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Very near here, on a round eminence of bare rock, rises the ruin of a Moorish tower, named Cas-tel-Vieil. Its side is bordered with a frightful mountain, black and brown, perfectly bald and resembling a decayed amphitheatre; the layers hang one over another, notched, dislocated, bleeding; the sharp edges and fractures are yellowed with wretched moss, vegetable ulcers that defile with their leprous patches the nudity of the stone. The pieces of this monstrous skeleton hold together only by their mass; it is crannied with deep fissures, bristling with falling blocks, broken to the very base; it is nothing but a ruin dreary and colossal, sitting at the entrance of a valley, like a battered giant.
There was an old beggar-woman there, with naked feet and arms, who was worthy of the mountain. For a dress she had a bundle of rags of every color sewn together, and remained the whole day long crouched in the dust. One might have counted the muscles and tendons of her limbs; the sun had dried her flesh and burned her skin; she resembled the rock against which she was sitting; she was tall, with large, regular features, a brow seamed with wrinkles like the bark of an oak, beneath her grizzled lids a savage black eye, a mat of white hair hanging in the dust. If a sculptor had wished to make a statue of Dryness, the model was there.
The valley narrows and ascends; the Gave rolls between two slopes of great forests, and falls in a constant succession of cascades. The eyes are satiated with freshness and verdure; the trees mount to the very sky, thickset, splendid; the magnificent light falls like a rain on the immense slope; the myriads of plants suck it in, and the mighty sap that gorges them overflows in luxury and vigor.
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On all hands the heat and thewater invigorate and propagate them; they accumulate; enormous beeches hang above the torrent; ferns people the brink; moss hangs in green garlands on the arcades of roots; wild flowers grow by families in the crevices of the beeches; the long branches go with a leap to the further brink; the water glides, boils, leaps from one bank to the other with a tireless violence, and pierces its way by a succession of tempests.