Why is only part of this great stretch of land now fertile, and the rest a desolating waste? The mistake was made in the sixteenth century, when the engineers of Louis XIV examined the country and made recommendations for its treatment. The outlets from the lagoons had been allowed to get choked up, and the Camargue had for long been a fever-breeding waste instead of providing the rich corn land that it had once done. The king's engineers recommended the embanking of the Rhône, so that it should be kept to its course, instead of flooding the adjacent land, and the building of dykes against the inrush of the sea. Drains, protected by traps, were also cut to carry out the stagnant water from the lagoons into the sea, and all this was done at an original cost of about a million pounds, and is kept up at an annual cost of about five thousand. There are now two hundred and thirty miles of dike, and although the land is fertile enough where the Rhône is allowed its periodical overflow, and has been laboriously reclaimed elsewhere, the main effect of these works has been to reduce the Camargue to sterility. It has been estimated that at every overflow of the Rhône, eighteen thousand cubic yards of rich alluvial soil was deposited over the land. This is now carried out to sea, and thrown down to make new bars. Perhaps some day the work will be done again, the dikes removed and the river allowed to take its natural course. All that would have to be done then would be to keep open the mouths of the lagoons, to prevent them from stagnating and breeding fever and ague; and then the whole Camargue would once more be one of the most fertile tracts of the earth.
In the meantime it has its own picturesque wild life, just as the fen country of eastern England had before it was drained. As in all flat countries it domed with magnificent skies; the mirage is a common effect of the scorched desolation; flights of rose-coloured flamingoes are to be seen among the commoner wild fowl. Bulls and horses roam the great solitudes in a wild state, until the time comes round for one of those great pastoral manœuvres, half business, half sport, in which a whole countryside takes part, when the animals that are wanted are cut out from the rest and their ownership settled.
The Guardiens ride over the wide territory committed to their charge, mounted on wiry little white horses of the breed that is most common on the plain. They are splendid-looking young men, for the most part, and it gave me quite a thrill to see one of them a few days later. For there is a romance about them, and the wild yet anciently ordered life they lead, which is hardly of our civilization. You may read all about it in some of the novels of Jean Aicard, and especially in "Roi de Camargue," which seems to cry aloud for translation into English, it is so much finer than later ones by which he is chiefly known here. Now that Mistral and Daudet are dead Jean Aicard is the chief literary interpreter of Provençal life, and in his pictures of this wild life of the great plains with its primitive pursuits and passions he stands supreme.
CHAPTER XVIII
Saintes-Maries de la Mer
I was on the road early the next morning with a twenty-mile walk before me to Saintes-Maries de la Mer. I had to follow the canal for a couple of miles to the north, then to strike across the plain to the westward, then to follow the course of the Little Rhône to the south. This took me through country that has been for the most part reclaimed, and grows acres upon acres of vines. To the south and west of Aigues-Mortes it is nothing but étangs and unreclaimed marsh, and if there is a way through it all I could hardly have expected to find it and should certainly have been cut off by water besides.
The walk was not very inspiring. Any one who knows the reclaimed fen lands of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire will agree that, fertile though these flats may be, they provide the modicum of picturesque scenery. I imagine that the vine-growing industry hereabouts is a comparatively new thing, but it is already a big one. After walking along a straight road between vineyards—flat fields regularly planted with vines about the size of small gooseberry bushes—for five miles, I saw ahead of me an enormous castellated, spired building which I afterwards learnt to be a wine lodge, but which was not on my map at all. And just outside the walls of Aigues-Mortes they have recently erected a building having to do with the shipping or storage of wine over which there has been a good deal of controversy; for it is built in a sham castellated style, and interferes with the effect of the ancient fortifications.
My road turned before I came to the big building I have mentioned, and presently the fields became less ruled and planed, and little bits of untouched marshland began to encroach upon them. I came to the hamlet of Sylvéreal at a turn of the Little Rhône, where there is a bridge and a road running to Saintes-Maries on either side of the river. I refreshed myself at a poor little inn and was heavily charged for sour bread and hard cheese. But these regions are really out of the world, habitations are sparse and communications rare. Five miles further on I came to a ferry—the Bac du Sauvage—and was put across the Little Rhône, which is not little at all, but a big river with a rapid flow. Except for the quite good road, one might well have imagined oneself during these last miles in a new country gradually being opened up. The river carries no merchandise, its banks are deserted. Since Aigues-Mortes, in sixteen miles or so, I had passed no village except Sylvéreal, and there cannot be more than a dozen houses there. I could not rid myself of the feeling of being somewhere in the bush of Australia, which I know best of the new countries. Even the occasional wayside shanties were not absent—little groups of them occasionally, in which there was nearly always one announcing itself as that of a coiffeur.