"'Coume au mas, coume au tems de
Moun Paire, ai! ai! ai!'"
("As at a farm in the time of my father, Alas, alas, alas!")
The carriage soon swallowed the eighteen kilometres of level road, the country changing in character as we neared the banks of the Gard. Here began the great cliffs which had inspired the Romans with the truly Imperial idea of carrying water to Nimes across the river from height to height, for with all their engineering skill this great people did not know that water will rise to its own level.
The magnificent bridge came suddenly into view, startling in its forty-nine metres of solid grandeur. Three tiers of arches lifted themselves one above the other; the lowest series short and solid, the second more slender and taller, rising in its haughty Roman way to carry the third and most towering of all, at whose summit in the sky used to run the water which supplied the people of Nimes when they were Roman citizens. It was there on hot summer days that they revelled in their splendid baths (fed by the great aqueduct) which may still be seen in the public gardens, with cool open marble courts some eight or ten feet below the level of the soil, where stone Tritons and Neptunes kept watch over the waters that flowed refreshingly among the white columns, and lay green and still in little murmuring grottoes well sheltered from the sun. It was then, too, that these luxurious citizens used to assemble in their thousands to see beasts and men fight for dear life in the great amphitheatre; and then that some Roman built the curious Tour Magne that puzzles the learned and dominates the town to this day. The Pont du Gard must have presented precisely the same aspect to those old Romans as it does to us, for scarcely a stone has been disturbed in all these centuries.
THE ROMAN TOUR MAGNE, NIMES, FROM THE FOUNTAIN GARDEN.
By Joseph Pennell.
It is not surprising that its magnificent design should have been attributed in the middle ages to the devil.
The story is that the architect, overwhelmed with the difficulty of the task and the number of times the river had carried away the uncompleted arches, was almost thinking of abandoning it altogether, when the enterprising enemy of mankind approached with the offer to construct the bridge in such a way as never bridge had been constructed before, for the trifling consideration of the first soul that should cross it after its completion.