Chapter III
St. Léons. Fabre’s Village
“Far are those tranquil hills
Dyed with fair evening rose,
On urgent, secret errand bent,
A traveller goes.”
Walter de la Mare.
They had arrived!
All the car’s doors flew open at once and its four occupants fell out on to the high tableland of the Rouergue, where Fabre said he was born.
They had hunted that place through great and lovely France, almost like Fabre himself pursuing a beetle to its burrow through earth and rocks. Their hunt seemed as hard as his; for the Rouergue is a high, hidden, mysterious place and not Fabre himself could have found in the heart of earth stranger things than they had seen in the heart of France. They had already decided that the Rouergue was a pleasant place wherein to be born, for they had come past bright green rivers and golden trees. They had climbed over the snow of high passes and threaded at last the wild gorges that lead up to Fabre’s country. There, in the gorges of the Dourbie and Tarn, they had followed a road that runs at the bottom of great crevasses. Villages overhang it, perched on ledges of rock and reached by stairs instead of streets. There, where rocks in fantastic shapes seemed to reach the sky, they had seen battlemented cliffs like castles high in air, and huge stones, that balance themselves giddily on the points of slim pinnacles, and stone men and beasts in a crumbled city of natural rock. They had grown more and more excited as they thought how Fabre must have loved to live in so wild a place. They almost held their breath, as they wondered what the land would be like that had so weird a succession of avenues leading to it.
And now they were really there!
This was the kind of place where Fabre spent his childhood. They were on the top of the world!
The wind caught their breath and pinned their clothes tight against their chests and swept their hair behind them and bit tears from their eyes. They looked out upon a barren moorland, stony, moss-covered, marshy. Here and there a whipped and pollarded tree added desolation to its woe-begoneness; here and there the marsh gathered into small lakes that lit the scenery as they caught the sun.
It is all just as Fabre described it, said Penelope, and if it is as cold as this in the middle of April, he must have been accustomed to long winters of wind and frost and snow.
“That’s snow over there,” exclaimed Giles, “I am fetching some!” and in a minute, he was back scattering snow on the road.
“It may be cold,” said Margaret, “but it is a great sight. The mountains, which may be the Cevennes or the Auvergne, look just a purple blueness scored with giant bands of amethyst and pearl. I suppose those are the rocks we have come through? And oh, look! The snow-covered peaks beyond, under those waves of sunlit cloud!”
Geraldi
