rivers of Provence are strangely fascinating; perhaps because they so dominate and ensoul the country, and because of their tumultuous flowing. The really fascinating thing for the living is life!
The river Asse is so impetuous that a proverb has grown up about it: "l'Asse; fou qui la passe."
"And fleet Durance …
Rugged in gait as wild of appetite. … "
The Rhone has a little wind all to herself; the west wind that is called lou rosau, the Provençal name for the river being la Rose.
The Rhone and the Durance are very different in character, though it would take some telling to make the distinction clear. Both are swift and strong, but the Durance is always a wild mountain creature, clear and singing, while the Rhone is more humanised, more experienced, more profound in the still passion of its flowing.
Its calm is perfect, its storm tremendous. Rohan le taureau is a name well deserved when the mistral descends from the mountains, waking the "majestic music" of the river; impetuous, stormy, but always with that mysterious under-note of calm that seems to belong to all great things. Even the stern St. Jerome called the persuasive Hilarius "the Rhone of eloquence," because nothing could resist the seductive power of his language.
"His waves like herded cows that roar and bound" is one of Mistral's many descriptions of the river which has inspired poet after poet and traveller after traveller with a sense of its splendid power and beauty.
It is to the rivers, those patient builders, that the Gulf of Lyons owes its curious formation which is of extraordinary interest to the geologist as well as to the historian and the artist.
It was when the glacial epoch of the world was just over and the great glaciers were breaking up along the valleys that lead down to the Mediterranean that the present contours of the Gulf of Lyons began to form. It is the old story of river-borne material forming deltas and bars, but in this case, perhaps because of the great number of rivers—(the Tech, the Aude, the Olbe, the Hérault, the Vidourle, the Durance, and above all the Rhone)—there has arisen a sort of twin-coast; a double shore enclosing a complicated series of lagoons or étangs producing a labyrinth of land and lake; "ephemeral isles," and wandering waterways, long stretches of sand-dunes—shores that fly before the wind—great swamps and deserts such as the Rhone-enclosed island of the Camargue and the plain of the Crau. In its desolate way, this coast of many changes and fortunes is one of the most interesting features of the country.
On the outer beach break the waves of the Mediterranean; the inner is bathed by the smooth waters of the great chain of lagoons, blue, lonely, strangely bright and still.
ON THE DURANCE.
By E. M. Synge.
This lake system in the early centuries was the scene of active navigation and commerce, and on its shores were brilliant cities. A canal or grau connected the lagoons with the sea, and these avenues in the prosperous days were kept carefully open so that the sea could enter and keep the water fresh and moving, and so perfectly wholesome.
Gradually, as one by one the great ports fell into decay, the canals were neglected and the lakes became stagnant, silting up and so developing into poisonous morasses, till the whole dismal regions in the Middle Ages became a place of death.
AIGUES MORTES FROM THE CAMARGUE.
By E. M. Synge.
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!
The most ancient of the dead cities, those whose origin recedes far back before the Roman occupation, are generally a few miles inland, and mark the old line of the coast.
Narbonne, the famous capital of Gallia, was, like all the Celtic cities, sombre and severe in aspect, with mortarless walls of enormous blocks of stone. The people of Marseilles who traded with Narbonne "found no charm in these marshy solitudes beaten by all the winds in the midst of the indefinite and shallow lagoons, which rendered almost unapproachable the grey walled town whose sadness contrasted strikingly with the magnificence of the elegant Massilia."
Since then the Romans have occupied Narbonne, the Visigoths and Saracens have devastated it. This, the first Roman colony in Gaul, was