"But why," he adds, "should the sun on the head superinduce a vision of Kobolds? Is it because other people have suffered from the sun that the fables of little men, brownies, pixies, gnomes, fairies, is to be found everywhere? Or—is it possible that there is such a little creature only visible to man when he is subject to certain influences?"
ON THE VERGE OF LA CRAU.
By E. M. Synge.
We first approached this forsaken region in the train, when the sun was beginning to get low, and wonderful tragic lights were showing along the western horizon. The olives and the pleasant farmsteads had been left behind, and we found ourselves rushing on through the evening glow into a limitless desolation. And suddenly there flashed past close to the train a tall, dark shadow and a little station, and then another shadow and another, till presently the shadow grew continuous except for recurrent flashes of light, pulsing steadily as the train raced on; and we found that the line was bordered on one side with an immense wall of cypresses, and between their trunks one caught glimpses of the white wilderness beyond. For miles this sombre rampart runs on and on beside the line protecting it from the mistral which sweeps with terrible violence across these huge spaces. The stones are described by many writers as gigantic, but they look not more than about a foot in diameter in this southern part of the plain, and in the neighbourhood of St. Martin-en-Crau they appear rather smaller and of extraordinary uniformity of size and shape.
But not only is the eye amazed by this tremendous extent of water-worn stones (there are really two other lesser Craus beside the Crau d'Arles): the imagination is startled by the extraordinary depth of this strange deposit, an average of from ten to fifteen metres; that is at the lowest estimate over thirty feet, and at the highest forty-five feet.
Imagine that depth of vast pebbles being poured down from the Alps over miles and miles of plains! No wonder the ancient tribes called in the aid of their gods in trying to account for the stupendous catastrophe.
Among the distant mountains—many miles away—in the strange landscape of the Luberon range lies Varigoule, the scene of the Provençal Sabat. Valmasque, the Witch's Vale, was the home of the persecuted Vaudois. Witches, wizards, dracs (or water spirits), and a hundred other uncanny creatures have been associated by the people for unnumbered centuries with these gloomier scenes: rivers springing out of unknown sources, black cliffs, fantastic pinnacles whose names belong to forgotten tongues: Ligurian, Gallic, Phœnician, one knows not what, bestowed one knows not when; perhaps when Hercules fought the Ligurians on the Crau and his father Jupiter came to his aid with a shower of enormous stones.
Æschylus makes Prometheus direct the footsteps of Hercules to the Crau, where he tells him he will encounter the native Ligurians and be helpless in their hands for want of a single stone, which the country cannot supply. In this dilemma he will touch the pity of Jupiter who will cover the sky with clouds and send down a hail of stones with which Hercules can drive back the Ligurian hosts.[19]
The ancient Ligurian race of which one hears so much, occupied the country from the Pyrenees to the Arno in the seventh or eighth century b.c., and were not subdued till the reign of Augustus, who raised the well-known monument at La Turbie, near Monaco, to celebrate his victory. As one of their great tribes, the Salyans, had for their cities Marseilles, Tarascon, Arles, Glanum (St. Remy), it is not improbable that the natives of this district, now growing so familiar, were the descendants of the Ligurians or Ligyens, "ce peuple harmonieux," as they have been called. They are thought to be of Asiatic origin, and are described as a small, dark-haired people, open to all the arts, particularly music, and "sensitive to all the delicacies of life." They gave a high place to their women, who had the rôle of arbitress in all large affairs and who have left behind them many traditions of their "heroism and largeness of soul." Perhaps it is to this "harmonious people" that France and Italy owe their brilliant artistic history.