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

the shack, there is another one similar, but morerustic. It's home to our keeper, his wife and their two eldestchildren. The girl is responsible for the men's meal, and doing repairsto the fishing nets, while the boy helps his father look into the keepnets, and maintain the sluice gates in the ponds. The two youngestchildren are in Arles, staying with their grandmother, until they havelearned to read and have taken their first communion. It is too far tothe school and the church from here, and the atmosphere of the Camargueis completely unsuitable for young children. The fact is that, come thesummer, when the marshes are dry and the white mud of the irrigationchannels cracks in the great heat, the islet isn't really habitable atall.

I experienced it once when I came in August to hunt ducklings and Iwill never forget the miserable and ferocious appearance of theburningly hot landscape. Here and there ponds were steaming in the sunlike huge fermentation vats, keeping scant signs of life, perhaps justsalamanders, spiders, and water insects looking for some moisture.There was a pestilential air about, a miasmic, brooding fog thickenedby innumerable clouds of mosquitoes. At the keeper's house everybodyhad the shivers, everybody had the fever, and it was pitiful to see theyellowed, drawn faces, and the circled, popping eyes, of theseunfortunates, who were condemned to drag themselves around for threemonths under this high, pitiless sun, which burnt, but didn't warm….The life of a gamekeeper is miserable and hard in the Camargue. Atleast ours has his wife and children round him; but a little further onin the marsh, a horse-warden lives absolutely alone, from one year'send to the next, Robinson Crusoe like. In his home-made reed cabin,there isn't a single household utensil not made by him; the wovenwicker-work hammock, the three black stones that form the hearth, thetamarisk roots made into stools, even the lock and key made from whitewood that secures this unique accommodation.

The man himself is at least as strange as his dwelling. He is a sort ofsilent thinker like so many solitary people, hiding his peasant'swariness under thick bushy eyebrows. When not on the pasture land, hecan be found sitting outside his door, and with touching, childlike,care, slowly fathoming out one of the little coloured leaflets whichare wrapped around phials of medicines for his horses. The poor devilhasn't any recreation but reading these leaflets. Despite beingneighbours, our keeper and he don't see each other. They actually avoideach other. One day when I asked the stalker the reason for this, hereplied in a serious manner:

—It's because of a difference of opinion…. He is a red; I am a white.

Well, even in this wilderness, where solitude ought to have broughtthem close together, these two unsociable people, as ignorant and naïveas each other, these two cowherds of Theocritus, who barely go to townonce a year, and the small cafés of Arles must seem like the Palace ofPtolemy to them, have managed to fall out about politics of all things.

V

LAKE VACCARES

One of the finest sights in the Camargue is lake Vaccares. I oftenleave the hunt to sit down by the shore of this beautiful, brackishlake, this baby inland sea, which seems a true daughter of the ocean.Being locked indoors, so to speak, she is made all the more appealingthrough her captivity. There is none of the dryness and aridity thatoften bedevils the seaside, around our Vaccares. On its high banks, itboasts a fulsome covering of fine, velvet-smooth grass, a perfectshowcase for unique and charming flora. There are centauries, clover,gentians, and those lovely flowers that are blue in winter, and red insummer, apparently changing their clothes to suit the weather, and,when they have an uninterrupted flowering season, show their full rangeof colours.

About five o'clock in the evening, as the sun is going down, thesethree watery delights, without boat and sail to cover and change them,open out into an amazing scene. No longer is it just the intimate charmof the open-water and the irrigation channels appearing here and therebetween folds of marl, where the smell of water pervades, and is likelyto emerge at the least depression in the ground. Here, lake Vaccaresgives an impression of size and space. The radiant waves attractflights of scoter ducks from far away, and herons, bitterns, andwhite-flanked, pink-winged flamingos, lining up to fish all along thebanks, in many-coloured strands. Then there are ibis, the sacred ibisof Egypt, truly at home in this splendid sunshine and silent landscape.From where I am, I can hear nothing but the lapping of water and theranger calling his horses from around the lakeside. Each animal onhearing its name, rushes in, mane flowing in the wind, and takes hayfrom his hand….

Further on, still on the same bank, there is a herd of beef cattle freeranging like the horses. Sometimes, I notice their bony, curved backshunched over a clump of tamarisk, and their small, immature horns justvisible. Most of these Camargue cattle are bred to run in the brandingfêtes in the villages, and some of them are already famed in thecircuses of Provence and Languedoc. In one herd of the neighbourhood,there was a terrible fighter amongst them called the Roman, who hasbeen the undoing of I don't know how many men and horses at thebullfights at Arles, Nîmes, and Tarascon. His companions also made himthe leader, for in these strange herds the animals organise themselvesaround an old bull which they adopt as their leader. When there is astorm on the Camargue, it is truly terrifying on the great plain, wherethere is nothing to divert or stop it. It's an amazing sight to see theherd group themselves behind their leader, all their heads down andturned into the wind, their whole strength behind their foreheads.Shepherds in Provence call this manoeuvre: turning the horn to wind.

Perish the herd that doesn't do it. Blinded by the rain, and carriedaway by the storm, the herd turns in on itself, becomes panicky,scatters, and is overwhelmed. To escape the storm, they have been knownto dash headlong into the Rhone, the Vaccares, or even the sea.