Before one descends upon Marseilles from the Estaque, he comes upon the little village of Carry.
Of the antiquity of the little fishing-port there is no question, but it is doubtful if the hordes of Marseillais who come here in summer, to eat bouillabaisse on the verandas of its restaurants and hotels, know, or care, anything of this.
As the Incarrus Posito, it had an existence long before bouillabaisse was ever thought of, at least by its present name. It was one of the advance-posts of the Massaliotes when Marseilles was the Massalia of the Greeks.
Carry, with its port, and the château of M. Philippe Jourde, a Frenchman who won his fortune on the field of commerce in the United States, is delightful, but it is not usually accounted one of the sights that is worth the while of the Riviera tourist to go out of his way to see.
Within the grounds of the château have been brought to light within recent years many monumental remains; one bearing the two following inscriptions bespeaks an antiquity contemporary with the early years of the building up of Marseilles:
| C. POMPEI PLANTEA | AES AVC C R IANCO IP CAIII EXCL INIPSNIS SEVIR AUGUSTALIS I. S. D. |
Besides this, marbles, mosaics, pottery, coins, and even precious metals have been found. Carry may then have been something more than a fortress outpost, or a fishing-village; it may have been a Pompeii.
Almost at one’s elbow is Marseilles itself, brilliant and burning with the feverish energies of a great mart of trade, and bathed in the dark blue of the Mediterranean and the lighter blue of the skies. Beyond are the isles of the bay and the rocky promontories to the eastward, while to the northeast are the heights of the Var and the Alpes-Maritimes. Truly the kaleidoscopic first view of the “Porte de l’Orient” fully justifies any rhapsodies. There is but one other view in all France at all approaching it in splendour,—that of Rouen from the height of Bon Secours,—and that, in effect, is quite different.
One’s approach to Marseilles by rail from the north is equally a reminder of a theatrical transformation scene, such as one has when he reaches Rouen or Cologne; a sudden unfolding of new and strange beauties of prospect, which are nothing if not startling. The railway runs for many minutes in the obscurity of the Tunnel de la Nerthe before it finally debouches on the southern gorges of the Estaque Range, the same which flanks the coast all the way from Marseilles to the entrance to the Étang de Berre.
Pines and boursailles and rocky hillocks, set out here and there with olive-trees, form the immediate foreground, while that distant horizon of blue, which is everywhere along the Mediterranean, forms a background which is softer and more sympathetic than that of any other known body of water, salt or fresh, great or small.