were women selling shellfish, crouched bawling beside their wares,
sailors passing, some with pots of tar, some with steaming pots of stew,
others with baskets full of squid which they were taking to wash in the
fresh water of the fountains. Everywhere prodigious heaps of merchandise
of every kind. Silks, minerals, baulks of timber, ingots of lead,
carobs, rape-seed, liquorice, sugar cane, great piles of dutch cheeses.
East and west hugger-mugger.

Here is the grain berth. Stevedores empty the sacks onto the quay from
a scaffold, the grain pours down in a golden torrent raising a cloud of
pale dust, and is loaded by men wearing red fezes into carts, which
set off followed by a regiment of women and children with brushes and
buckets for gleaning.

There is the careening basin. The huge vessels lie over on one side and
are flamed with fires of brushwood to rid them of seaweed, while their
yardarms soak in the water. There is a smell of pitch and the deafening
hammering of shipwrights lining the hulls with sheets of copper.

Sometimes, between the masts, a gap opened and Tartarin could see the
harbour mouth and the movement of ships. An English frigate leaving for
Malta, spruce and scrubbed, with officers in yellow gloves, or a big
Marseilles brig, casting off amid shouting and cursing, with, in the
bows, a fat captain in an overcoat and a top hat, supervising the
manoeuvre in broad provencal. There were ships outward bound, running
before the wind with all sails set, there were others, far out at sea,
beating their way in and seeming in the sunshine to be floating on air.

Then, all the time the most fearsome racket. The rumbling of cart
wheels, the cries of the sailors, oaths, songs, the sirens of
steam-boats, the drums and bugles of Fort St. Jean and Fort St. Nicolas,
the bells of nearby churches and, up above, the mistral, which took all
of these sounds, rolled them together, shook them up and mingled
them with its own voice to make mad, wild, heroic music, like a great
fanfare, urging one to set sail for distant lands, to spread one's wings
and go. It was to the sound of this fine fanfare that Tartarin embarked
for the country of lions.

Chapter 12.

I wish that I was a painter, a really good painter, so that I could
present to you a picture of the different positions adopted by
Tartarin's chechia during the three days of the passage from France to
Algeria.

I would show it to you first at the departure,