Before the Chevelure d'Or[22] there is a little group of men. Here the trap is put up and we set forth on foot up the steep main street of this "mediæval Pompeii."
The whole place is built on the shelving shoulder of the cliff; a sloping ledge whence one might expect the town to slip down at any moment into the cauldron-valley; just as from time to time great fragments of rock have evidently rolled down to eternal oblivion.
The impression of universal greyness strengthens as we move upwards through the silent streets: grey walls, grey tiles, grey paving stones and grey escarpments above, on whose highest summit stands the rock-excavated castle, now apparently inaccessible except to adventurous birds—or, perhaps, the ghosts of the Princes of Les Baux who for their crimes are unable to rest in their graves.
We clamber up and down the ruinous higher part of the town, among those pathetic rectangles of masonry open to the sky where human life throbbed so eagerly a little while ago; we mount some perilous-looking steps on the cliff-side, in hopes of reaching the castle, but find ourselves emerging in mid-air upon the edge of the plateau overlooking from an appalling height the windy spaces of the Crau.
The mountains run sheer to the plain. It is exciting to stand on that great altitude which commands the stony desert towards Arles and the mouths of the Rhone. It has something of the character of the scene from the Appian Way looking towards Ostia and the mouths of the Tiber. The approach to Les Baux from Arles is in some respects more impressive than the route from St. Remy, for then the whole immense height of the cliffs is visible from the level of the plain. On one of the little heights that rise here and there on this plain stands the windmill of Daudet, which gives the title to his famous Lettres de Mon Moulin.
If we stand on the highest point of the city, the eye can run along the line of the Alpilles. Another little wave of hills sweeps forward on to the plain precisely as the smaller ocean waves go curling in on the shore, followed by the foaming line of breakers. The Alpilles seem, indeed, to be breaking on the shore of the Crau like the billows of a great sea.
A pathway perilously near the edge of the cliff fails to help us to approach that strange castle from which we are still separated by many feet of sheer rock.
DAUDET'S WINDMILL.
By Joseph Pennell.