But ah, if Raimbaut de Vacqueiras had seen his successors!
It was a touching little scene: the two footsore troubadours--jongleurs, perhaps, one ought to call them--passing wondering but unconscious below the city where once their forefathers of the craft were welcomed and honoured guests.
If the passes of the Alpilles were as desolate as a moon landscape in the full blaze of a Provençal midday, what were they in the grey of evening? The human spirit is not fashioned to endure the aspect of these abysmal regions of nature.
Masses of rock rising out of unknown deeps of shadow take on the aspect of some lawless architecture, the handiwork of an alien race: fantastic earth-born peoples raising mad palaces half sublime, half grotesque:--
colonnades whose capitals are sculptured by the wind spirits: strange half-finished cathedrals with pinnacles and fretwork, flocks of gargoyles wrought by goblin sculptors.
There was one sublime insane cathedral looming crazily through the dusk, with an encumberment of caricatures of saints and angels, grinning faces, half defined, half suggested--it seemed like some great Temple of Evil.
From the Gorge of Hell, high up among the recesses of the hills, opens the Witch's Grotto amidst "tortured shapes which rise up, sink down, stretch into great entablatures and gardens in the air."
This is the dreaded domain of Tavèn, the famous sorceress of the Alpilles. She plays an important part in Mistral's epic poem _Mireille_ (or _Mirèio_, in the original Provençal).
To this maiden and her lover Vincent, who visited her cavern which stretches for long distances underground, Tavèn gives extraordinary experiences. They have come to her for aid in their love affair which Mireille's father, a wealthy farmer on the outskirts of the Crau, violently opposes. Vincent has been treacherously wounded by his rival, an owner of cattle on the Camargue; a brutal but wealthy suitor favoured by the father.
The sorceress is found at the bottom of the grotto amid a "cloud of dreams," with a sprig of broom-grass in her hand, which is called the devil's wheat. Above her head is a raven perched on a beam, and beside him a milk-white hen; also (for magical reasons) a sieve tied to the wall.