As he stooped above her, she whispered, “Meester Deek, our quarrels have brought us nearer.”
They heard the rattle of the carriage in the tunnel. Joining hands, they set out down the steep decline. In the valley they found themselves among laurel-roses, pink with bloom and heavy with fragrance. Then they commenced the climb to Les Baux, through cypresses standing stiffly as sentinels. Beady-eyed, half-naked children watched them and hid behind rocks when they beckoned.
Beneath a battered gateway they entered the ancient home of the Courts of Love. Near the gateway, built flush with the precipice, stood a little house which announced that it was the Hôtel de la Reine Jeanne. An old gentleman with eyes like live coals and long white hair, stepped out to greet them. He informed them that he was the folk-lore poet of Les Baux and its inn-keeper. They engaged rooms; while doing so they noticed that many of the walls were covered with frescoes.
“Ah, yes,” said the poet inn-keeper, “an English artist did them in payment for his board when he had spent all his money. He came here like you, you understand; intending to stay for one night; but he stayed forever. It has happened before in Les Baux, this becoming enchanted. He was a very famous artist, but he works in the vineyards now and has married one of our Saracen girls.”
Then he explained that Les Baux was like a pool front which the tides of Time had receded. Its inhabitants were descendants of Roman legionaries and of the Saracens who had conquered it later. That was why there were no blue eyes in Les Baux, though it stood so near to heaven.
They wandered out into the charmed silence. There was no wheel-traffic. The toy streets could be spanned by the arms outstretched. There were no shops—only deserted palaces, with defaced escutcheons and wall-flowers nestling in their crannies. Only women and children were in sight; they looked like camp-followers of a lost army. Old imperial splendors moldered in this sepulchre of the clouds, as out of mind as the Queens of Beauty asleep in their leaden coffins.
They came to the part that was Roman. Cicalas and darting swallows were its sole tenants. From the huge structure of the crag houses had been carved and hollowed. The pavement was still grooved by the wheels of chariots.
In Paris it had been the foreignness of their surroundings that had forced them together; now it was the antiquity—the brooding sense of the eventlessness of life and the eternal tedium of expectant death.
“A doll’s house of the gods,” he said.
“No, a faery land waiting for its princess to waken.”