Views from abroad.



















Chapter 1

Camus’ Grave.

1. The Grave Site

 

What first strikes you, after entering via the inevitable highwalled entrance, is the openness of Loumarin’s cemetery. The vista is rather like one viewed from some peaceful and tranquil graveyard, such is as found in a rural English churchyard, the grave ground exposed to the surrounding view, opens out onto the landscape, dropping as it slopes gently into the valley below, and up to the hills beyond. An enchanting variety of vineyard, orchard, olive groves, stone buildings and pasture, remind you of the ancient polyculture that still characterizes Provence. This landscape beset with beautiful stands of trees, stately plane trees, and cypresses waving in the light afternoon air, creates a picture whose frame, formed from the bottom wall of the cemetery boundary, aspires thoughts of Renaissance painting: scenes seen through an open loggia, perhaps glimpsed from behind a brace of angels or over the shoulder of the beautifully plaited hair of a painted virgin. This picture is so unlike the austere Cimitière of so many French village, town or city.  Loumarin’s cemetery is no prison ground for the dead. It contrasts starkly with the city of tombs, with passageways lined neatly, with their cell like plots, bordered by dark windowless walls that is the custom, recreated in Parisian necropolises and their neat provincial copies, such as the celebrated Père Lachaise.
No, this place is far more reminiscent of those picturesque burial ruins fashioned by the Etruscans, or some funerary site chosen in the Fifth century BC, by the Etruscan’s northern neighbours, the ancient Ligurians, who in all probability remain the direct ancestors of the present Provencal population. These Etruscan necropolis, though in many respects much like the orderly mausoleum cells of a Père Lachaise which they presumably inspired, are in other features, entirely different. For now in their disapparel and disintegration, exposed to the landscape, invaded by nature, as if dissolved and fused into the local topography, they are places of wild imagining or contemplation. Far from being dark austere mausolea, they evoke the Romantic, the imaginative spirit and a love of the antique.
 It was a beautiful late summer afternoon when we visited the cemetery and the odours and sounds of Provence were at there most seductive: a gentle breeze, early evening sun, the faint smells of wild herbs, of thyme, grasses filled with chattering insects and birds, and the ripening grapes gently fermenting in the warmth. I had imagined, as the crowds of tourist wandering through the village behind and below, readily suggested, that the site would be inundated by the curious and respectful. But the cemetery was entirely empty even though it was a Sunday afternoon. So, alone the two of us split apart, looking for the grave signs of two great French Twentieth Century Writers hidden within the labyrinth of the village Cimitière. In this manner, by approaching the search, with a certain nonchalant detachment and disinterest, I might imagine that this burial ground, in use for two and a half thousand years, was in fact the resting place for a host of Ligurian, Greek and Roman citizens. That I was wandering in an emblematic place that held within its fine earthy confines all the history, culture and typos of this highly cultivated land, with a dust that speaks in the air… 

 In this scented air there was something sweet and satisfying to stand then, by the simple border of Camus’ grave, and see the native plants of Provence growing in a cultivated disorder into, and over, his and his wife’s mortal remains. Something humbling in the inordinate simplicity of this vegetative gesture beside the more monstrous mausolea that crowd round the rest of the cemetery: the dark polished lids of mortuary monuments vainly constructed to appear solid and everlasting in their massiveness, the sealed up crypts of family tombs with their ornate inscriptions or more modest stone structures, all compete unequally with nature. But Camus’ grave is conspicuously covered in a variety of native and exotic species, planted into the bare earth atop his coffin site, including thyme, sage, lavender, and with an oleander bush rising from the rear, the whole surrounded and breaking out of the plot, by a profusion of bulbous sprouting irises. Amongst this micro island of fecundity are cropped leaves of daisies and other flowering perennials. And the whole is simply fringed by rough stones that attempt to hold back the growth while demarcating Camus’ funerary plot. At the front of this miniature garden, almost peeping out of the bed of planting, is a small rough headstone hewn with modest san serif lettering that reads ‘ALBERT CAMUS’ 1913 –1960. And there it is in La Provence, a photograph of a place that appears so simple and yet…
   Everything speaks here then of a certain humility, and a deflating of the grandiosity of man, in a returning toward the earth and in an acknowledgment of natures’ omnipotent beauty – part of the mysterious absurdity of man’s conscious life. It reminds me of a description by Vincent Van Gogh of the enclosed garden at Arles hospital:
…And then, as a pendant, the inner court. It is an arcaded gallery like those one finds in Arab buildings, all whitewashed. In front of those galleries an antique garden with a pond in the middle, and eight flower beds, forget-me-nots, Christmas roses, anemones, ranunculus, wallflowers, daisies, and so on. And under the gallery orange trees and oleander. So it is a picture quite full of flowers and vernal green. However, three gloomy black tree trunks pass through it like serpents, and in the foreground four big dismal clusters of somber box shrub…
A letter written to his sister Wil on 30 April 1889 and to whom he also wrote:
Ivy favours old willows without branches – each spring the ivy seeks out the trunk of an old oak – and that is just how it is with cancer, that mysterious plant which so often fastens on to people whose lives were nothing but love and devotion. (Van Gogh: 435)

  The melancholy note of the serpentine trees and the somber box shrubs catch his ‘dismal’ mood, and yet, this spreading ivy that fastens on life, gives his thought a note of optimism, of life’s intertwined binding and loosing, while surreptitiously acknowledging the threat of impending death. For how swiftly did his brother Theo degenerate after Vincent’s own death, as though his life withered away without his brother, with the sudden lose of one-half of that symbiotic relationship which was the root of both their artistic lives. And the letter found in Vincent’s pocket unsent, and another rewritten, edited slightly, to draw the sting:
‘I tell you again that I shall always consider you to be something more than a simple dealer in Corots, that through my mediation you play your part in the production of some canvases,…For this is where we have got to, and this is all, or at least it is the main thing I have to tell you at a moment of comparative crisis. At a time when things are very strained between dealers in pictures of dead artists, and artists who are alive.
Well, my own work, I am risking my life for it and it has cost me half of my reason – that’s all right -… but as far as I can tell, you are not one of those traders in men, and you can choose to still act with humanity. But what do you want? (Van Gogh, 24 July 1890: 502/150)
  What was it that Theo told his brother in Paris on that fateful day in July 1890? Whatever, it was the end for both of them, in this temporary split. And yet in this untieing there is an absolute rebinding of the brothers. For at the cemetery in Auvers-sur-Oise, we witness Theo finally reunited with Vincent, his body disinterred from the hospital grounds in Utrecht where he had been hastily buried in 1891, and reburied beside his elder brother in the year 1914. Long before all the museums and the extravagant claims on, and for Vincent’s work, on the eve of a European cataclysm, the Van Gogh brothers’ were brought together once again, just as Camus and his wife, in a vigorous intertwining of vegetation. Their graves also bear small unadorned headstones, inscribed modestly with black letters – ICI Repose VINCENT VAN GOGH  - 1853-1890 – ICI REPOSE THEO VAN GOGH 1857-1891. And here too, like Camus’s twin plot the burial place has been transformed into a garden, a rich bed of ivy tumbles over the rectangle, joining together with his brother’s resting-place in a plump double bed of intertwined leaves. So in life as in death each is strictly allocated their plot. Bosco’s grave, accompanied by his wife, is a twin set of simple stone slabs incised with his/her name and dates and fringed with pebbles. At the front it is planted with lavender. So as you stand and remember you might brush the flowers with your hands and be replete…

 



2. Grave News – Jour des morts
 
Casually opening La Provence, the local newspaper, I come across a full page spread describing for readers, notable ‘graves to visit in the region’. In the article my attention is immediately drawn to a familiar yet unusually cropped photograph of Albert Camus’ grave. His small headstone, prominently at an angle, is surrounded by foliage. It brings back immediately the memory of my visit, only three weeks before, to this very spot, looking down at the small plot of earth in which the writer is buried beside his wife. But why is this information in the Newspaper today? Because today it is the 31st of October and the morning before All Saints day, the first of November, a day to remember the dead. And if tonight is All Hallows – in Anglo-American culture a night more generally associated with the trickery of Halloween – in Metropolitan France it is the eve before a very particular national holiday. This public day of rest is commonly known as the jour des morts, and is set aside for visiting the family grave site. As this annual and entirely Catholic ritual of grave cleaning and flower arranging approaches, the local newspaper helpfully suggests some graves to visit in case you feel left out, and have no family grave to honour. For tomorrow, as florists profitably stock up with a selection of potted and cut flowers, countless families make arrangements to visit the family plot, as a pretext to remember their family, in this state of purgatorial activity: to tidy up the tomb or grave, scrubbing and bleaching plastic flowers or placing fresh pots of blooming chrysanthemum in bright shades of yellow, gold, red and orange on or by the casket or mausoleum entrance, a form of penitential sorrow, brightened by these sunny hues.
  While different attitudes and rituals towards death and the afterlife have created this particular National Holiday in France – ostensibly it remains the Catholic All Saints Day, a hugely significant day in the Roman Catholic calendar, delineating its identity and liturgy from other lesser churches – the day however appears as much a celebration of laïcité in the everyday activity of cleaning and visiting the family tomb. Whilst all faithful Catholics are expected to attend solemn mass, in honour of all the saints, both known and unknown, the attendance at the local churches seems surprisingly sparse. And here in Provence it might appear that this jour des morts is as much a recollection for one day only, of the Classical practices of ancestor worship, mimicing the elaborate rituals that the Greeks, Etruscans and then the Romans performed, often on a daily basis, as their way of memorializing, sanctifying, and pacifying their ancestral benefactors. It is somewhat paradoxical to find that the origin of this wholly autumnal festival of All Saints, is, in the West Christian Tradition, dated to May 13, and has its origins at beginning of the Seventh Century when Pope Boniface IV consecrated the great Augustan Pantheon in Rome to the Blessed Virgin and all the martyrs. This religious feast day of the dedicatio Sanctae Mariae ad Martyres has been celebrated at Rome as Spring gives way to Summer, ever since. The inauguration of this feast day was almost certainly an attempt to finally neutralize the pagan festivities of 13 May, the Roman Feast of the Lemures, in which those restless and unpredictable spirits of the dead were propitiated by offerings - this comforting act of placing flowers on the graves of loved ones…
 Just as the Roman Catholic Church sought a way to accommodate Pagan Roman traditions, so it is that 21st Century Europeans are still pondering and thinking how best to honour their family members, and to deal with their dead; this searching for some kind of post-Christian spirituality, even if that means clinging stubbornly to edicts of a historical Church bypassed by events – that even if fundamental beliefs of Christian Faith have long since been abandoned, the ideas of Purgatory, the final Day of Judgement and of the afterlife – that you are still obliged by custom to honour the dead by making an annual pilgrimage to their grave site on this day and no other. Here then an instant when the Lemures and the Interpares, the Genii of the household, those spirits that lived round, in, and protected the domestic hearth prior to the Christian era, are set free from their filial bonds, raised out of their family entombments and literally dusted off. As if in cleaning and scrubbing the tombs, in changing their offerings of cyclamen and chrysanthemum, the dead spirits are reawakened, becoming manifest in the thought-memories of the living in such a way that they are once again part of everyday life. And this maybe the real meaning of this new day of the dead, the spirit of the departed re-formed momentarily in the thoughts and re-affections of those living, especially in the thoughts of close family members, but also in the memories called upon in honouring the lives of dead public figures, such as Camus. These dead reborn as a spirit that has renewed power to effect the world – rekindled with their odorous and mellifluous influence. 

Pantheon and the alleyway of tombs at Alyscamps:
 
…All Saints’ Day, when the saints in heaven are honoured, and All Souls’s Day, when prayers are said for the soul suffering in purgatory, have become somewhat confused in the tradition of Roussillon. The name of the first has survived, but its function has no hold on the minds of the people. It is popularly applied, rather, to the second of the two days which is solemnly observed even by those who rarely go near the church.
…. All during the day the cemetery was full of people arranging flowers on the tombs they had cleaned a few days before. Though Madame Jouvard, the mason’s wife, is the only person in Roussillon who raises flowers simply for their beauty, some families raise a few flowers in order to decorate the family graves on All Souls’ Day. It is less expensive than buying the chrysanthemums which old Monsieur Grandgeon raises to sell to people for the occasion…. After the service the priest led the faithful out of the church in a procession to the cemetery. As the procession wound through the streets down to the hill many people joined it who never go to Mass but felt a need to participate in the ceremonies at the cemetery. By the time the procession started up the cemetery path, it had grown from a score of people to almost a hundred. (Wylie: 282-3)

For some unspecified but obviously auspicious reason, only known to himself, Pope Boniface IV inaugurated the religious feast day of the dedicatio Sanctae Mariae ad Martyres - ‘to the blessed Virgin Mary and all other martyrs’ - on the 13th May, on a clear Spring day in Rome under the great dome of the Pantheon. The omens and auguries must have been concentrated in a peculiarly apt manner for the spiritual entrails of Europe to be laid out, there, on the polished marble floor of this Imperial Temple, then gathered up and bound together by the Pope’s blessing which miraculously (or hopefully) was to transform thousands of years of veneration and fidelity, into a peculiarly prescient place of worship, for the new Christian martyrs. This building, nearly 600 years old in 609, was originally constructed as monument to the power and majesty of the Emperor Augustus, consecrated as a temple to all the great gods of Rome. These Gods, whose pedigree and origin might be traced back to the ancient practices found in early Etruria, drawn from across the Middle East, or borrowed wholesale from the ritual spells of Ancient Persia or Pharaohnic Egypt. But the surviving structure with its domed roof pierced by a large central open light or oculus, was in fact made over 150 years later, after Agrippa’s Augustan Temple was destroyed by fire. Its domed span, made of poured concrete coffers, fitted carefully together to make its characteristic ocular squared pattern around the concaved roof, is still regarded as the world's largest unreinforced concrete dome. Pope Boniface then, was making a bold, risky gesture on that day. Though it was not the extraordinary structure but its use and purpose that the Pope was most exercised by. In dedicating the Pantheon ‘to the blessed martyrs’ he was hoping to erase all the residual power and custom of pagan ritual. To erase the engrained customs and cult of the dead and replace them with Christian saints. It seems doubly ironic then that the festival of All Saints and All Souls now conflated, should see such an outpouring of customary ancestral worship, dedicated to ones immediate family or to those ‘Genii’ that should never be forgotten.



Walk 1.
Loumarin - 25 September

A Visitation:

 Loumarin Cemetery was a place I visited as much to locate the simple gravestones of another writer buried there, Henri Bosco with his wife, as to remember Camus. Indeed it was at my own wife’s insistence and somewhat against my will. For I am not a frequenter of cemeteries, these places of the dead like hospitals that remind me of our insistent mortality, are places to be avoided. But she had wanted, now we had made it to Loumarin, to go and see something of Bosco’s, a trace or scent of his presence, and had finally persuaded me with a charming account of his writing that we must visit his grave. And at first it was a lot harder than I had thought to locate Bosco’s tomb, just as it had been to try and imagine how Loumarin was a hundred years ago, overrun as it is with tourists and suffering under the influence of rich ex-pat foreigners.
 Bosco’s writing is steeped, as in so much of the literature to spring out from Provence, in the rich variety of culture and habitat of very specific localized traditions. Much of his lyrical and poetic writing, which has rarely been translated into English, gives a childeye’s view of life, and presents an almost dreamy, fantastical account of existence in Early Twentieth Century Provence. After returning form North Africa and giving up his teaching-post in Morocco, Bosco began writing fulltime, dividing his time between his summer retreat in Bastidon and an apartment in the Chateau of Loumarin. This particular Chateau he had been instrumental in restoring, sits slightly outside the village and looks down across a flat meadow to the football ground where local teams still play.

But the breeze was coming from the Beyond, beginning in the plateaus where poppies, wild asters, and hyssop plants grow, it had in passing, gathered up all the perfumes that lay hidden in little valleys, buried in warm hollows, suppressed in the slightest cracks of limestone: hawthorn, foxglove, centaury, blackberry blossoms, privet, rush leaved broom, rosemary, veronica. (Bosco: 23-24)

The almost abstract plan with its white symbols nailed to the noticeboard, devised to help visitors find Camus’s or Bosco’s tombs, only seemed to further complicate our search. For the grave ground, divided as it is into crude quadrants, and terraced because of the slope, is separated by low walls interspersed with a variety of trees, shrubs and flowering plants – creating an effect almost of a half-walled semi-tropical garden, made up of dusty pathways and impasses: ‘a carpet of primroses, snapdragons, rennets, wild teasels, star thistles and clover’ (Bosco: 23-24). It was only the arrival of another curious couple that indicated to us the whereabouts of Camus’ tomb. Bosco’s grave however, remained allusive. It seemed even harder to locate. And the couple who had stopped at Camus’s grave had mysteriously disappeared, obviously not interested in anyone but Albert. Finally we found it down another terrace in a part of the grave ground that remained only half full. Bosco’s grave accompanied by his wife, is a twin set of simple stone slabs incised with his/her name and dates, both fringed with pebbles. At the front the slabs are planted with lavender. So as you stand and remember you might brush the flowers with your hands and be replete…
Scarcely did you see wavering there like a memory, those gentle stretches of meadows, the breath of Lucerne, clover and furze, which delight the dreams of ordinary donkeys sleeping in their poor stables. (Bosco: 25) 


3. Ici Repose 

« Je les connais tous, les sites humains d'où sont partis les hommes, l'abri du charbonnier, la cuve à vin creusée dans la paroi du roc, le poste à feu oublié du chasseur et, quelque part en un lieu hanté de moi seul, perdu dans la broussaille, cette aire immense avec des talus et quatre grands fossés mangés par l'herbe. Un vieux peuple, rude et sensé, au cours d'une migration énergique, avait sans doute établi là, jadis, son camp à l'ombre de la Terre. »         

'I knew them all, the human sites from which man sprung, the charcoal burner’s shelter, the wine vats dug into the cliff, the hunters’ fiery point, and somewhere, in a place haunted by me alone, lost in the scrub this enormous clearing edged with four huge ditches, eaten away by grass. An old people, rough and sensitive, during a great migration established their camp here, at the earth’s shadowy edge.' (Bosco – author’s translation)


Much like my ignorance of Henri Bosco, I was blissfully unaware, as I stood in the cemetery at Loumarin, admiring its tranquility and beauty, that it had recently been the centre of a political and symbolic storm. A storm encapsulated by the terse phrase:

ICI REPOSE

For Camus’ beautiful resting place unlike Bosco’s was not wholly assured. Larger forces, represented by powerful partisan politics, and a brutal nationalism, had been working to disturb the peaceful graveyard. Camus’ name and his mortal remains were being summoned – his literary terroir, claimed as a national treasure – that the President in his wisdom now required. "I thought it would be a particularly pertinent choice," Sarkozy opined, while telling journalists that a final decision had yet been taken. "[It is] a project which is extraordinarily close to my heart." Thus the President, somewhat out of the blue, had suggested that Camus should quit his provincial slumber, be torn from his adopted Provencal soil, and come to rest in Paris, as a full national hero, worthy of the Pantheon. The signs had been there, if one had been attentive to them. Not least in the way Sarkozy had appropriated Camus’ words early on in his Presidency while on a state visit to Tunisia. Looking out across the Mediterranean, back across the bright blue sea toward France, he had listened ostentatiously to a Camus text being read aloud to him. Camus as the foreigner and the outsider, independent in mind and thoroughly outspoken, apparently appealed to Sarkozy’s own sense of marginal ancestry, and bolstered his credentials as a President with an urbane, civilized and generous appeal[1]. Although it was much debated and then commented upon, whether he had really read much, if any of the writers’ oeuvre.  His reputation as a hater of both books and all literary study preceding his effusive confession that the project ‘was extraordinarily close to my heart’, seemed to dampen his announcement.
  Was this really such an astute political maneuver? This project to recuperate Camus, scourge of the far-right (and even more famously the far left), resistance fighter, champion of the oppressed and unrepresented, the poor and marginalized, initiated at the insistence of the right wing President Sarkozy, this former Interior Minister of France who famously called the youth of the banlieue 'scum’ (racaille, a term that bears implicit racial and ethnic resonances). All any one not fascinated in the politics of this situation could think, when he made this controversial suggestion, was what the hell would Camus of made of it all. This turning over of the soil, this digging into the past:
 Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: "Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours." That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday. (Camus - The Stranger 1.1.1)
Nothing could be stranger than this abrupt turning over of truth, this meddling in and reconstruction of ancestry, and yet simultaneously, nothing could be more familiar, more heart warming:
‘It was pleasant; the coffee had warmed me up, and the smell of flowers on the night air was coming through the open door. I think I dozed off for a while.’ (Camus - The Stranger 1.1.14)
Just as abruptly as he was reawokened into public consciousness, Camus was allowed to doze off again rooted into his Provencal garden, a petit paradise. But this had nothing to do with any goodwill on the President’s part. It was because Camus’s son would not agree to the disinternment. The Elysee had somehow failed to get the consent of the next of kin, before making the announcement. While Camus’ daughter was less unequivocal, apparently vacillating, his son was not for turning. Then again perhaps this was all part of the plan to make the suggestion publicly – a demonstration of a certain broadness and imagination on the part of the famously unliterary, uncultured President – let it hang there in the media and then quietly let it slip. Maybe now he can suggest another Pantheonista – someone closer politically to him – and let Camus respose in peace beside his wife…
But I can only imagine if they ever tried digging up the coffin and attempted to exhume his body, that the rich bed of plants and fauna that now luxuriated over him had shattered the casket, and turned his remains entirely, transformed into a rich sweet compost. So with the appropriate degree of absurdity, and with the writers characteristic parrhesia, finally dissolving all attempts for a proper, decent disinterment!

Chapter 2 















Reveries of Mont Ventoux


While I was wandering in those mountains upon a Friday in Holy Week, the strong desire seized me to write an epic in an heroic strain, taking as my theme Scipio Africanus the Great, who had, strange to say, been dear to me from my childhood. But although I began the execution of this project with enthusiasm, I straightway abandoned it, owing to a variety of distractions. The poem was, however, christened Africa, from the name of its hero, and, whether from his fortunes or mine, it did not fail to arouse the interest of many before they had seen it.” (from Petrarch's Letter to Posterity (1909 English translation, with notes, by James Harvey Robinson)

I have become obsessed with Mont Ventoux. It was the one geographical, and physical presence, apart from the Rhone that I had some idea of, before transplanting to the Vaucluse. Passing on the Autoroute de Soleil it leaves an instant impression, graphic in its size and somehow mysteriously wild with its white-capped summit, that false summer crown of snow that in winter transforms into a semi-Artic landscape replete with Artic hare. Everyone who passes through the Rhone Valley will see it, even if they do not know its name or its unique history. It was in my mind as a brooding presence as we drove down to the village of Saint Saturnin-Les-Avignon; this mountain on which the Tour de France sporadically tests its heroes and sometimes breaks them. But somewhat disappointingly the house and garden, which we were renting had no view of the giant Mont. We could see it from the road below, and almost any where else we went walking or by car, but it seemed frustratingly that it was obscured by the houses and trees planted just below us.
   But now as the last leaves curling and yellowing fall off the fig tree at the back of the house I gain a sudden unexpected glimpse of the Mountain. And as the sun begins its afternoon descent and baths the summit in a subtle array of pink and violet light I register a sense of belonging. No longer will I have to climb up, out onto the bedroom windowsill, to look at the weather on the Mont Ventoux, or check how clear the air is by peering in its direction from the road. No, now I can see it without leaving the garden, by opening the back door and standing on the tiled terrace, looking up at it through the bare branches of the tree. Just its bare summit rising from the dark ridge of scrubby pines, viewed from over the rooftops and trees of our neighbour's house, but nevertheless there in all its majesty. And at night I will be able to watch the lights of cars like scattered fireflies flickering on the ridge as they descend from a nocturnal drive to the mont’s windy heights. That is until the fig tree comes back to life and obscures the view with its opulent leaves.
  Still that leaves me plenty enough time to contemplate the Giant of Provence from our back garden and imagine what it might be like to be upon the uncanny, unfamiliar surfaces of its exposed ridge. How insufferable the heat in the summer, as you break cover from the treeline and rise into the calcariferous boulder scape. Or I can recall now, as I stare up at the observatory tower which marks its peak, the only time I have been near its crown, on a full moonlit night this October. Almost clinging to the car, fearful that it might turn over as the wind hits its side at the Col des Tempétes, I clambered breathlessly up its white bare flanks with my son following carefully behind. Sometimes holding each other’s hands as if to reassure ourselves that we would not fly off in the wind. And beneath our feet the crisp shards of bleached stone somehow shifting, sorted into sizes by the winds, the rain and its freezing action. On the shingly slopes just above the monument to Tommy Simpson we ascend as quickly and lightly as possible. And here we are now, under the full moon light, approaching the crest of the ridge plateau, buffeted by the wind. We see the concreted stakes marking the pathway – like pilgrim waymarkers lost in a desert – it is a strange Dantesque landscape. My son picks out a cluster of lights that seem to form themselves into a trident as we gaze down over the extended plain of the Comtat Venaissin, out towards Avignon and its orange glower. On this night the exposed flanks of la Jousserène and the precipice of the Ravin de la Cave de Diau appear, less like the powdery accumulation of inert cosmic dust that seems to make people think of the moon, and more like an exposed plateau of windswept calcariferous bones, under constant chemical and physical attack, spotted with strange miniature vegetation. Hardened and tempered by the dry sun, this bone yard of stone captures the terrifying grandeur of Dante’s ascent into Purgatorio, as he looks now down at the circles of Hell, which he has somehow escaped. And indeed the shadow that the fullmoon seemed to be casting now gave a particular hellish gloom to the valley behind us as we stood pressed against the wind, leaning over the precipice and looking out north eastwards with watering eyes into a dark, unlit landscape. For a moment there was a feeling of utter desolation.
   It was only a few days later as I was reading a chapter of Put me back on my bike, William Fotheringham’s biography of Tommy Simpson, that this impression of the Mountain’s strange wild devastation, and its dangerous foreboding presence, was confirmed. It is worth quoting the passage for its lurid details (but why 90 sheep and why 30 goats?):
…part of the fascination of the Ventoux must derive from the hostile forces the mountain can unleash. Hurricanes could wipe out up to 90 sheep and 30 goats in one fell swoop, and flash floods could wreak havoc in neighbouring towns. The mountain was known for its wolves …its caves were reputed by local legend to lead down to hell itself. Even the very stones are to be feared when the wind gets up. In one midwinter storm in the 1970s, the body of a woman tourist was found just below the summit. The car that she and her husband were driving had been blown off the road, its windscreen smashed by a stone driven by the wind and she had then attempted to walk the few hundred metres to the observatory for help. Her body was virtually unrecognizable due to the bruises from the windblown rocks. ‘She had been stoned. Killed by the rocks. It seemed incrediable,’ said a soldier stationed at the summit… (Fotheringham: 206-7)
Walking then, through the uncertain, unfamiliar moonlight with my son, on the gently curved backbone of the mountain, following the concreted poles there is a sudden falling away into a shadowy blackness, rising up from beneath and then toppling as if into the dark void. Like Virgil guiding Dante, I stop, holding on for dear life to his hand, as the wind roars across the exposed ridge, threatening to tear us apart and grind us into the boney shards of the mountain's barren crown. Below our feet the shifting, crackling bones of a million souls. In Dante's Purgatorio, the penitent walks through flames to purge himself of lustful thought and feeling, but in the Inferno, the unforgiven lustfilled souls are blown about incessantly, in restless hurricane-like winds. Hell indeed – how odd this touch of the sublime.

Walk 4: 
L’Ane des Abeilles Sunday 13th November
   In the foothills of Mont Ventoux, that curve gently in a bow all the way from the summit down to the Gorges de la Nesque and up again to the Monts de Vaucluse, we commence our climb, effortlessly ascending from the centre of Villes-sur-Auzon, up a small back road, that passes the cemetery and runs up the Combe de Sault. The heat from the sun still seems unseasonably intense, burning on our backs even at 2 pm. We take deep draughts of water from the metal flask. There is an overpowering odor of wild thyme, of olives, bare vines, all intermingled with the scent of dwarf mint, dried grasses and flowerheads that we brush against as we walk. Some of the grasses and flowers are still proudly drying in the sun while others dangling, their seeds falling away into the thin rocky soil hopefully. We are passing small half-terraced fields of vines with a few shriveled, drying grapes. The shattered rubble of the rock slips down the slopes on either side of the Combe. We reach a turn in the track. In front of us, a little to the right, a simple cross looks down onto a small hidden vineyard, still with their reddening leaves, that grows in a small protected bowl where the earth and moisture collects. 
   Now we turn away as if from the Mountain, and walk along the GR91 for approximately 500 metres until we come to the road, the source of much roaring of motorbikes and fast cars. Walking this way, there is always a view over the shoulder of Mont Ventoux. As we reach the embankment of the D1 road we make sure there is no convoy of bikers waiting to roar past us and cross the tarmac hurriedly. Quickly we are swallowed up in a labyrinth of scrubby trees and brushwood, a mixture of stunted deciduous oaks, and evergreen holm oaks, dwarf varieties gripping the thin rocky soil. We head upwards, trying to relocate the proper pathway, scrambling under and over the trees disordered branches, tearing our legs on the prickly leaves and twisting briars. This was not a good idea. All we seem to be doing is going further into a dense maze of tangled wood - in no time we will be completely disorientated.    This landscape reminds me now of the hinterland depicted in Pagnol’s stories La Gloire de Mon Père and Le Château de ma Mère, an emptied scrubby landscape that lies just beyond the towns and villages: a land that hides in its elaborate topography, extraordinary vistas, crevices, gorges, all of which conceal within its harsh brush-woods, small oases-like settlements. It is only by retracing our steps and returning to the road that we find the signed way again. Now, as we drop away from the road again, along a concealed track, we hear some bells – is it the sound of a goatherd? They seem to be coming from above on the other side but we cannot see anything. As we descend the track the bank disappears and falls away on the right, to reveal an encampment - les Escampeaux. There is something enchanting in the moment as if we were entering a forbidden paradise. It is completely silent now, the sun only reaching the far side of the valley. We strain to hear the bells again. And then we see it, at the bottom of a roughed out pasture, a donkey shaking its head. The sound of bells ringing. Around its broad grey neck hangs a cluster of bells. It is presumably irritated by some flies or other insects, and shakes its head. We stop to watch for a moment, then walk on into the sun. In the curve of this miniature, concealed valley are a few half restored houses and by their side a van, parked just off the track, with the words painted on its rusted flank - L’Ane des Abeilles. We dream now together, of having our very own donkey of the bees, to walk with, and to accompany us on our new imaginary journeys.





                                                                                                                                                          
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