
THRASHING CORN.
Presently we came to the salt-making basins—great shallow lakes, divided by dykes into squares somewhat in the style of a chess-board; and here the solitude of the expanse was broken by the figures of the workmen clambering along the narrow dykes to watch and superintend the progress of evaporation. By the side of these lakes, rows of ugly rectangular cottages were erected, and slight carts drawn by two horses, one ahead of the other, moved the loads of salt from the pans, or pools, to the heaps in which it was stored. Here and there, where the ground rose a little, a thin crop of maize, or barley, appeared to have been cultivated; and it was probably some such harvest that I saw being thrashed by the peculiar process in use all through Provence and southern Languedoc. There are very few thrashing mills, even in the best cultivated parts of France. Over the vast proportion of the kingdom, the orthodox old flail bears undisturbed sway; but the farmer of the far South chooses rather to employ horse than human muscles in the work. He lays down, therefore, in a handy spot, a circular pavement, generally of brick, a little larger than the ring at Astley's. All along the swampy shores of the Mediterranean, traversed by the delta of the Rhone, and stretching westward towards Spain, there feed upon the scanty herbage great herds of semi-wild horses, said to have been originally of Arabian descent. These creatures are caught, when needed, much in the style of the Landes desert steeds, and every farmer has a right to a certain number corresponding with the size of his farm. When, then, the harvest has been cut, and the thrashing time comes on, you may see, approaching the steeding, an unruly flock of lean, lanky, leggy horses, most of them grey, driven by three or four mounted peasants—capital cavaliers—each with a long lance like a trident held erect, and a lasso coiled at the saddle-bow. Then work commences: the wild steeds are tolerably docile, although shy and skittish. A heavy bit is forced into the mouth of each, with a long bridle attached. The creatures are arranged in a circle on the edge of the brick flooring, exactly as when Mr. Widdicombe or M. Franconi prepare for an unrivalled feat of horsemanship upon eight bare-backed steeds by the "Whirlwind Rider," surnamed the "Pet of the Ring," or the famous artiste, "Herr Bridleinski, the Hungarian Tamer of the Flying Steeds." The sheaves of corn are placed just where the active grooms at Astley's rake the sawdust thickest; and then, in answer to the thundering exhortations of Mr. Widdicombe and his coadjutors in the centre of the ring, and the cracking of the whips, the horses, held by their long bridles, go plunging and rearing round the arena, and, after more or less obstreperousness, settle into a shambling trot, treading out the corn as they go, and preserving the pace for a wonderful length of time. At night, the creatures are released, and left to shift for themselves. They seldom stray far from the farm, and are easily recaptured and brought back to work next day. The four-legged thrashers, I am sorry to say, are rather scurvily treated, for they get nothing in return for their labour better than straw—a poor diet for a day's trot. The first time I saw this equestrian thrashing-machine in motion, the effect was very odd. I could not dissociate it from the equestrian performance of some wandering company of high-bred steeds and "star riders." The only thing that seemed strange was, that there should be no spectators; and, after a little time, that there should be no human performers. Round and round, at a long, irregular trot, went the lanky brutes—sometimes breaking out—plunging, and taking it into their heads, as their Rochester cousin, hired by Mr. Winkle, did, to go sideways, but always reduced to obedience by a few smacking persuaders from the whip. But where was the illustrious Whirlwind Rider, who should have stood on all their necks at once, or the famous Bridleinski, who should have stood on all their haunches? No shrill clown's voice echoed from the circus. The stolid, bloused, straw-hatted master of the ring was a perfect disgrace and reproach to Mr. Widdicombe, who, if he had been on board the boat, would infallibly have taken refuge in the run, rather than contemplated such a melancholy mockery of his mission and his functions.
At length there gleamed before us a noble sheet of water, ruffled by a steady breeze, before which one of the Lateen-rigged craft of the Mediterranean was bowling merrily, driving a rolling wave of foam on either side of her bluff bows. This was the Lagoon, or Etang, of Thau, a salt-water lake about a dozen of miles long, and opening up by a narrow channel—on both banks of which rises the flourishing town of Cette—into the Mediterranean. For the greater part of its length, only a strip of sand and shingle interposes between the lake and the sea, and as the steamer to which we were transferred, at the end of the canal, paddled its way to Cette, we could see every moment the surf of the open ocean rising beyond the barrier. The passage along the Etang is pretty and characteristic. On the left lie, in a long, blue chain, the hills of the Cevennes—distance hiding their barren bleakness from the eye—while along the inland edge of the water, village after village, the houses sparklingly white, are mirrored in the lake, with a little fleet of lateen-rigged fishing boats, the sails usually very ragged, pursuing their occupation before each hamlet. Now and then we were passed by huge feluccas, rolling away before the wind, and bound for the Canal du Midi, with great cargoes of hay and straw, heaped up half as high as the mast—the lateen-sail having to be half furled in consequence, and the captain shouting his orders to the steersman as from the top of a stack in a barnyard. The scene reminded me greatly of the hay-barges of the Thames bringing up to London the crops of Kent and Essex.
At length we were landed among groups of Mediterranean sailors, with Phrygian caps—otherwise conical red night-caps—and ugly-looking knives in their belts. The women had the usual Naiad peculiarity of short petticoats, and wore them, too, of a showy, striped stuff, which reminded me of the Newhaven fish-wives, near Edinburgh. This Phrygian cap, by the way, is the prototype of the ordinary cap of liberty, which our good neighbours are so fond of sticking on the stumps of what they call "trees of liberty"—of painting, of carving, of apostrophising, of waving, of exalting—which, in short, they are so fond of doing everything with—but wearing. The effect, as a head-dress, on the Cette fishermen, was not unpleasant. The long, conical top, and tassel, give a degree of drapery to the figure, and the cap itself seems luxuriously comfortable to the head.
A well-appointed little omnibus rattled me through busier streets than I had seen for many a day, by open counting-houses, and under the great lateen yards of feluccas lying in rows, with their bows to the quays, and across a light, wooden swing-bridge, haunted by just such tarry mortals as you see about St. Katherine's docks; and at length I was set down at the wide portal of the Hotel de Poste—a straggling, airy hostelry, such as befits the hot and glaring South. Still, I had not seen the Mediterranean. The great coup was yet unachieved: so, getting five words of instruction from a waiter, I hurried through some narrow streets, crossed two or three more swing-bridges, skirted half-a-dozen boat-building yards, very like similar establishments in Wapping, and then suddenly emerged upon the open beach, with sand-hills, and long bent, or seagrass, rustling in the soft southern wind, with the blue of the great inland sea stretching away, deep and lovely, before me; and with the hissing water and foam-laced inner wavelets of the surf creaming to my feet. A sensation, it will be admitted, is a pleasant thing in these blasé days, and the Mediterranean afforded one. There came on me a vague, crowded, and indistinct vision, at once, of schoolboy recollections and many a subsequent day-dream—of Roman galleys, triremes and quadremes, with brazen beaks and hundred oars, moving like the legs of a centipede; of all the picturesque craft of the middle-ages; of the fleets of Venice; the argosies and tall merchant-barks which carried on the rich commerce of northern Italy; of the Algerine corsairs, which so often bore down upon the Lion of St. Marks; of the quick-pulling piratical craft; the rovers who pillaged from the mouths of the Nile to the Pillars of Hercules; and of the whole tribe of modern Mediterranean vessels, which thousands and thousands of pictures have made classic, with their high peaked sails, and striped gaudy canvass; the whole tribe of feluccas and polacres, whereof, as I gazed, I could see here and there the scattered sails, gleaming like bird-wings upon the sea. The Mediterranean is, after all, the sea of the world: we associate it with everything classic and beautiful, either in art or climate; and although we know well that its lazy, saint-ridden seamen, and its picturesque, but dirty and ill-sailed, vessels would fly before a breeze which a North-sea fisherman or a Channel boatman would consider a mere puff,—still there is something racily and specially picturesque about the black-eyed, swarthy, copper ear-ringed rascals, and something dearly familiar about the high, graceful peaks of the sails around which they cluster. From the beach I went to the harbour, which was crowded almost to its entrance, but, for reasons to be presently alluded to, I was not sorry to recognise not one union-jack among the Stars and Stripes—Dutch and Brazilian ensigns, which were flying from every mast-head. Few Mediterranean harbours are savoury places. It will be remembered that "there shrinks no ebb in that tideless sea;" and accordingly, when the drainage of a town or a district is led into the harbours, there it stays. Marseilles enjoys a most unenviable notoriety in this respect. The horrible fluid beneath you becomes, in the summer time, despite its salt, absolutely putrid; and I was told that there had been instances in which it bred noisome and abhorrent insects and reptiles—that, literally and absolutely, "slimy things did crawl, with legs, upon the slimy sea."
As for the stench, the richness of the steam of fat gases perpetually rising, must be smelt to be appreciated. The Marseillaise, however, have sturdy noses, which do not yield to trifles. They say the dirt preserves the ships, and besides, adds Dumas—a great favourer of the ancient colony of the Greeks—"what a fool a man must be, who, under such a glorious sky, turns his eyes down to gaze on mud and water!"