The whole place gives the impression of having been fashioned in some gloomy dream.
Every turn brings new and monstrous forms into view; the fantastic handiwork of earth's inner fires, patient modellings of the sun and wind. One thinks of the busy coming and going along these "footprints of the earthquake" in troubadour days, when knights and nobles flocked to the famous little court of the Alpilles, and the fame of the beautiful Passe Rose (Cecilia des Baux) brought troops of admirers from the ends of the earth—kings, princes, jongleurs, troubadours. Many a figure well known to history—the exiled Dante among them—has passed along these gorges. The Princes of Les Baux owned seventy-nine bourgs and had a finger in half the intrigues of Europe; a barbaric race, probably descendants of the ancient Ligurians, with wild mountain blood in their veins.
Further on, the valleys widen, and we see large oblong holes hollowed out of the creamy limestone, sometimes at regular intervals, producing an effect of arcades in the rock. Still further on we come upon majestic Assyrian-like portals, narrowing to the top in true archaic fashion and giving ingress to dark vestibules exciting to the fancy. They might well have been the entry to some subterranean Aladdin's palace whose gardens and miraculous orchards grow emeralds and diamonds as cherries grow in Kent. It was quite surprising to find that these grandiose excavations were the work of mere modern quarrymen still engaged in the prehistoric industry. Fine groups of horses and big carts and labourers before the Assyrian entrances had an effect curiously ancient and majestic. There was a time when the men of the Stone Age cut just such galleries and holes far up in the rocks at Les Baux and dwelt there like a flock of jackdaws, high above the hazard of attack.
It is asserted by the learned that the city, in fact, dates from the Stone Age, being inhabited by generation after generation of wild peoples, till gradually the dwellings were adapted to less uncivilised needs and added to by further sculpturing and excavation and by masonry whose material was hewn from the surrounding limestone.
In the city is a small museum containing many Stone Age implements.
It is indeed a place of strange memories.
In one of the tombs of the principal church was discovered the perfectly preserved body of a young woman with a mass of golden hair. The body crumbled to dust almost immediately, but the innkeeper took possession of the beautiful tresses, and called his inn in its honour, à la Chevelure d'Or.
Poor golden hair, it has set many a poet singing and vielle twanging in its day!
We have been wending our way steadily upward across a region that grows wider and more sweeping in its contours. The road rounds a corner. Suddenly we feel the wind in our faces and a blaze of light.