ractive pertness,
and they feel the need to stand on tip toe, so that their laughter and
banter can be heard by everybody. The bell rings and off we go. What
with the fast flow of the Rhone, the propeller, and the mistral, the
two 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 its
short 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 or
left bank, or on the _Empire_ or the _Kingdom_, as it was known in the
middle ages, in the time when Arles was a Kingdom. The old Rhone
sailors still use these same words today. At every stop there was a
white farm, and a clump of trees. The workmen getting off with their
tools, and the women with their baskets under their arms, go straight
onto the gangway. Little by little the boat empties, first on the
Empire side and then on the Kingdom, and by the time we get off at
Mas-de-Giraud, there's hardly anybody left on board.

The Mas-de-Giraud is an old farm of the Lords of Barbentane, and we
went in to await the keeper appointed to come and meet us. In the main
kitchen, all the farm hands, ploughmen, winegrowers, and shepherds are
sitting at the table, solemnly, silently, and slowly eating their meal
and being served by the women who have to wait to eat until the men are
finished. Presently the keeper arrives with the cart. He is a real
Fennimore-Cooper type, a trapper on land and water, fish-warden, and
gamekeeper, known locally as the Stalker, because he can always be
found in the morning mists or at nightfall stalking amongst the reeds,
or stock still in his small boat watching over his keep nets on the
open water and the irrigation channels. It may be this work of
perpetual lookout that makes him so silent and focussed. And yet, as
the cart full of rifles and baskets trundles along in front of us, he
gives us news of the hunt, the number of over-flights, and the location
where the birds of passage have been brought down. As he talks, he
melts into the landscape.

The cultivated earth gives way to the true, untamed Camargue, amongst
the pasture and the marshland, and the irrigation channels shine in
amongst the goose-foot plants as far as the eye can see. Bunches of
tamarisks and reeds form little islands on a calm sea. There are no
tall trees; the immense evenness of the plain is unbroken. The animal
sheds have ro