There is an exclamation, and then silence.
The carriage has stopped on the highest point of the pass just where the road has been cut through the low rock, and the driver points with his whip across a vast grey cauldron of a valley to a sort of shelving plateau high up on the shoulder of the opposite cliffs.
"Voilà Les Baux!"
The stupendous scene is spread out before us, wild and silent. The wind from the Crau to the south continues to blow through the cut in the rock; the sun glares down full upon the mysterious rock-city and lays bare the desolation of the valley.
Behind us a few sounds rise from the quarries, but there is otherwise that perfect silence of high places which seems to brood and wait, eternally patient.
This is the spot which is said to have furnished Dante with the scenery of his infernal regions, and the mind at once accepts the tradition, so gloomily grand, so instinct with motionless despair is the scene.
Beyond measure extraordinary the aspect of that cluster of roofs and walls scarcely to be distinguished from the crags and escarpments out of which they grow—"window and vault and hall" fashioned in the living rock. Truly, as Madame our hostess had said, "une ville remarquable"!
The eye slowly learns to recognise the masonry among the natural architecture, to separate the fantastic limestone surfaces from broken dwellings and fallen towers.
The city, once containing about eight thousand inhabitants, is now reduced to about a dozen or so, and these all live at the entrance to the town on the ascending road from the valley by which the traveller from the mountains must approach this grim little court of mediæval princes. The road is comparatively new, for it cuts through some of the great houses, and high up above us as we pass, we see the columns and frieze of a fine stone mantelpiece overhanging the road, evidently belonging to some seigneurial dwelling. Perhaps it was here that the lady of the golden hair passed her tumultuous life—it could scarcely have been peaceful at that time, in that place—with that hair!
A few silent inhabitants watch us as we go by. A cat peers suspiciously over a wall of which the roof has fallen in; a mongrel hunts for garbage in a rubbish heap in a windowless mansion.