‘The Lighthouse on Bloody Shoals’ by Guest Author Alphonse Daudet

Jim Gaines

The Lighthouse on Bloody Shoals

By Alphonse Daudet

Translated by James F. Gaines

            Last night I couldn’t sleep.  The north wind was angry and the bellows of its great voice kept me awake until dawn.  Roughly swinging its worn-out vanes that whistled in the breeze like the rigging of a ship, my old mill creaked all over.  Tiles from the roof crazily flew off.  In the distance, the clustered pines that covered the hillside waved around and rustled in the dark.  You would have thought you were on the high seas…

It reminded me perfectly of the persistent insomnia I had experienced three years earlier, when I lived at the lighthouse on Bloody Shoals, down on the Corsican coast, at the mouth of the Gulf of Ajaccio.

    Another pretty spot that I had found to dream in and to be alone.

      Imagine a reddish island with a savage appearance, the lighthouse on one end and at the other an old Genoese defensive tower where, in my time, a sea eagle nested.  Lower down at the water’s edge, a ruined quarantine station completely invaded by weeds.  And then, ravines, scrubland, outcrops of rock, a few feral goats, Corsican ponies prancing with their manes in the wind.  Finally, up at the top, amid a gyre of seabirds, the lighthouse keepers’ house with its terrace  of white-washed stonework, where the keepers walked back and forth, a green door shaped like the entrance to a monastery, a squat iron tower, and above it all the huge facetted lantern that gleamed even in the daytime with the rays of the sun.  That is the scene of the Bloody Shoals as I recalled them that night while listening to the moaning of the pines.  That was the magic island where I sometimes shut myself up before I moved to the mill, when I needed fresh air and solitude.

     What did I do there?

     Just as little as I do here in Provence, but a lot less.  When the northers or nor’easters weren’t blowing too badly, I went down to sit between two boulders at the water’s edge, surrounded by seagulls, blackbirds, and swallows, and I remained almost all day in a kind of listless stupor provided by the view of the sea.  Don’t you also know that wonderful drunkenness of the soul?  You don’t think, you don’t even dream.   Everything breaks free from you, flies off, and scatters.  You become the diving tern, the spume floating between a couple of breakers, the whitish trail of a boat heading out, the red-sailed skiff of the coral fishermen, a drop of seawater, a patch of fog, anything but yourself.   How many glorious hours of somnolence and self-abandon I spent on that little island!

     On the days when the wind was up and the water’s edge was unapproachable, I stayed in the courtyard of the quarantine compound, a little melancholy enclosure utterly saturated by the scent of rosemary and wormwood.  There, leaning against an old wall, I left myself open to the soft sense of oblivion that floated with the dappled sun among the stone cells that opened on the courtyard like a circle of ancient monuments.  From time to time there would be a sound of cracking wood and a wild nanny-goat would spring into view on its way to graze in the lee of the gale.  As soon as she noticed me, she froze and stayed quiet and alert, horns to the sky, watching me with childlike eyes…

      Around five o’clock, the lighthouse keepers would shout to me through a megaphone to come up for supper.  Then I would take a narrow path through the brush that clung to the cliff side above the sea, as I slowly returned to the lighthouse, pausing at every step to gaze over that immense, glowing blue horizon that seemed to get bigger and bigger as I ascended.

      It was homey up there.  I can still see that pretty oak-paneled dining room with its great flagstones and a steaming bowl of bouillabaisse in the middle of the table.  The door was opened wide onto the white terrace and the setting sun streamed in.  The keepers were waiting for me to sit down to eat.  There were three of them, one fellow from Marseille and two Corsicans, all short, bearded, with the same tanned, wrinkled face and the same village-made sheepskin jacket, but so unlike in temperament and pace.  You could sense right away the difference in country lifestyles from the way those characters lived.  The man from Marseille was lively and industrious, always up to some scheme, perpetually in movement as he rushed around the island from morning to night, gardening, fishing, collecting birds’ eggs, lurking in the underbrush to catch and milk some passing goat, and always putting some bouillabaisse or aioli on the burner.  When the Corsicans, on the other hand, were not on duty, they took care to do nothing at all.  They considered themselves Civil Servants and spent the daytime in the kitchen playing innumerable games of scopa, and only putting down their cards to light their pipes solemnly or to use the scissors to cut up tobacco leaves into their cupped hands.  To sum it up, whether from Marseille or Corsica, all three were good old fellows, plain and straight-forward, and full of consideration for their boarder, whom they must have judged to be a very odd duck.

     Just think of shutting yourself up in a lighthouse for fun!  They found their own days quite long and were happy when it came their turn to go ashore.  In the fine weather, this great privilege was accorded them once a month: ten days ashore for every thirty on the island, that was the rule.  But when the change of seasons brought heavy weather, all rules were off.  The gales blew, the waves battered the cliffs, and the Bloody Shoals were soaked with spray.  The lighthouse keepers were entrapped for two or three months on end, sometimes in quite insufferable circumstances.

     “Here’s what happened, to me, sir,” Old Bartoldi recounted one evening at supper time, “Here’s what happened to me five years ago at this very table where we now find ourselves.  One winter evening, just like tonight, there were two of us here at the light, me and a buddy called Chico.  The others were ashore, sick or on leave, I don’t remember.  We were just finishing a nice, quiet supper when all at once, my friend stops eating, looks at me for an instant with strange eyes, and poof!, he falls face down on the table.  I came around and shook him and called out, ‘Chico! Chico!’  No good, he was dead.  You can just imagine my feelings.  For more than an hour I trembled stupidly there, staring at the corpse.  Then, suddenly, an idea popped into my head, “What about the light!”  I barely had time to scramble upstairs to light the lantern.  It was already dark.  Well, sir, what a night!  The sea and the wind did not have their natural voices at all.  It seemed to me that someone was continually calling to me from the stairwell.  I became feverish and damned thirsty, but wild horses could not have dragged me down those steps.  I was too afraid of that corpse.  However, as dawn broke, I got up a little courage.  I carried my friend to his bed, pulled up his sheets, dashed off a quick prayer, and then raced to the semaphore flags.”

      “Unfortunately, the sea was too rough.  I signaled and signaled, to no avail.  Nobody came.  There I was for three days in the lighthouse with the earthly remains of my friend Chico and God only knew how long it would last.  I hoped to keep him near me until a boat arrived, but after three days it became unbearable.  What to do?  Take him outside?  Bury him?  The ground was nothing but bedrock and there are so many crows on the island.   It would be a shame to abandon a Christian soul to their greedy beaks.  Then I thought about bringing him down to the quarantine station.  That sad chore took a whole afternoon, and I can tell you it took a ton of courage.  Look, sir, even today, when I go along that side of the island on a windy afternoon, I can feel the weight of that dead man on my shoulders,”

     Poor Old Bartoldi.  Beads of sweat ran down his forehead at the mere thought of it.

     Thus we spent our meals in long conversation: the lighthouse, the sea, tales of shipwrecks, stories of Corsican bandits.  Then, as the sun went down, the keeper on first shift lit his hand lantern, took up his pipe, his canteen, and a fat volume of Plutarch with a red ribbon marker that constituted the entire library of the Bloody Shoals, and disappeared into the shadows.  After a few seconds everyone in the building could hear a fracas of chains, pulleys, and ponderous counterweights being hauled up into position.

      As for myself, I went out onto the terrace and took a seat.  The sun, already very low, dropped more and more quickly toward the sea, pulling the whole horizon along with it.  The breeze grew colder and the whole island turned purple.  In the nearby sky a massive bird glided slowly by, the sea eagle on its way home to the nest in the Genoese tower.  Little by little the twilight thickened and soon one could only see the curls of white foam around the edge of the island.  Suddenly, above my head, a ray of light shot out.  The lantern of the lighthouse had been lit.  Leaving the rest of the island itself in shadow, the beam projected its soft light far off onto the sea.  I was lost in the dark beneath those great swaths of light that scarcely trickled down as they swept overhead.  But the wind was freshening and it was time to go inside.  Feeling my way, I closed the heavy door and bolted it, then located the little iron stairway that shook and squeaked under my weight, and came finally to the cabin at the top of the lighthouse.  Here, there was certainly a great deal of light!

      Think of a gigantic Carcel lamp with six rows of wicks, around which revolved the panes of the lantern, half filled with huge crystal lenses and the other half opening onto fixed sheets of glass that kept the lamp sheltered from any wind.  I was stunned as I entered.  Glittering reflections of copper, zinc, and tin, and those curved crystal panels that spun in great bluish circles, all those mirrors and the clanking of polished clockwork made me dizzy for a minute.  Yet, my eyes gradually got used to it and I came and sat down at the foot of the lamp next to the keeper who was reading his Plutarch out loud so as not to fall asleep.

      Outside, a great pit of darkness.  On the little balcony that wound around the lantern, the wind tore by, howling like a madman.  The lighthouse creaked and the sea groaned.  On the point of the island, on the rugged boulders, the breakers exploded like cannon fire.  Every so often an invisible finger would tap on the glass.  Some night bird attracted by the light had bashed itself into the glass panels.  Inside the hot, glittering lantern, the only perceptible noises were the guttering of the flames, the dripping of oil, the chains inching along, and a monotonous voice chanting out the life of Demetrius of Phaleria.

      At midnight, the keeper stood up, cast a last glance over his wicks, and we went downstairs.  On the way down, we met our companion who held the second watch.  He was rubbing his eyes on his way up.  We handed him the canteen and the Plutarch.  Then, before getting into our beds, we crossed the lower room cluttered with chains, barrels of lamp oil, ropes, and there, in the circle cast by the little portable lantern, the keeper completed his shift by writing in the heavy log book that always sat open: Midnight.  Heavy seas.  Storm approaching.  Ship coming in.

‘The Ordeal of the Semillante’ contributed by Guest Author Jim Gaines

Guest Author Jim Gaines

The Ordeal of the Sémillante[1] -By Alphonse Daudet

-Translated by guest author James F. Gaines

          Since that northerly wind the other night blew us up onto the coast of Corsica, permit me to tell you the tale of a terrible maritime tragedy the fishermen down there mention often during the evenings and on which chance has furnished me with very interesting information. It was two or three years ago.

     I was sailing the seas around Sardinia with a team of seven or eight customs officers.  Tough trip for a novice!  All through the month of March we didn’t have a single good day.  The easterly gale bore down on us and the waves would show us no mercy.

     One night we were racing before the storm when our boat came to find shelter at the entrance to the Gulf of Bonifacio in the midst of a cluster of little islands.  Their appearance offered nothing encouraging; huge windswept boulders covered with seabirds, a few tufts of wormwood, stunted locust trees, and here and there in the mud, scraps of wood moldering away.  But by heaven, for a spot to spend the night, these hideous rocks were better than the broken keel of wrecked ship where the waves swept in and out as though they owned it, so we made the best of it. As soon as we had gone ashore, while the mates were putting together a fire to boil some chowder, the skipper called me over and showed me a little enclosure of white stones hiding in the broom at the end of the island. 

     “You coming along to the cemetery, Mister Daudet?” he asked.

      “A graveyard, Captain Lionnetti, sir?  Where can we be, then?”

     “The Lavezzi  Rocks, my friend.  This is the last resting place of the six hundred men of the Sémillante, exactly where their frigate broke up ten years these ten years past.  Poor fellows, they don’t get many visitors; the least we can do is to go pay our respects while we’re here.”

    “Yes, sir, with all my heart.”

     What sadness in that little cemetery of the Sémillante!  I can see it again now, with its low surrounding wall, its rusty iron gate so hard to open, its silent chapel amid hundreds of darkened crosses hidden in the weeds.  Not even a single bouquet of everlastings to brighten the place, not a single memorial, nothing.  Oh, the poor deserted dead, how cold they must feel in their makeshift tombs.

      We knelt there a moment.  The skipper prayed out loud.  Great herring gulls, the only watchmen for these graves, pivoted around our heads and mixed their raucous cries with the moaning of the sea.

      When our prayer was finished, we returned with heavy hearts to the corner of the island where our boat was anchored.  During our absence, our shipmates had not wasted their time.  We found a big campfire blazing in the lee of a cliff and the pot boiling away.  We sat in a circle around it with our feet to the fire and soon each of us had in his lap a big earthenware trencher of chowder with two large hunks of dark bread to sop up the sauce.  It was a silent meal, since we were soaked, hungry, and so close to a cemetery.  Yet when all the dishes had been cleared, we lit our pipes and started to chat a bit.  We spoke, naturally, about the wreck of the Sémillante.

      “How did the events unfold?”  said the skipper with a deep sigh.  “Well, mates, no one in the world can say precisely.  All that we know is that the Sémillante, loaded with troops bound for the Crimea, set sail from Toulon the previous evening in the midst of bad weather.   As night wore on, it got worse and worse.  Wind, rain, and combers higher than anyone could remember.  Toward morning the wind fell off a little, but the sea was as stirred up as ever, and along with that, a damned, devilish fog set in, so thick you couldn’t see a lantern two fathoms ahead.  That kind of fog, my boy, is undoubtedly the most treacherous danger in the seven seas.  But as if that were not enough, I’ve a mind that the Sémillante had her rudder carried away during the morning.  No fog bank lasts forever, and without some further bad luck, her skipper never would have been fooling around in these shoal waters.  He was a real old salt whom we all knew well.  He had commanded the coast guard in Corsica for three years  and knew the charts as well as I do, who knows little else. “

     “And how many bells, you think, when the Sémillante went down?”

     “It must have been around midday, yes sir, just about noon.  But Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, in all that mist it must have been no brighter than the pelt of midnight wolf.  A customs man ashore told me that he had gone outside just about half past eleven to refasten a shutter that had blown loose.  Suddenly his uniform cap blew off and at the risk of being blown into the drink himself, he chased it along the beach, running on four legs like a dog!  You’ve got to understand, you don’t get rich in the customs corps and those uniform caps cost a pretty penny.  It so happened that at a certain point this fellow raised his eyes and saw, looming out of the fog, a ship of the line with its rigging all blown away being driven by the wind toward the Lavezzi Rocks.  That ship was racing so quickly that it swept by like a vision in a dream.  Everything leads me to believe that was the Sémillante, because scarcely thirty minutes later the shepherd who keeps a flock on these rocks… But, look, here comes the very man I was talking about.  He can tell us all about it himself.  Good evening, Palumbo!  Come warm yourself up a bit, don’t be shy.”

     A hooded man that I had been watching wandering near the fire for a short time and that I had mistaken for a member of our crew, since I had no idea there could be a shepherd on this reef, cautiously came closer.   He was a mangy old timer, like a village idiot, afflicted with some kind of odd scurvy that had swollen his lips to horrible proportions.  It took quite a while to explain to him what we wanted to know.  Then, holding up his bloviated lip with a dirty finger, the old man told us that, in fact, he heard from his hovel around midday an awful crashing on the rocks.  Since the island was nearly awash, he could not go outside.  It wasn’t until the morrow that he opened his door and saw the beach covered with debris and bodies washed up by the sea.   Horrified, he ran off to his rowboat to go to Bonifacio and ask for help.

     Worn out by so much story-telling, the shepherd sat down and the skipper took up where he left off.

    “Yes, sirree, this is the very man who came to tell us the news.  He was almost crazed with terror.  The affair left his wits a bit scrambled.  Well, of course, it was enough to… Just imagine, six hundred cadavers all over the strand, scattered among the flotsam and scraps of sail.  The poor Sémillante!  The sea had dashed her to bits and ground her up into pieces so small that Palumbo could barely find enough solid driftwood to repair his ruined sheepfold.   As for the men, they were almost all terribly mutilated and disfigured.  It was awful to see them stuck together in little bunches like clusters of grapes.  We found the captain in his full dress uniform, the chaplain with his stole on his shoulders, as though giving last rites, and in a small hollow in the rocks a little wisp of a cabin boy with his eyes wide open.  You’d think he was still alive, but no, it was fated that not a single person would escape.

     Here the skipper paused.  “Watch out, Nardi!  The fire’s going to go out!”  Nardi threw an armful of tarry planks on the coals that flared up immediately.  The skipper went on.

     “The saddest thing of all in this business is this.  Three weeks before the disaster, a little corvette headed for the Crimea like the Sémillante had broken up in the same way and almost in the same spot.   Except that time we had been able to save the whole crew and twenty or so soldiers who were aboard in transport to the front lines.  Those poor soldier boys were not exactly in the catbird seat, as you can well imagine.  We brought them back to Bonifacio and looked after them for a couple of days at the base.  Once they were dried off and on their feet again, so long, good luck, and they were on their way back to Toulon.  A little while later they were off to the Crimea again, but guess in which ship?  The Sémillante, by damn!  We found them all, all twenty of them right here where we sit tonight.  I picked up the body of a fine young brigadier with a fancy moustache, a fair-haired Parisian, who had lodged at my own house and regaled us with constantly with his tales of city life.  Seeing him there like that nearly broke my heart.  Oh, Mother of Mercy!”

     With that good old Lionetti, with tears in his eyes, shook out the ash from his pipe and bade me goodnight.  For a few more minutes some of the shipmates went on chatting with muted voices.  Then, one after another, they put out their pipes, no one spoke further, and the old shepherd drifted away.  I alone remained awake musing while the crew around me fell asleep.

Still under the gloomy influence of the tale I had just heard, I tried to picture in my mind the poor, doomed ship and the ordeal whose only witnesses had been the seagulls.  A few ideas that had stuck with me, such as the captain in his full dress uniform, the chaplain with his stole, and the twenty trans-shipped soldiers, helped me to reconstruct the events of the disaster.  I imagined the frigate leaving Toulon in the pitch dark, setting out from port.  The sea was angry and the winds terrible.  But the captain was a brave and seasoned sailor, so no one aboard was worried.

     In the morning the fog bank crept in.  Alarm spread.  The crew members were all turned out on deck and the captain didn’t leave the wheel.  Below decks the soldiers were cramped in complete darkness.  The atmosphere was clammy and stifling.  A few of the passengers  groaned from seasickness in their berths.  Suddenly the hull lurched over and it was no longer possible to stand upright.  Hunkered down on the decks and benches , they started to mutter, but they found they had to yell to be heard.  Some of them started to get scared.  Think about it!  Shipwrecks are not rare in these waters, as the soldiers themselves can testify, and what they recalled was not reassuring.  The officer especially, a wise guy from Paris, made their skin crawl with his bad jokes.  “A shipwreck, that’s a laugh!  If we crack up, we’ll all get nothing but a good cold bath and they’ll bring us back to Bonifacio again to swill down pheasant at old man Leonetti’s place. “

     At that, the soldier boys began to snicker.   Suddenly there was a crash.  What was that?  What was going on?

     “We’ve just lost the rudder!” shouted a water-logged seaman running down to the other end of the hull.

     “No fear!” responded that comedian of an officer, but no one was laughing any more.

     There was an uproar up on deck, but the fog prevented anyone from making out what was happening.  The sailors were feeling their way around in a panic.  No rudder!  That meant they were dead in the water, at the mercy of the waves.  Blown before the gale, the Sémillante raced through the water.  That must have been when the customs man saw her pass by.  It was eleven thirty.  Up in the forecastle, there was noise like a cannon.  The breakers!  The breakers!  That’s it, there was no more hope and they smashed onto the rocks.  The captain made his way into his cabin and emerged again in a minute next to the useless wheel, in full dress.  He wanted to look proper for his death.

     Between decks, the agony-stricken soldiers looked silently at each other.  Those who were sick pulled themselves to their feet.  The brigadier had stopped making jokes.  At that instant the door burst open and the chaplain appeared in his stole, saying “Kneel down, boys.”  They all obeyed.  With a ringing voice, the chaplain began a prayer to Saint Jude.  Suddenly there was an unbelievable crash and amid outstretched arms and clasped hands, a single huge wail went out, crying “Mercy on us!”  The vision of death passed like lightning before their eyes.

     That’s how I spent the night, pondering the destiny of the ill-fated ship from ten years distance with its debris scattered all around me on the beach.   Out in the straits, the storm raged on, and gusts occasionally rushed into our camp to whip at the flames of our dying fire.  Out in the cove, I could hear the groaning of our own cutter as it strained at the anchor chain.

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[1] The frigate Sémillante was named after a symbol of the French Revolution, a peasant woman sowing grain who represented fertility and hope for the future, so ironically in this case.

- See more at: http://www.eeriedigest.com/wordpress/2013/07/the-ordeal-of-the-semillante-contributed-by-guest-author-jim-gaines/#more-9205

‘Locusts’ by Guest Author James F. Gaines

Locusts

By Alphonse Daudet

Translated by James F. Gaines

          Before returning to my mill, here’s another memory of Algeria…

      The night I arrived in that farm on the outskirts of the Sahara, I couldn’t sleep.  The new landscape, the disruption of the trip, the barking of the jackals, and then that sapping, oppressive heat – complete suffocation –  as if the mesh in my mosquito netting could not allow the passage of a single breath of air.  When I opened the window at dawn, a heavy summer fog floated in the air, scarcely drifting along and fringed at the edges with pink and black.  It hovered like a cloud of gunpowder over a battlefield.  Not a leaf fluttered, and in the beautiful gardens that spread out below me, everything had the same sullen mood, the same immobility of foliage waiting for a thunderstorm: the grapevines aligned on the exposed slopes that made for sweet wines, the European orchard tucked into a shady corner, the orange and mandarin trees in long, calibrated rows.  Even the banana trees with their shoots of tender green, always waving in the slightest breeze that tousled the fine, light fronds, stood at attention silent and straight as the plumes of a cavalry regiment. 

     I paused a moment to look over that marvelous plantation where all the trees of the world congregated, each providing in season its gifts of exotic fruits and flowers.  Between the wheat fields and the masses of cork oaks shown a stream that was refreshing to behold on such a stuffy morning.  Just as I was admiring the orderliness and plenty of all these things, the handsome farmhouse with its Moorish arcades, the terraces sparkling with dew, the stables and barns clustered around, it struck me that twenty years ago, when the intrepid settlers came to homestead in this valley of the Sahel, they had found nothing but the wretched hut of a highway worker surrounded by a wilderness of dwarf palms and sumacs.  Everything had to be done from scratch, built up from nothing.  At the drop of a hat an Arab revolt would spring up and they had to drop the plow to take up the rifle.  And then the diseases, the eye infections, the bad harvests, the groping around with inexperienced hands, not to mention the ongoing struggle with a short-sighted, wishy-washy administration.  What exertions!  What drudgery!  What unbroken watchfulness!

   Even today, despite the bad times they had weathered and the fortune they had scrimped to win, the farmer and his wife were the first in the village to rise.  I could hear them at this ungodly hour, bustling about down in the kitchen on the ground floor as they organized breakfast for the farm hands.  Soon a bell rang and the workers filed out onto the paths.  There were vineyard specialists from Burgundy, Kabyles from the Berber hills dressed in homespun  with red fezzes on their heads, Spanish gardeners from Minorca without any leggings, Maltese, Italian laborers from Lucca, a whole motley world of a workforce that was challenging to control.  To each of them the farmer in the doorway assigned a daily task in a clipped, gruff voice.  When he had finished, this tough fellow raised his head and scoured the sky with worried eyes.  When he spotted me at the window he yelled up, “Bad weather for the crops.   The scirocco wind will be blowing in.”

    Just so, as the sun rose higher, gusts of incandescent, suffocating air hit us like the fires of a blast furnace.  We couldn’t decide what to do or where to hide.  The whole morning went on like that.  We took our coffee on mats out in the gallery, without the force to stir or to make conversation.  The miserable dogs, seeking coolness from the floor tiles, stretched themselves into ridiculous contortions.  Lunch raised our spirits a bit, for it was a real farmer’s spread with odd ingredients including carp, trout, slices of roast boar, hedgehog stew, high-class butter from the resort at Staoueli, local wine from Crescia, guavas and bananas.  Nothing less than an international conference of dishes that so resembled the complex environment that surrounded us.  We were about to get up reluctantly from the table when suddenly we heard cries that came right through the shuttered French doors that tried to keep out the incinerating midday heat: “Locusts!  Locusts!”

    Our host became as white as a sheet, like a man who had heard news of a disaster, and we sped outside.  For ten minutes throughout the house that had moments ago been so calm there arose a stampede of running feet and chaotic voices blending into the mobilization of an alarm.  Hopping up from the shady nooks where they had been enjoying their siestas, the servants stormed outdoors banging away with sticks, pitchforks, flails, and any metal objects they could lay hands on, such as copper kettles, wash basins, or pots and pans.  The shepherds blew frantically on their sheep horns.  Others sounded off with conch shells from the ocean or hunting horns.  This created a frightful, disorganized cacophony that accompanied the harsh ululation made by Arab women running up from the adjoining village.  Sometimes, they think, you can frighten off the locusts by making a colossal racket that causes the atmosphere itself start to shake and impedes the locusts from descending to earth.

     But where in the world were those horrible insects?  I could see nothing in the vibrant blue and burning sky but a bronze-colored cloud on the horizon, compact as a cloud full of hail, advancing with the sound like a million trees rustled by a downburst.  That was the locusts.  Flying wingtip to parched wingtip as if to hold each other aloft, they formed a solid mass that spread a dense, expanding shadow over the valley below.  Despite all our cries and exertions, they came on.  Soon the cloud arrived right over us.  For a second we noticed a slight tear on the edges and a sort of unraveling.  Like the first drops to fall from a shower, a few of them, distinct and brownish, broke off from the flight and dove, then the entire cloud broke open and a hail of insects hit the ground hard and noisily.  As far as the eye could see, the fields were covered with enormous grasshoppers as fat as your thumb.

     The massacre began.  A hideous crunching like hay being chewed up.  With plows, harrows, and picks, the people attacked the seething earth.  The more we killed, the more they came on.  They writhed, layer upon layer, with their long legs interlocked.  The ones on top leaped wildly in panic, right onto the noses of the horses that had been harnessed for this bizarre plowing.  Dogs from the farmyard and the native village launched themselves into a cross-country mayhem, snapping at the locusts and rolling on them, At that instant, two companies of the Native Algerian Rifles, trumpets blaring at the lead, raced to the rescue of the beleaguered colonists, and the battle changed its appearance.

    Instead of squashing the bugs, the soldiers methodically roasted them by igniting long trails of gunpowder stretched through the furrows.

     Tired of killing, sickened by the stench, I returned to the farmhouse.  Inside the building there were almost as many of the locusts as outside.  They had pressed in through the shutters, through cracks around doors and windows, even down the chimneys.  Along the woodwork and the half-eaten draperies, they dragged, dropped and flew.   They scaled the whitewashed walls casting huge shadows that doubled their ugliness.  And always that gut-wrenching smell.  At dinner time, we had to do without water because they had fouled all the cisterns, the water basins, the wells, and even the horse troughs.   That night in my room, despite the hordes of them we had killed and removed, I still heard some stragglers crawling beneath the furniture.  The scraping of their carcasses reminded me of the sound of pods splitting open in the sun.  I didn’t sleep that night, either.  Anyway, the entire farm was still awake.  Gunpowder trails sizzled across the valley from one end to the other.  The Native Algerian Rifles were still at it.

     The next day, when I opened my window again, the locusts had all gone.  But what devastation they had left behind them!  Not a flower remained, not a blade of grass.  Everything was blackened, eaten away, incinerated.  I could recognize the orchards of bananas, apricots, peaches, and mandarins only by the skeletons of their lifeless branches.  Nothing remained of the charm, the shimmering leaves that are the life and soul of a tree.  Women were dredging out the cisterns and the pools.  The farm hands were plowing up every inch of earth to kill the eggs that the swarm had laid.  Each clod had to be turned and laboriously broken up.  My heart nearly broke at the sight of all the pale roots, previously full of life, that withered as the land was turned inside out.

‘Moving In’ – By Alphonse Daudet -Translated by James F. Gaines

The rabbits were the ones who were surprised.  Since they had seen the door of the mill closed for so long, the walls and the front yard invaded by weeds, they had come to think that the species of millers was extinct.  Finding the place empty, they had established it as a sort of headquarters, a center of strategic operations – the Jemmapes Rabbit Mill.  The night I arrived, there were (honestly) twenty of them sitting around the front yard warming their paws in the moonbeams.  The second I opened a window, frrt! they broke camp in a rout and all their little white butts sprinted off, tail in the air, into the bush.  I hope they come back.

     Another inhabitant who was astonished to see me was the second-floor renter, a sinister old owl with the face of The Thinker, who had lived in the mill for at least twenty years.  I spotted him in the upper room, sitting still and straight on the cross-timber in the midst of fallen plaster and tiles.  He watched me a minute with his round eyes, then, surprised not to recognize me, started to call out “Hoo! Hoo!” and ponderously to shake his big wings, grey with dust.  Those damned Thinkers, they never brush themselves off!  No matter.  Such as he is, with his blinking eyes and frowning face, this silent renter pleases me more than any other could.  I instantly renewed his lease.  As in the past, he takes the whole second story of the mill, with an entry through a hole in the roof.  I reserve for my own use the first floor, a whitewashed room underneath, its ceiling low and vaulted like the refectory of a monastery.

     That’s where I write to you from, my front door wide open to the wonderful sun. A beautiful stand of pines shimmering with light goes down to the bottom of the hill.  On the horizon, the Alpilles Mountains raise their pointed peaks.  Not a sound.  You can barely hear, far away, as though through a filter, a curlew in the lavender fields or the bells of a mule train on the highway.  This whole Provencal landscape lives entirely on light.

      So why should I regret your dirty, noisy Paris?  I have it so well in my mill.  It’s just the spot I was looking for, a fragrant, warm getaway a thousand miles from newspapers, cabs, and fog.  And there are so many great things around me.  I’ve been moved in for scarcely a week and already my head is crammed with impressions and memories.  Why, just last night, I was present when the flocks came back to the mas (farmstead) down the hill.  I swear that I wouldn’t trade that spectacle for all the premières you have gone to in Paris this week.  You be the ju   dge.

     I should explain that in Provence it’s customary that as soon as the hot weather arrives they send the livestock up into the mountains.   Man and beast spend six months up there sleeping under the stars with green grass up to their chests.  Then, at the first bite of autumn, they come back down to the mas to graze comfortably on the little grey-green hills perfumed with wild rosemary.  Since the break of day, the farmyard gate has stood wide open in welcome, the barns full of fresh straw.  From hour to hour, the farm folk would say, “Now they’re as far as Eyguières, now they’re at Paradou.”  Then, all of a sudden, towards twilight, a great cry goes up, “There they are!  Down over there!”  In the distance, we see the flock approaching in an aura of dust.  The road itself seems to be marching along with them.  Out in front come the old rams, brandishing their horns defiantly.  Behind them the mass of sheep, the ewes somewhat tired, with their lambs nosing around under foot.  The mules decorated with red pompoms on their bridles carry the newborn lambs in baskets, rocking them as they walk along.  Then come the dogs, panting away, their tongues practically down to the ground, and two big rascally shepherds in red wool mantles that hang down to their ankles like a priest’s robes.

     This whole parade passes joyously in front of us and disappears into the barnyard, their tramping feet making a noise like a downpour of rain.  You should see the uproar in the compound.  From up on their perch, the big green and gold peacocks with iridescent heads recognize the arrivals and greet them with a terrific trumpet burst.  The chicken coop, which had been on the point of falling asleep, reawakens with a jolt.  All the birds are running around: ducks, guinea fowl, turkeys, pigeons.  The hen house has gone crazy; the chickens are talking about staying up all night! It seems as though each sheep has brought back in its wool a wild Alpine fragrance, a bit of that giddy mountain air that makes one dance.

     Amidst all this hubbub the flock disperses to find their bedding spots.  Nothing could be more charming than this homecoming.  The old rams fondly settle in to their favorite corners.  The younger lambs who were born during the high season and have never before seen the farm gaze around with astonished eyes.

     But the most touching thing of all is the dogs, those good old sheepdogs completely absorbed with their flock and seeing nothing else in the mas.  In vain, the guard dog barks at them from his house.  The bucket from the well, filled with fresh, cool water, beckons to them with no effect.  They refuse to see or hear anything until the flock is bedded down, the big steel latch bolted on the Dutch door, and the shepherds at table in their quarters.  Only then do they consent to go to the kennel where, lapping at their bowls of stew, they tell their farm friends what it was like up in the mountains, a dark land with wolves and giant purple foxgloves filled to the brim with dew.