MENTONE: RUE LONGUE.
XXXVII
THE FIRST VISITORS TO THE RIVIERA
THERE is great fascination about a very ancient human dwelling-place. It stands out among the blank shadows of the past as a warm reality, a lingering spark still aglow among the ashes of things that once had been. There is about it the charm of a memory that is partly real and partly only dreamed about. Strange as the venerable place may be it comes quite naturally into the story of our common ancestry. It seems, in some indefinite way, to be a family possession which we can regard with a personal interest and a legitimate curiosity. Amidst the changes and upheavals of everyday life there is about the old house a comfortable assurance of the continuity of human existence and of our individual claim upon those who have trod before us the great highway.
Such an ancient abode of men is to be found at Mentone, at a spot called, in the local speech, the Baoussé-Roussé. The English would term the place the Red Cliff. The Red Cliff is just beyond the tragical looking chasm, with its babyish stream, that marks the frontier of France. It stands, therefore, in Italy. It is a formidable cliff of great height, as erect as a wall, as defiant as a Titanic bastion. It rises sheer from the rugged beach and is as old as the sea. It has been scraped smooth by the wind of a million years, and may have been once scoured clean by the rain of Noah’s deluge. It is bare of vegetation, except that, here and there, a pitying weed, lavish with yellow blossoms, clings tenderly to its scarred surface. About its foot are a few palms, a tall aloe, and some bushes with scarlet flowers. The colour of the cliff is a tawny grey, stained with red of the tint of ancient rust. There are long seams, too, on its surface which suggest the wrinkles of extreme old age.
At the bottom of the precipice are certain caverns which were once the abodes of men. These caves are about nine in number; so that at one time the Red Cliff must have been quite a little town, for the caverns are capacious. The entrances to the caves are, for the most part, in the form of huge clefts in the rock from twenty feet to sixty feet high. They face towards the south, so that at noon a streak of light can penetrate into the vast stone hall and illumine its floor. When the sun has passed each portal becomes no more than a black gap in the precipice, very mysterious to look upon.
The people who inhabited these caves belong to our earliest known ancestors. They stand at the root of the family tree. They represent the Adam and Eve of human history. Behind these people stretches the void of the unknown. It is in their likeness that the first human being steps out of the everlasting darkness into the light of the present world.
MENTONE: A DOORWAY IN THE RUE LONGUE.