A cart was moving slowly over the sandy road.
“Good-day, Renaud.”
“Good-day, Marius. Where are you going?”
“To carry fish to Arles.”
Marius raised the branches which apparently made up his load, but which were simply used to shade a dozen or more baskets and hampers. Well pleased with his freight, he put aside the cloth that was spread over his treasure under the branches. Baskets and hampers were filled to the brim with fish taken in the ponds and the sea. There were mullet and bream, still alive, animated prisms with mouths and gills wide open like bright red marine flowers amid a mass of dark-blue, olive-green, and gleaming gold. There were enormous eels, too, caught for the most part in the canals of Camargue, which are veritable fish-preserves.
The dark-hued, slippery creatures twisted in and out, tying and untying endless slip-knots with their snake-like bodies. By the livid spots upon some of the great eels, Renaud recognized them as murænæ, possessors of voracious mouths, well stocked with sharp teeth.
“See how they all keep moving!” said Marius.
At that moment, as if to justify his words, a great flat fish flapped out of one of the baskets and fell to the ground.
With the end of his three-pronged spear the mounted drover nailed him to the earth to prevent his leaping into the ditch, filled with water, that ran along the road.
“Hallo!” said he in surprise, “isn’t that a cramp-fish. When I spear one of them with my regular fish-spear, which is longer than this three-pronged one, it gives me a shock I didn’t feel at all to-day.”