Fanfarigoule in the Crau[18] is the haunt of the ghouls.
Let any one wander alone in that extraordinary desert, and if he have not nerves of steel or a cast-iron imagination he will understand how it earns that reputation. As for disputing the existence of those ancient beings, to what reasonable mind would it occur—especially at the hour of sunset?
Immense silent world of stones—stones rounded by centuries of rolling and wearing at the mercy of the Alpine torrents—a long range of far-away mountains with Mont Ventoux as their highest point, an atmosphere thrilled with the sunlight, with that strange purity that speaks of absolute solitude—such is La Crau.
If one is disposed to imagine that Provence is a land all brilliancy and gaiety, as first impressions would perhaps suggest, a sight of the Crau and the Camargue is enough to correct the error.
When any place has gathered through long centuries a certain kind of reputation, there will always be found particular potent influences that hang about the spot. And sometimes these influences are very mysterious and hard to account for.
This is the case with the Crau. The reflections of heat, and light from the immense body of stones may produce peculiar conditions of atmosphere and ether and so affect that delicately responsive instrument the human brain.
In any case, in its power of stirring and impressing it is a place apart.
A strange story is told by Baring-Gould of his experience when a child, of crossing the baking plain with his father, on a hot summer's day. He was on the box watching the post horses. As he looked, he "saw a number of little men with peaked caps running about the horses and clambering up them." His father sent him inside the carriage out of the hot sun, but for some time, he says, "I continued to see these dwarfs among the pebbles of the Crau, jumping over the tufts of grass, or careering along the road by the carriage side, making faces at me."
However, one must not attribute a monopoly of the power of evolving such visions to the Field of Pebbles, for the author goes on to relate how in after years, one of his boys, while picking gooseberries, "saw a little man of his own height with a peaked cap, red jacket, and green breeches."
Moreover, strange to say, the same thing happened to his wife when a girl of thirteen, so that one cannot account for the marvel by heredity, that convenient explanation of mysteries. Sun on the head, the author supposes, must have caused all these experiences.