DEFILE OF DONZERE]

Having escaped from the Defile of Donzere, the river wanders away
restfully into a wilderness of islands--a maze so unexplored and so
unexplorable that otters still make their home in it, and through the
thick foliage poke out their snub noses at passing boatmen now and then.
Thence onward for a long way islands are plentiful--past Pierrelatte,
and Bourg-Saint-Andeol, (a very ancient and highly Roman flavoured
town), and the confluence of the Rhone and the Ardeche--to the still
larger archipelago across which the Bridge Building Brothers, with God
himself helping them, built the Pont-Saint-Esprit.

Modern engineers--possibly exalting their own craft at the expense of
that of the architects--declare that this bridge was the greatest piece
of structural work of the Middle Ages; certainly it was the greatest
work of the Freres Pontifes: that most practical of brotherhoods which,
curiously anticipating one phase of modern doctrine, paid less attention
to faith than to works and gave itself simply to ministering to the
material welfare of mankind. In the making of it they spent near half a
century. From the year 1265 steadily onward until the year 1307 the
Brothers labored: and then the bridge was finished--a half-mile miracle
in stone. In view of the extraordinary difficulties which the engineer
in charge of the work overcame--founding piers in bad holding-ground and
in the thick of that tremendous current, with the work broken off short
by the frequent floods and during the long season of high water in the
spring--it is not surprising that the miracle theory was adopted to
explain his eventual victory. Nor is it surprising that the popular
conviction presently began to sustain itself by crystalizing into a
definite legend--based upon the recorded fact that the Brothers worked
under the vocation of the Holy Spirit--to the effect that the Spirit of
God, taking human form, was the designer of the fabric and the actual
director under whose guidance the work went on. And so the genesis of
the bridge was accounted for satisfactorily; and so it came by its holy
name.

Personally, I like miracles; and this miracle is all the more patent, I
think, now that the bridge has been in commission for almost six hundred
years and still is entirely serviceable. Yet while its piers and
arches, its essential parts, remain nearly as the Brothers built them,
the bridge has undergone such modifications in the course of the