“Trod by a circle of Camargan steeds,
The tall sheaves have been yielding up their seeds
To the incessant hoofs, a month or more.
No pause, no rest; and, on the treading-floor,
Dusty and winding, still the eye perceives
A very mountain of untrodden sheaves.
“Also, the weather was so fiercely hot,
The floor would burn like fire; and rested not
The wooden forks that more sheaves yet supplied
While at the horses’ muzzles there were shied
Clusters of bearded ears unceasingly,—
They flew as arrows from the cross-bow fly.
“And on St. Peter’s day and on St. Charles’
Rang, and rang vainly, all the bells of Arles:
There was no Sunday and no holiday
For the unhappy horses: but alway
The heavy tramp around the weary road,
Alway the pricking of the keeper’s goad,
“Alway the orders issued huskily,
As in the fiery whirlwind still stood he.
The greedy master of the treaders white
Had even muzzled them, in his despite.
And, when Our Lady’s day in August came,
The coupled beasts were treading, all the same,
“The pilèd sheaves, foam-drenched. Their livers clung
Fast to their ribs, and their jaws drivelling hung,
When suddenly an icy, northern gale
Smit, swept the floor,—and God’s blasphemers pale.
It quakes! It parts! On a black caldron’s brink
Now stand they, and their eyes with horror sink.
“Then the sheaves whirl with fury terrible.
Pitch-forkers, keepers, keepers-aids as well,
Struggle to save them; but they naught can do:
The van, the van-goats, and the mill-stones too,
Horses and drivers, treading-floor, and master
Are swallowed up in one immense disaster!”
“You make me shudder!” poor Mirèio said.
“Ah, but that is not all, my pretty maid!
Thou thinkest me a little mad, may be:
But on the morrow thou the spot wilt see;
And carp and tench in the blue water playing,
And, in the reeds, marsh-blackbirds roundelaying.
“But on Our Lady’s day, when mounts again
The fire-crowned sun to the meridian,
Lay thee down softly, ear to earth,” said he,
“And eye a-watch, and presently thou’lt see
The gulf, at first so limpid, will begin
To darken with the shadow of the sin;
“And slowly up from the unquiet deep
A murmuring sound, like buzzing flies, will creep;
And then a tinkling, as of tiny bells,
That soon into an awful uproar swells
Among the water-weeds! Like human voices
Inside an amphora the fearsome noise is!
“And then it is the trot of wasted horses
Painfully tramping round their weary courses
Upon a hard, dry surface, evermore
Echoing like a summer threshing-floor,
Whom drives a brutal keeper, nothing loth,
And hurries them with insult and with oath.