levelled on purpose for the tilting of knights in great
tournaments. Above and around us (for suddenly we were in as well as
under it) was a City of Ghosts.

Huge masses of rock, like Titan babies' playthings, had been hollowed
out for dwellings, fit houses for our late cousins the cave-dwellers.
There were colossal pillars and dark, high doorways such as one sees in
pictures of the temples at Thebes; but all this, said Mr. Jack Dane, was
merely a preface for what was yet to come, only an immense quarry whence
the stones to build Les Baux had been torn. We were still on the road to
the real Les Baux; and even as he spoke, the Aigle was clawing her way
bravely up a hill steeper than any we had mounted. At the top she turned
abruptly, and stopped in a queer, forlorn little place, where to my
astonishment our journey ended in front of a small house ambitiously
named Hotel Monte Carlo. Then I remembered the story I had read: how a
young prince of the Grimaldi family came begging Louis XIII. to protect
him from Spain; how Louis, who didn't want Spain to grab Monaco,
promptly gave soldiers; how the Grimaldi's shrewd wit did more to get
the Spanish out of the little principality than did the fighting men
from France; and how Louis, as a reward, turned poor, war-worn Les Baux
into a Grimaldi marquisate.

That little episode in history accounted for the Hotel Monte Carlo; and
I wondered if it were put up on the site of the Grimaldis' miniature
pleasure-palace, which the forest-burning revolutionists tore down just
before Les Baux, after all its strange passings from hand to hand,
became the property of the nation.

Against the rocks a few mean houses leaned apologetically, but on every
side rose the ruins of a proud, dead past: a past beginning with the
ruts of chariot-wheels graven on the rock-paved street. I thought, as I
looked at the sordid little village of to-day, which had crawled into
the very midst of the fortress, of some words I'd read last night: "a
rat in the heart of a dead princess."

Strange, haggard hill, whispered about by history ever since Christians
ran before Alaric the Visigoth, and hid in its caverns already echoing
with legends of mysterious Phoenician treasure! Strange robber house of
Les Baux, founded thirteen hundred years ago, and claiming half
Provence two centuries later! No wonder, after all the fighting and
plundering, loving and hating, that all it asks now is for its bleached,
picked bones