The man's bundle was evidently a musical instrument, and as they came nearer we heard snatches of song, sometimes gay, sometimes sad. The man pointed to Les Baux as if astonished at its extraordinary aspect, and the woman stood looking up at it curiously. Sometimes they left the road to explore some of the clefts and rock passages, and among the bare walls of limestone and the narrow galleries, their songs—with which they had doubtless delighted Marseilles audiences—reverberated most fantastically. Evidently they were strolling minstrels tramping the country, and were now probably on their way to St. Remy, Tarascon, and Beaucaire, and on to Avignon and the cities of Languedoc; modern troubadours following the ancient calling in the ancient country.
But ah, if Raimbaut de Vacqueiras had seen his successors!
It was a touching little scene: the two footsore troubadours—jongleurs, perhaps, one ought to call them—passing wondering but unconscious below the city where once their forefathers of the craft were welcomed and honoured guests.
If the passes of the Alpilles were as desolate as a moon landscape in the full blaze of a Provençal midday, what were they in the grey of evening? The human spirit is not fashioned to endure the aspect of these abysmal regions of nature.
Masses of rock rising out of unknown deeps of shadow take on the aspect of some lawless architecture, the handiwork of an alien race: fantastic earth-born peoples raising mad palaces half sublime, half grotesque:—
"great plinths, majestic porticoes."
colonnades whose capitals are sculptured by the wind spirits: strange half-finished cathedrals with pinnacles and fretwork, flocks of gargoyles wrought by goblin sculptors.
There was one sublime insane cathedral looming crazily through the dusk, with an encumberment of caricatures of saints and angels, grinning faces, half defined, half suggested—it seemed like some great Temple of Evil.
From the Gorge of Hell, high up among the recesses of the hills, opens the Witch's Grotto amidst "tortured shapes which rise up, sink down, stretch into great entablatures and gardens in the air."
This is the dreaded domain of Tavèn, the famous sorceress of the Alpilles. She plays an important part in Mistral's epic poem Mireille (or Mirèio, in the original Provençal).