Letters From My Windmill Alphonse Daudet (top 10 ebook reader .txt) 📖

at the unearthly hour of five o'clock, their largewagon, loaded with rifles, dogs, and provisions, came to pick me up atthe bottom of the hill. Off we go on the road to Arles, which is a bitdry and the trees have mostly lost their leaves by this time inDecember. The pale green shoots of the olive trees are hardly visible,and the garish green of the oaks is a bit too wintry and artificial.The stables are beginning to stir into life, while very early riserslight up the windows in the farms before day break. In the gaps in thestones amongst the ruins of Mont-Majeur abbey, the sea eagles, stilldrowsy, stretch their wings. Despite the hour, the old peasant womenare coming from the Ville-de-Beaux, trotting along in their donkeycarts. We pass them alongside the ditches. They have to go six countrykilometres to sit on the steps of St. Trophyme to sell their smallpackets of medicinal herbs collected on the mountain….

The low, crenellated ramparts of Arles appear, just as you see them onold engravings, which show warriors with lances larger than the talusthey are standing on. We gallop through this marvellous, small town,surely one of the most picturesque in France, with its roundedsculptured, moucharaby-like balconies, jutting out into the middle ofthe narrow streets. There are old black houses with tiny doors, in theMoorish style, gothic and low-roofed, which take you back to the timeof William the Short-Nose and the Saracens. At this hour there's nobodyabout yet, except the quay on the River Rhone. The Camargue boat issteaming up at the bottom of the steps and is ready to sail. The tenantfarmers are there in their red serge jackets. So are some young womenof La Roquette, out looking for farm work, and standing on the deckamongst us, chatting and laughing, with their long brown mantles turneddown because of the sharp morning air. The tall Arles' headdressesmakes their heads look small and elegant with an attractive pertness,and they feel the need to stand on tip toe, so that their laughter andbanter can be heard by everybody. The bell rings and off we go. Whatwith the fast flow of the Rhone, the propeller, and the mistral, thetwo river banks speed by. On one side, there is the Crau, an arid,stony plain. On the other we have the Camargue, much greener, with itsshort grass and swamps full of reeds stretching all the way to the sea.

From time to time the boat pulls in at a landing stage, on the right orleft bank, or on the Empire or the Kingdom, as it was known in themiddle ages, in the time when Arles was a Kingdom. The old Rhonesailors still use these same words today. At every stop there was awhite farm, and a clump of trees. The workmen getting off with theirtools, and the women with their baskets under their arms, go straightonto the gangway. Little by little the boat empties, first on theEmpire side and then on the Kingdom, and by the time we get off atMas-de-Giraud, there's hardly anybody left on board.

The Mas-de-Giraud is an old farm of the Lords of Barbentane, and wewent in to await the keeper appointed to come and meet us. In the mainkitchen, all the farm hands, ploughmen, winegrowers, and shepherds aresitting at the table, solemnly, silently, and slowly eating their mealand being served by the women who have to wait to eat until the men arefinished. Presently the keeper arrives with the cart. He is a realFennimore-Cooper type, a trapper on land and water, fish-warden, andgamekeeper, known locally as the Stalker, because he can always befound in the morning mists or at nightfall stalking amongst the reeds,or stock still in his small boat watching over his keep nets on theopen water and the irrigation channels. It may be this work ofperpetual lookout that makes him so silent and focussed. And yet, asthe cart full of rifles and baskets trundles along in front of us, hegives us news of the hunt, the number of over-flights, and the locationwhere the birds of passage have been brought down. As he talks, hemelts into the landscape.

The cultivated earth gives way to the true, untamed Camargue, amongstthe pasture and the marshland, and the irrigation channels shine inamongst the goose-foot plants as far as the eye can see. Bunches oftamarisks and reeds form little islands on a calm sea. There are notall trees; the immense evenness of the plain is unbroken. The animalsheds have roofs that slope down almost to ground level. The roamingflocks, lying in the salt grass or making their way as they nuzzlearound the shepherd's red cape, don't disturb the landscape's regularflow, dwarfed, as they are, by the endless space of blue horizons andopen sky. Just as a rough sea is still the sea, so a sense of solitudeand immensity emerges, heightened by the relentless mistral, which,with its powerful breath, seems to flatten yet enlarge the landscape.Everything bows down before it. The smallest shrubs bear the imprint ofits passage, and stay twisted and bent over southwards in an attitudeof perpetual flight….

II

THE SHACK.

The roof and walls consist of dried, yellowing, reeds. This is theshack, which is to be our meeting place for the hunt. A not untypicalhouse of the Camargue, it has a single, vast, high room with no window,getting its daylight through a glass door kept fully shuttered atnight. All along the huge, rendered, whitewashed walls, the gun-rackwaits for the rifles, the game bags, and the wading boots. At the back,five or six bunks are placed round an actual boat mast which is steppedinto the soil and reaches the roof which it supports. During the night,while the mistral is blowing and the house is creaking everywhere, thedistant sea seems nearer than it is, its sound carried by thefreshening wind, and gives us the impression of being in a boat's cabin.

In the afternoon, the shack is especially charming. Throughout ourbeautiful, southern winter days, I enjoy being alone by the tallmantelpiece, while several twigs of tamarisk smoke away in the hearth.The howling