Let any traveller cross the Camargue on some calm afternoon in winter, leaving the wonderful dark walls and towers of Aigues Mortes behind him on the marshy plain, and he will probably be disinclined to admit that any important changes can have taken place since those unhappy days. Nevertheless vast improvements have been made, at any rate as regards hygienic conditions; and though still dangerous in the hot season, these swampy spaces cannot rival the old appalling death-roll which in certain times of the year would summon so many victims from the marsh-encircled towns that there were not sufficient hands left to bury them.
At Aigues Mortes the people used to say that the fever held its spring assizes, and there were out of 1,500 inhabitants never less than five or six deaths per day.
Aigues Mortes is but one of the Dead Cities of the coast; some of these are still existing in that sadly pensive way in which once active and famous centres survive their time of glory; while others are ruined or have altogether disappeared.
The series begins at Port Vendre (Portus Veneris), following the coast eastward past Narbonne, Aigues Mortes, Marseilles (the most famous of all, with its Phocæan colonists) to Olba, whose site every traveller passes on his dusty way to the Riviera.
Many of these ancient cities are now inland, but formerly they were still on the shore; as, for instance, Rousillon (the ancient Roscino), Narbonne, and Illiberis. This last is so ancient that Pomponius Mela and Pliny are quoted as having referred to it as "once a great and glorious city." In their day it was reduced to a small village. Its name is thought to be Iberic or Basque, and signifies a new town (Illi beris).
One seems never able to get back far enough to arrive at the beginning of Illiberis, for the city that was already decayed in Pliny's time had a predecessor called Pyrene, named after the daughter of the king of the mysterious Ligurian race of Bebrykes. Pyrene had for a lover no less a person than Hercules, and she gave her name to the capital of the Bebryke Kingdom and to the great chain of mountains that dominate it.
These vast masses of the Pyrenees seem to be the only fixed thing in this region of deltas; this strange, lone land, which rises and flees in a mist before one's eyes, gathering now here, now there in restless dunes, encroaching on the sea at this point, falling back at that; always wandering and wild; shifting, drifting against the walls of ancient cities; stirring, shivering in forgotten corners, by forsaken ways and shrines; silting up round old wrecks or ruins of years ago, till an island or a mount is born out of the waste; giving way before the rush of some swollen current, as it breaks forth into a fresh channel with bright, victorious waves bearing new fortunes to whole regions along the coast.
Among the many races that have populated this shore, besides the great and far-reaching Ligurians and Iberians, there were the agricultural Volscians in the fifth century and the Sordares or Sordi, another traditional half-fabulous people who belonged chiefly to the country about Rousillon, the ancient Roscino.
The whole coast was haunted by the Phœnicians from the earliest times; and the Volscians held a large part of the region for centuries, cultivating the land in quiet bucolic fashion. Narbonne, Agatha (Agde), Brescon, Forum Dimitti (Frontigen), St. Gilles, Maguelonne, Aigues Mortes, were among these old cities or ruins, of which Narbonne alone is of much importance to-day.
When they were flourishing, the country was more or less covered with vegetation; and of a dream-like loveliness these twin-shores must have been with their fair cities dotting the green shores; towers and palaces repeating themselves in the stillness of the lagoons; gliding ships richly laden threading the waterways, passing and repassing; a fresh little wind coming in from the sea, and the vast blue of those waters stretching forth to the edge of the world!