Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE ROAD TO ARLES—THE CAMARGUE—RUINS OP ARLES—THE "ALISCAMPS" T EAVING Aix down in her bowl in the hills with the silvery olive and flowering almond and plum trees framing her quaint old face, we roll on over the finest stretches of highway I have ever imagined. This is the level land of the mouth of the Rhone and in the next two hours we have three bits of road of ten miles each, and all as straight as a string drawn taut. What speed we seem to make; how the wind sings, and how exhilarating! The machine, a of some twenty-four horse-power, makes now about forty- five miles an hour; yet we feel when one of ninety horse-power passes as though we were at a standstill. During the morning hours our route lies through many old towns; each of which has its memories. This one of Salon holds the castle of the astrologist Nostradamus and in her church of St. Laurent he lies buried. From Salon our way leads directly west and we skim along for twenty miles through the flat land but see nothing of the Rhone until we reach and through Arles. Then we bring up suddenly upon its very brink with its yellow floods rolling southward at our feet. On our right are the gateways of the famous old city of Arles, but my eyes are drawn off and away across the river and out over the fantastic land of the Camargue, a land more akin to Africa than to Europe,—that great "Field of Reeds" between the two branches of the Rhone, only a few feet above the level of the sea, where the ibis, Egyptian vulture, and the flamingo are to be found. The whole is so low and so covered with salt that it glistens and glitters under the morning's sunlight, while the air quivers and shifts above it, and is full of the mirage, taking on strange forms and fantastic shapes as the eye wanders over it. ... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.