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Travels in the Cévennes Without a Donkey
FRANCE, 1965

T
UESDAY
A fine, windy crossing to Calais. Drove to Boulogne to find that night train to Avignon could not accommodate vehicles over 64½ inches in height. Land Rover 77½ inches. Forced to remove entire metal super-structure with spanners. Left with huge piles of nuts, struts and bolts, side windows, etc., like jumbo-size Meccano set. Shared couchette with family of five. Carriages very new with clean towels. The train left at 8.10 p.m.

WEDNESDAY
Arrived Avignon 8.20 a.m. Vehicles unloaded at rural siding complete with snack bar and wash place. French officials all trying to win courtesy prize.

Exhausted by rebuilding Land Rover we spent rest of the morning under plane trees in Place de l’Horloge. How expensive it became sitting under plane trees in Place de l’Horloge!

Crossed Rhône in sizzling midday heat; through gravelly wastes to Tavel. Drank excellent, cold Tavel rosé in deserted main square. Then through the Forêts de Tavel and Malmont, strange, stony, almost waterless wastes, peppered with ilex and dwarf oaks and scented with thyme and lavender. Ate very good
charcuterie
in the ink-pot black shade of an ilex tree and finished the other half of the still-cold Tavel, to the insane music of
cigales.

5 p.m. Alès, dreary industrial town on the Gardon d’Alès, a river which has almost as many branches as our bank. R. L. Stevenson came here after travelling with and selling his donkey, Modestine, but only to collect his mail.

By winding, wooded D 50. Saw forest of giant bamboos, 20 metres high, in Parc de Prafance. With sun going down rapidly, drove along wooded valley of another Gardon, Gardon de Mialet, and stopped at a fine, unofficial-looking camp site in a grove of chestnut trees down by the river, beyond Le Mialet. Fearful job pegging down tent on iron-hard soil using alloy pegs which behaved like folding teaspoons from a joke shop. The farm had some likely-looking chickens raised on good farmyard grit running about. Wanda ordered one for the following day. She then cooked veal in wine. Slept soundly on punctured airbed.

THURSDAY
Very hot morning – tent like an oven. Re-pitched it under a tree. Magnificent swimming in deep pools. Thousands of butterflies. Collected blackberries. Dined on chicken cooked with thyme, ratatouille, blackberries in wine, and drank Tavel rosé. Afterwards went for black-as-pitch swim in the Gardon. At 3 a.m. heard weird noises outside tent. Shades of Dominici and the dead Drummonds? Finally, I emerged trouserless from the tent armed with a hammer, whereupon the noises ceased.

FRIDAY
Warm and beautiful day. To St Jean du Gard, little town with one long street where Stevenson sold his donkey. Outside the town bought the most delicious honey we had ever tasted – as black as treacle.

Then through great, wooded mountains, past deserted villages and abandoned terrace fields to the mouth of the Tunnel du Marquaires, which burrows through the Cévennes watershed. This was the divide for the weather, too. Overhead it was as if the master chef was stirring a
pot au feu.
From it a long descent to Racoules on the Tarnon where there was a pleasant-looking camping place and an equally pleasant little inn close by.

Then on down the Tarnon to the little town of Florac at its
junction with the Tarn, with the cliffs of the high plateau of the Causse Méjean (
causse
being a high plateau) looming over it – a good place for shopping but too many cars (even in 1965). Then up the Tarn, now very beautiful and peaceful with many unorganized places for camping which you would not be allowed to use today; and then up the valley of the Mirals river with heather-covered hills rising above it.

Here, we met a young woman who said we could camp down by the river, where there was a water meadow with apple trees growing in it. Hidden under a cliff, there was a disused mill house with the date 1718 over the door, built with huge blocks of stone, the interior all shrouded in cobwebs.

Weather now very threatening, with clouds like giant black puffballs dead overhead. Pitched tent on little mound in the water meadow. No point in being washed away. In the mill house Wanda cooked duck in wine, ratatouille from previous evening and stewed blackberries with windfall apples, followed by a goat cheese from a village at the head of the valley. Fine if you like goat’s cheese.

SATURDAY
Woke to find that the mound with the tent on it was now an island. Waded to mill for breakfast. Then set off on foot in showery weather up the steep side of a ridge between the valleys of the Mirals and the Briançon. Strong wind at the top. To the southwest black rain clouds were pouring over the edge of the Causse Méjean. Deep down below us, in the valley of the Briançon, there was a minute village, its houses built of brown stone and with slate roofs, now shiny with rain. Higher up, the tributaries of the Briançon reached up to stony crests like long green veins and to the east-northeast the Mirals fell away into the valley in a long, white plume; while from north to south the Cévennes rose and fell, more like a rough sea than a mountain range.

We climbed round the head of a valley to a village set amongst tor-like rocks. Inside the houses, some of which had
only recently been abandoned, there were fireplaces with cowled chimney pieces, huge dressers, old cordial bottles bearing the names of long-extinct firms, mid-nineteenth-century religious books and tracts (the people in this region were ardent Protestants), calendars of the 1900s, little round boxes full of buttons, old coats with braided lapels and suits of velveteen (one with a family of mice living in its pockets) and, upstairs, mounds of bedding, all surprisingly clean, mountain boots and strange wardrobes that resembled the bodies of old stage coaches.

Every house was deserted, except one. Inside it a woman of fifty or sixty was sitting by an open fire. She and her husband were the last occupants. Before the last war forty people had lived here. She was lonely, she said, but she didn’t like towns or cities.

A white-washed rock, part of the mountain, protruded into the room. In one corner there was a big double bed. Homemade sausages hung from hooks in the ceiling. Outside, on a wooden platform, undercover, was all their gear: saws, felling axes and sledges for bringing the wood in from the forests.

Back at the camp we ate sausages made with herbs, beans with oil and vinegar, goat’s cheese and a fruit tart bought in Florac.

SUNDAY
An impressive, windswept dawn, then rain. Breakfast was scrambled eggs, stewed apples, bread and the black honey.

Then we climbed to one of the villages we had seen the previous day. Only three houses were occupied in this one. Some of the children had curious pop-eyes.

After this, in the Land Rover, up the road which ran alongside the main stream of the Briançon, passing gleaming water meadows, irrigated by little ditches which ran along the hillsides like creeping plants, and up the screes of Mont Lozère where broom grew and huge thistles which the local
people nailed to the doors of their houses as barometers (they closed when it was going to rain).

A starry night. Very cold. Wanda cooked, or rather reheated, a guinea fowl cooked that morning, bought because of a shortage of chickens. Like a lot of guinea fowl this one was a bit rubbery but the gravy was good.

MONDAY
Up the right bank of the Tarn to Le Pont de Montvert, a small, windy village at the meeting of several valleys. Here we bought wine from barrels in a barrel-shaped cellar and homemade ice cream.

Then on up to the Col de Finiels on open downs on Mont Lozère, as lonely as the loneliest parts of the Cheviots, where the wind was tearing the sky apart and one solitary shepherd in an immense green canvas cloak stood alone with his sheep in this vast landscape as if he was the last shepherd on earth. Until recently the Causses had been treeless, huge expanses of rock and stones with minimal quantities of earth in which thin grass, lavender, marjoram, wild thyme and dozens of other herbs grew. Nevertheless they supported vast flocks of sheep.

Every year, in the spring, the sheep were walked up from Bas-Languedoc by their shepherds to the Causses and Mont Lozère in the Cévennes by way of
les drailles
, paths on which, at intervals of a day’s journey, there were huts and pens for the accommodation of the shepherds and their sheep. In the autumn the journey was made in reverse. This was the
transhumance.
The wool from these sheep was used for making French Army uniforms.

Now the government was embarking on a huge programme of tree-planting on the Causses that would transform it, in much the same way as Fabre had done in the Cévennes in the 1870s to replace the beech forests cut down by charcoal burners and ravaged by goats. This reafforestation was naturally unpopular with the shepherds of the
Causses and mysterious acts of arson had already taken place.

To walk along the ridge of Mont Lozère from end to end must be, I thought at the time, one of the great walks of the world. One day, I promised myself, I would do it, but I have not done so yet.

Not Such a Promising Land
ISRAEL, 1965

J
ERUSALEM
in February 1965 was a bit chilly, not surprisingly as it is 2500 feet up in the air on a bare, almost waterless, limestone plateau. How King David, a thousand years before Christ, came to choose such a site for his capital, having captured it from the inoffensive Jebusites, is a bit of a mystery. One of his reasons must have been because it was isolated, and therefore, he hoped, free from corrupting, outside influences, something that would have been inescapable down on the shores of the Mediterranean, thirty miles or so away, where every ship that arrived was a possible harbinger of innovation and change.

At that time, in 1965, the New City, which was being developed by the Israelis, was entirely sealed off from the Old City, which was still in Jordanian territory. It was a state of affairs that benefited neither side, but one that was to become even worse for the Jordanians two years later, in 1967, when they were thrown out completely.

There was something decidedly eerie about one’s first sight of the battlemented western wall of Jordanian-occupied Old Jerusalem, pierced by the then blocked-up Jaffa Gate, one of the seven gates of the city, all of which, well into the twentieth century, were shut at night, leaving anyone still outside the walls at the mercy of marauding Bedouin. This was the gate used by the victorious General Allenby when, on 11 December 1917, having received the Turkish surrender, he entered the city on foot.

Next to it there was a large hole in the wall, also now blocked up, made by order of Sultan Abd ul-Hamid II, so that
Kaiser Wilhelm II, dressed in shining armour, could ride into the city on a white horse in order to attend the consecration of the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer.

It was eerie because all frontiers by their nature are eerie, and because on this one there was no sign of life, except where the sun caught the field glasses of a sentry in one of the Jordanian look-out posts. It was like some gigantic filmset from which the extras had departed.

Just to the south of Allenby Square, where the Israeli houses nestled close under the walls, the little streets were either sealed off at one end or else were placarded ‘Danger!’ ‘Frontier Ahead!’ It was here that the real no-man’s-land began. It led southward down along the foot of the west wall, past David’s Tower and down to the Pool of the Sultan, rebuilt in the sixteenth century by Suleiman the Magnificent as a reservoir for rainwater on the site of an earlier pool, at which Crusaders used to water their horses.

To the west of this pool, facing the walls on the side of the valley, was the first suburb of the New Jerusalem (Yemin-Moshe, otherwise Miskenot Sha’ananim, the ‘Home of the Unworried’), the first Jewish settlement outside the walls of the Old City. Fort-like houses were built here, at the top end of the Vale of Hinnom, by the English Jewish philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore, while Palestine was still under Turkish rule, to encourage Jews to leave the confines of the Old City and create a new life outside the walls. In the alleys of Yemin-Moshe, huge-eyed children played hopscotch and tip-cat.

Above that was the Central Railway Station, terminus of the line from Tel Aviv, built by the Turks in 1892, the first railway line in the Middle East. Below it the Vale of Hinnom curled away downhill round the southern wall of the Old City; only the upper part was in Israeli territory. Above it was Mount Zion, in a salient of the frontier, close to the southwest corner of the walled city and separated from it and the Gate of Zion by a no-man’s-land of Armenian and Latin burial
grounds, to be glimpsed furtively through bullet holes in rusty iron doors.

Here, on the Mount, outside the present wall, within a labyrinth of courts, was the stone tomb of David, venerated by Muslims, too, on which rested the great silver crowns of the Torah, the Law. The work of building this last wall took five years and the Sultan Suleiman had the builder in charge put to death for omitting to include within it what was for long presumed to be, but some boring experts now say isn’t, the burial place of David. Whether it is or is not, and it would have been very difficult to persuade any practising Jew that it wasn’t, Jews still came here, grasping the railings that separated it from the rest of the small room in which it stood. During the years when they were denied access to the Wailing Wall, they used to come here to pray in large numbers.

A few years ago, in the mid-1980s, you could walk round the walls of Jerusalem on every side except the east, where the Golden Gate was, and where the Muslim burial grounds are above the Valley of the Kidron, opposite the Mount of Olives. Twenty-five years or so ago, if you had been an Arab and had exposed your noddle near the western section of the Wall, an Israeli sniper on the other side of the Hebron Road would have drilled a hole in it. The situation today again looks decidedly unpromising.

BOOK: What the Traveller Saw
10.59Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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