s' pathway round the gigantic ramparts, unchanged
since Boccanegra built them. Looking down from the ramparts the town,
enclosed in the fortress walls, was like a faded chessboard cast ashore
from the wreck of some ancient ship; and round the dark walls and towers
waves of yellow sand and wastes of dead blue waters stretched as far as
my gaze could reach, toward the tideless sea.

Louis bought this tangled desert of sand and water in the middle of the
thirteenth century from an Abbot of Psalmodi, so the guide told me, and
I liked the name of that abbot so much that I kept saying it over and
over, to myself. Abbot of Psalmodi! It was to the ear what an old,
illuminated missal is to the eye, rich with crimson lake, and gold, and
ultramarine. It was as if I heard an echo from King Arthur's day, that
dim, mysterious day when history was flushed with dawn; the Abbot of
Psalmodi!

The heart of Aigues Mortes for me was the great tower of Constance, but
a very wicked heart, full of clever and murderous devices, which was at
its wickedest, not in the dark ages, but in the glittering times of
Louis XIV. and of other Louis after him. That tower is the bad part of
the dream where horrors accumulate and you struggle to cry out, while a
spell holds you silent. In the days when Aigues Mortes was not a dream,
but a terrible reality to the prisoners of that cruel tower, how many
anguished cries must have broken the spell; cries from hideous little
dungeons like rat-holes, cries from the far heights of the tower where
women and children starved and were forgotten!

I was almost glad to get away; yet now that I am away I shall often go
back--in my dream.

Alexander Dumas the elder went from Aigues Mortes to St. Gilles, driving
along the Beaucaire Canal, on that famous tour of his which took him
also to Les Baux; and we too went from Aigues Mortes to St. Gilles,
though I'm sure the Turnours had no idea that it was a pilgrimage in
famous footprints. Only the humble maid and chauffeur had the joy of
knowing that. We had both read Dumas' account of his journey, and we
laughed over the story of the little saint he stole at Les Baux.

It was a pleasant run to St. Gilles, though there was a shrewish nip in
the wind which made me hope that Lady Turnour's mind was not running
ahead to the mountains and gorges in front of her, not far away by days
or miles now. I wanted her to get tangled up in them before she had time
to think of the cold, an