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really ambitious, and is full both of entertainment and repose. It is in
constant undulation, and the bareness of the soil lends itself easily to
outline and profile. When I say the bareness I mean the absence of woods
and hedges. It blooms with heath and scented shrubs and stunted olive,
and the white rock shining through the scattered herbage has a
brightness which answers to the brightness of the sky. Of course it
needs the sunshine, for all southern countries look a little false under
the ground-glass of incipient bad weather. This was the case on the day
of my pilgrimage to Les Baux. Nevertheless I was glad to keep going, as
I was to arrive; and as I went it seemed to me that true happiness would
consist in wandering through such a land on foot, on September
afternoons, when one might stretch one's self on the warm ground in some
shady hollow and listen to the hum of bees and the whistle of melancholy
shepherds; for in Provence the shepherds whistle to their flocks. I saw
two or three of them, in the course of this drive to Les Baux,
meandering about, looking behind and calling upon the sheep in this way
to follow, which the sheep always did, very promptly, with ovine
unanimity. Nothing is more picturesque than to see a slow shepherd
threading his way down one of the winding paths on a hillside, with his
flock close behind him, necessarily expanded, yet keeping just at his
heels, bending and twisting as it goes and looking rather like the tail
of a dingy comet.

About four miles from Arles, as you drive northward towards the
Alpilles, of which Alphonse Daudet has spoken so often and, as he might
say, so intimately, stand on a hill that overlooks the road the very
considerable ruins of the abbey of Montmajour, one of the innumerable
remnants of a feudal and ecclesiastical (as well as an architectural)
past that one encounters in the south of France; remnants which, it must
be confessed, tend to introduce a certain confusion and satiety into the
passive mind of the tourist. Montmajour, however, is very impressive and
interesting; the only trouble with it is that, unless you have stopped
and returned to Arles, you see it in memory over the head of Les Baux,
which is a much more absorbing picture. A part of the mass of buildings
(the monastery) dates only from the last century; and the stiff
architecture of that period does not lend itself very gracefully to
desolation: it looks too much as if it had been burnt down