o many solitary people, hiding his peasant's
wariness under thick bushy eyebrows. When not on the pasture land, he
can be found sitting outside his door, and with touching, childlike,
care, slowly fathoming out one of the little coloured leaflets which
are wrapped around phials of medicines for his horses. The poor devil
hasn't any recreation but reading these leaflets. Despite being
neighbours, our keeper and he don't see each other. They actually avoid
each other. One day when I asked the stalker the reason for this, he
replied 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 brought
them close together, these two unsociable people, as ignorant and naive
as each other, these two cowherds of Theocritus, who barely go to town
once a year, and the small cafes of Arles must seem like the Palace of
Ptolemy 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 often
leave the hunt to sit down by the shore of this beautiful, brackish
lake, this baby inland sea, which seems a true daughter of the ocean.
Being locked indoors, so to speak, she is made all the more appealing
through her captivity. There is none of the dryness and aridity that
often bedevils the seaside, around our Vaccares. On its high banks, it
boasts a fulsome covering of fine, velvet-smooth grass, a perfect
showcase for unique and charming flora. There are centauries, clover,
gentians, and those lovely flowers that are blue in winter, and red in
summer, apparently changing their clothes to suit the weather, and,
when they have an uninterrupted flowering season, show their full range
of colours.

About five o'clock in the evening, as the sun is going down, these
three watery delights, without boat and sail to cover and change them,
open out into an amazing scene. No longer is it just the intimate charm
of the open-water and the irrigation channels appearing here and there
between folds of marl, where the smell of water pervades, and is likely
to emerge at the least depression in the ground. Here, lake Vaccares
gives an impression of size and space. The radiant waves attract
flights of scoter ducks from far away, and herons, bitterns, and
white-flanked, pink-winged flamingos, lining up to fish all along the
banks, in many-coloured strands. Then there are ib