While chewing the bitter leaves, we come to the beeches. These are first big, solitary bushes, trailing on the ground; soon after, dwarf trees, clustering close together; and, finally, mighty trunks, forming a dense and gloomy forest, whose soil is a mass of rough limestone blocks. Bowed down in winter by the weight of the snow, battered all the year round by the fierce gusts of the mistral, many of the trees have lost [[202]]their branches and are twisted into grotesque positions, or even lie flat on the ground. An hour or more is spent in crossing this wooded zone, which from a distance shows against the sides of the Ventoux like a black belt. Then once more the beeches become bushy and scattered. We have reached their upper boundary and, to the great relief of all of us, despite the sorrel-leaves, we have also reached the stopping-place selected for our lunch.
We are at the source of the Grave, a slender stream of water caught, as it bubbles from the ground, in a series of long beech-trunk troughs, where the mountain shepherds come to water their flocks. The temperature of the spring is 45° F.; and its coolness is a priceless boon for us who have come from the sultry oven of the plain. The cloth is spread on a charming carpet of Alpine plants, with glittering among them the thyme-leaved paronychia, whose wide, thin bracts look like silver scales. The food is taken out of the bags, the bottles extracted from their bed of hay. On this side are the joints, the legs of mutton stuffed with garlic, the stacks of loaves; on that, the tasteless chickens, for our grinders to toy with presently, when the edge has been taken off our appetite. At no great distance, set in a place of honour, are the Ventoux cheeses spiced with winter [[203]]savory, the little pébré d’asé cheeses, flanked by Aries sausages, whose pink flesh is mottled with cubes of bacon and whole pepper-corns. Over here, in this corner, are green olives still dripping with brine and black olives soaking in oil; in that other, Cavaillon melons, some white, some orange, to suit every taste; and, down there, a jar of anchovies which make you drink hard and so keep your strength up. Lastly, the bottles are cooling in the ice-cold water of the trough over there. Have we forgotten anything? Yes, we have not mentioned the crowning side-dish, the onions, to be eaten raw with salt. Our two Parisians—for we have two among us, my fellow-botanists—are at first a little startled by this very invigorating bill of fare; soon they will be the first to burst into praises. Are we all ready? Then let us sit down.
And now begins one of those Homeric repasts which mark red-letter days in one’s life. The first mouthfuls are almost frenzied. Slices of mutton and chunks of bread follow one another with alarming rapidity. Each of us, without communicating his apprehensions to the others, casts an anxious glance at the victuals and asks himself:
‘If this is the way we are going on, shall we have enough for to-night and to-morrow?’ [[204]]
However, the craving is allayed; we began by devouring in silence, we now eat and talk. Our apprehensions for the morrow are likewise relieved; and we give due credit to the man who ordered the menu, who foresaw this hunger-fit and who arranged to cope with it worthily. The time has come for us to appreciate the victuals as connoisseurs. One praises the olives, stabbing them one by one with the point of his knife; another lauds the anchovies as he cuts up the little ochre-coloured fishes on his bread; a third waxes enthusiastic about the sausage; and all with one accord extol the pébré d’asé cheeses, no larger than the palm of a man’s hand. Pipes and cigars are lit; and we stretch ourselves on our backs in the grass, with the sun shining down upon us.
An hour’s rest and we are off again, for time presses. The guide with the baggage will go alone, towards the west, skirting the edge of the woods, which has a Mule-path. He will wait for us at the Jas, or Bâtiment, on the upper boundary of the beeches, some 5000 feet above the level of the sea. The Jas is a large stone hut, which is to shelter us, man and beast, to-night. As for us, we continue the ascent to the ridge, by following which we shall reach the highest peak more easily. From the top, after sunset, we shall go down to the Jas, where the [[205]]guide will have arrived long before us. This is the plan proposed and adopted.
We reach the crested ridge. On the south, the comparatively easy slopes which we have just climbed stretch as far as the eye can see; on the north, the scene is full of wild grandeur: the mountain, sometimes hewn perpendicularly, sometimes carved into rough steps, alarmingly steep, is little else than a sheer precipice a mile high. If you throw a stone, it never stops, but falls from rock to rock until it reaches the bottom of the valley, where you can distinguish the bed of the Toulourenc looking like a ribbon. While my companions loosen masses of rock and send them rolling into the abyss so that they may watch the frightful fall, I discover under a broad flat stone one of my old insect acquaintances, the Hairy Ammophila, whom I had always met by herself on the roadside banks in the plain, whereas here, almost at the top of the Ventoux, I find her to the number of several hundreds heaped up under one and the same shelter.
I was beginning to investigate the reasons for this agglomeration, when the southerly breeze, which already during the morning had inspired us with a few vague fears, suddenly brought up a cohort of clouds which melted into rain. Before we knew it, we were shrouded in a thick, [[206]]drizzling mist, which prevented us from seeing two yards in front of us. By an unfortunate coincidence, one of us, my good friend Delacour, had strayed aside in search of Euphorbia saxitalis, one of the botanical curiosities of these heights. Making a speaking-trumpet of our hands, we shouted as one man. No answer came. Our voices were lost in the flaky thickness and the dull sound of the whirling mist. As the wanderer could not hear us, we had to look for him. In the darkness it was impossible to see one another at a distance of two or three yards; and I was the only one of the seven to know the locality. So that nobody might be left in the lurch, we took hands and I placed myself at the head of the chain. For some minutes we played a regular game of blind-man’s-buff, leading to nothing. No doubt, on seeing the clouds drift up, Delacour, who knew the Ventoux, had taken advantage of the last gleams of light to hasten to the shelter of the Jas. We resolved to make for it ourselves as quickly as possible, for already our clothes were streaming with rain inside as well as out. Our white-duck trousers were sticking to us like a second skin.
A serious difficulty arose: the hurrying backwards and forwards, the twisting and turning, while we looked about us, had reduced [[207]]me to the plight of a person whose eyes are bandaged and who is then made to spin round on his heels. I had lost all sense of direction; I had not the least idea which was the southern slope. I questioned this man and that; opinions were divided and most uncertain. The upshot was that not one of us could say where the north lay and where the south. Never in all my life had I realized the value of the points of the compass as I did at that moment. All around us was the mystery of the grey haze; beneath our feet we could just make out the beginning of a slope here and a slope there. But which was the right one? We had to make a choice and to launch out boldly. If, by bad luck, we went down the northern slope, we risked breaking our bones over the precipices the sight of which had but now filled us with dread. Perhaps not one of us would survive it. I passed a few minutes of acute perplexity.
‘Let’s stay here,’ said the majority, ‘and wait till the rain stops.’