The eye slowly learns to recognise the masonry among the natural architecture, to separate the fantastic limestone surfaces from broken dwellings and fallen towers.
The city, once containing about eight thousand inhabitants, is now reduced to about a dozen or so, and these all live at the entrance to the town on the ascending road from the valley by which the traveller from the mountains must approach this grim little court of mediæval princes. The road is comparatively new, for it cuts through some of the great houses, and high up above us as we pass, we see the columns and frieze of a fine stone mantelpiece overhanging the road, evidently belonging to some seigneurial dwelling. Perhaps it was here that the lady of the golden hair passed her tumultuous life--it could scarcely have been peaceful at that time, in that place--with that hair!
A few silent inhabitants watch us as we go by. A cat peers suspiciously over a wall of which the roof has fallen in; a mongrel hunts for garbage in a rubbish heap in a windowless mansion.
Before the _Chevelure d'Or_[22] there is a little group of men. Here the trap is put up and we set forth on foot up the steep main street of this "mediæval Pompeii."
The whole place is built on the shelving shoulder of the cliff; a sloping ledge whence one might expect the town to slip down at any moment into the cauldron-valley; just as from time to time great fragments of rock have evidently rolled down to eternal oblivion.
The impression of universal greyness strengthens as we move upwards through the silent streets: grey walls, grey tiles, grey paving stones and grey escarpments above, on whose highest summit stands the rock-excavated castle, now apparently inaccessible except to adventurous birds--or, perhaps, the ghosts of the Princes of Les Baux who for their crimes are unable to rest in their graves.
We clamber up and down the ruinous higher part of the town, among those pathetic rectangles of masonry open to the sky where human life throbbed so eagerly a little while ago; we mount some perilous-looking steps on the cliff-side, in hopes of reaching the castle, but find ourselves emerging in mid-air upon the edge of the plateau overlooking from an appalling height the windy spaces of the Crau.