AN ASCENT OF MONT VENTOUX

The Hunting Wasps by Jean-Henri Fabre, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. AN ASCENT OF MONT VENTOUX

Chapter XI. AN ASCENT OF MONT VENTOUX

Thanks to its isolated position, which leaves it freely exposed on every side to atmospheric influence; thanks also to its height, which makes it the topmost point of France within the frontiers of either the Alps or Pyrenees, our bare Provençal mountain, Mont Ventoux, lends itself remarkably well to the study of the climatic distribution of plants. At its base the tender olive thrives, with all that multitude of semiligneous plants, such as the thyme, whose aromatic fragrance calls for the sun of the Mediterranean regions; on the summit, mantled with snow for at least half the year, the ground is covered with a northern flora, borrowed to some extent from arctic shores. Half a day’s journey in an upward direction brings before our eyes a succession of the chief vegetable types which we should find in the course of a long voyage from south to north along the same meridian. At the start, your feet tread the scented tufts of the thyme that forms a continuous carpet on the lower slopes; in a few hours they will be treading the dark hassocks of the opposite-leaved saxifrage, the first plant to greet the botanist who lands on the coast of Spitzbergen in July. Below, in the hedges, you have picked the scarlet flowers of the pomegranate, a lover of African skies; above you will pick a shaggy little poppy, which shelters its stalks under a coverlet of tiny fragments of stone and unfolds its spreading yellow corolla as readily in the icy solitudes of Greenland and the North Cape as on the upper slopes of the Ventoux.

These contrasts have always something fresh and stimulating about them; and, after twenty-five ascents, they still retain their interest for me. I made my twenty-third in August 1865. There were eight of us: three whose chief object was to botanize and five attracted by a mountain expedition and the panorama of the heights. Not one of our five companions who were not interested in the study of plants has since expressed a desire to accompany me a second time. The fact is that the climb is a hard and tiring one; and the sight of a sunrise does not make up for the fatigue endured.

One might best compare the Ventoux with a heap of stones broken up for road-mending purposes. Raise this heap suddenly to a height of a mile and a quarter, increase its base in proportion, cover the white of the limestone with the black patch of the forests, and you have a clear idea of the general aspect of the mountain. This accumulation of rubbish—sometimes small chips, sometimes huge blocks—rises from the plain without preliminary slopes or successive terraces that would render the ascent less arduous by dividing it into stages. The climb begins at once by rocky paths, the best of which is worse than the surface of a road newly strewn with stones, and continues, becoming ever rougher and rougher, right to the summit, the height of which is 6270 feet. Greenswards, babbling brooks, the spacious shade of venerable trees, all the things, in short, that lend such charm to other mountains, are here unknown and are replaced by an interminable bed of limestone broken into scales, which slip under our feet with a sharp, almost metallic ‘click.’ By way of cascades the Ventoux has rills of stones; the rattle of falling rocks takes the place of the whispering waters.

We are at Bédoin, at the foot of the mountain. The arrangements with the guide have been made, the hour of the start fixed; the provisions are being talked over and got ready. Let us try to rest, for we shall have to spend a sleepless night on the mountain to-morrow. But sleeping is just the difficulty; I have never managed it and that is where the chief cause of fatigue lies. I would therefore advise those of my readers who think of making a botanizing ascent of the Ventoux not to arrive at Bédoin on a Sunday evening. They will thus avoid the noisy bustle of an inn with a café attached to it, those endless loud-voiced conversations, those echoing cannons of the billiard-balls, the ringing of glasses, the drinking-songs, the ditties of nocturnal wayfarers, the bellowing of the brass band at the ball hard by, and the other tribulations inseparable from this blessed day of idleness and jollification. Will they obtain a better rest on a week-day? I hope so, but I do not guarantee it. For my part, I did not close an eye. All night long, the rusty spit, working to provide us with food, creaked and groaned under my bedroom. A thin board was all that separated me from that machine of the devil.

But already the sky is growing light. A donkey brays beneath the windows. It is time to get up. We might as well not have gone to bed. Foodstuffs and baggage are strapped on; and, with a ‘Ja! Hi!’ from the guide, we are off. It is four o’clock in the morning. At the head of the caravan walks Triboulet, with his Mule and his Ass: Triboulet, the Nestor of the Ventoux guides. My botanical colleagues inspect the vegetation on either side of the road by the cold light of the dawn; the others talk. I follow the party with a barometer slung from my shoulder and a note-book and pencil in my hand.

My barometer, intended for taking the altitude of the principal botanical halts, soon becomes a pretext for attacks on the gourd with the rum. No sooner is a noteworthy plant observed than somebody cries:

‘Quick, let’s look at the barometer!’

And we all crowd around the gourd, the scientific instrument coming later. The coolness of the morning and our walk make us appreciate these references to the barometer so thoroughly that the level of the stimulant falls even more swiftly than that of the mercury. In the interests of the immediate future, I must consult Torricelli’s tube a little less often.

As the temperature grows too cold for them, first the oak and the ilex disappear by degrees; then the vine and the almond-tree; and next the mulberry, the walnut-tree and the white oak. Box becomes plentiful. We enter upon a monotonous region extending from the end of the cultivated fields to the lower boundary of the beech-woods, where the predominant plant is Satureia montana, the winter savory, known here by its popular name of pébré d’asé, Ass’s pepper, because of the acrid flavour of its tiny leaves, impregnated with essential oil. Certain small cheeses forming part of our stores are powdered with this strong spice. Already more than one of us is biting into them in imagination and casting hungry glances at the provision-bags carried by the Mule. Our hard morning exercise has brought appetite and more than appetite, a devouring hunger, what Horace calls latrans stomachus. I teach my colleagues how to stay this rumbling stomach until they reach the next halt; I show them a little sorrel-plant, with arrow-head leaves, the Rumex scutatus, or French sorrel; and, practising what I preach, I pick a mouthful. At first they laugh at my suggestion. I let them laugh and soon see them all occupied, each more eagerly than his fellow, in plucking the precious sorrel.

While chewing the bitter leaves, we come to the beeches. These are first big, solitary bushes, trailing on the ground; soon after, dwarf trees, clustering close together; and, finally, mighty trunks, forming a dense and gloomy forest, whose soil is a mass of rough limestone blocks. Bowed down in winter by the weight of the snow, battered all the year round by the fierce gusts of the mistral, many of the trees have lost their branches and are twisted into grotesque positions, or even lie flat on the ground. An hour or more is spent in crossing this wooded zone, which from a distance shows against the sides of the Ventoux like a black belt. Then once more the beeches become bushy and scattered. We have reached their upper boundary and, to the great relief of all of us, despite the sorrel-leaves, we have also reached the stopping-place selected for our lunch.

We are at the source of the Grave, a slender stream of water caught, as it bubbles from the ground, in a series of long beech-trunk troughs, where the mountain shepherds come to water their flocks. The temperature of the spring is 45° F.; and its coolness is a priceless boon for us who have come from the sultry oven of the plain. The cloth is spread on a charming carpet of Alpine plants, with glittering among them the thyme-leaved paronychia, whose wide, thin bracts look like silver scales. The food is taken out of the bags, the bottles extracted from their bed of hay. On this side are the joints, the legs of mutton stuffed with garlic, the stacks of loaves; on that, the tasteless chickens, for our grinders to toy with presently, when the edge has been taken off our appetite. At no great distance, set in a place of honour, are the Ventoux cheeses spiced with winter savory, the little pébré d’asé cheeses, flanked by Aries sausages, whose pink flesh is mottled with cubes of bacon and whole pepper-corns. Over here, in this corner, are green olives still dripping with brine and black olives soaking in oil; in that other, Cavaillon melons, some white, some orange, to suit every taste; and, down there, a jar of anchovies which make you drink hard and so keep your strength up. Lastly, the bottles are cooling in the ice-cold water of the trough over there. Have we forgotten anything? Yes, we have not mentioned the crowning side-dish, the onions, to be eaten raw with salt. Our two Parisians—for we have two among us, my fellow-botanists—are at first a little startled by this very invigorating bill of fare; soon they will be the first to burst into praises. Are we all ready? Then let us sit down.

And now begins one of those Homeric repasts which mark red-letter days in one’s life. The first mouthfuls are almost frenzied. Slices of mutton and chunks of bread follow one another with alarming rapidity. Each of us, without communicating his apprehensions to the others, casts an anxious glance at the victuals and asks himself:

‘If this is the way we are going on, shall we have enough for to-night and to-morrow?’

However, the craving is allayed; we began by devouring in silence, we now eat and talk. Our apprehensions for the morrow are likewise relieved; and we give due credit to the man who ordered the menu, who foresaw this hunger-fit and who arranged to cope with it worthily. The time has come for us to appreciate the victuals as connoisseurs. One praises the olives, stabbing them one by one with the point of his knife; another lauds the anchovies as he cuts up the little ochre-coloured fishes on his bread; a third waxes enthusiastic about the sausage; and all with one accord extol the pébré d’asé cheeses, no larger than the palm of a man’s hand. Pipes and cigars are lit; and we stretch ourselves on our backs in the grass, with the sun shining down upon us.

An hour’s rest and we are off again, for time presses. The guide with the baggage will go alone, towards the west, skirting the edge of the woods, which has a Mule-path. He will wait for us at the Jas, or Bâtiment, on the upper boundary of the beeches, some 5000 feet above the level of the sea. The Jas is a large stone hut, which is to shelter us, man and beast, to-night. As for us, we continue the ascent to the ridge, by following which we shall reach the highest peak more easily. From the top, after sunset, we shall go down to the Jas, where the guide will have arrived long before us. This is the plan proposed and adopted.

We reach the crested ridge. On the south, the comparatively easy slopes which we have just climbed stretch as far as the eye can see; on the north, the scene is full of wild grandeur: the mountain, sometimes hewn perpendicularly, sometimes carved into rough steps, alarmingly steep, is little else than a sheer precipice a mile high. If you throw a stone, it never stops, but falls from rock to rock until it reaches the bottom of the valley, where you can distinguish the bed of the Toulourenc looking like a ribbon. While my companions loosen masses of rock and send them rolling into the abyss so that they may watch the frightful fall, I discover under a broad flat stone one of my old insect acquaintances, the Hairy Ammophila, whom I had always met by herself on the roadside banks in the plain, whereas here, almost at the top of the Ventoux, I find her to the number of several hundreds heaped up under one and the same shelter.

I was beginning to investigate the reasons for this agglomeration, when the southerly breeze, which already during the morning had inspired us with a few vague fears, suddenly brought up a cohort of clouds which melted into rain. Before we knew it, we were shrouded in a thick, drizzling mist, which prevented us from seeing two yards in front of us. By an unfortunate coincidence, one of us, my good friend Delacour, had strayed aside in search of Euphorbia saxitalis, one of the botanical curiosities of these heights. Making a speaking-trumpet of our hands, we shouted as one man. No answer came. Our voices were lost in the flaky thickness and the dull sound of the whirling mist. As the wanderer could not hear us, we had to look for him. In the darkness it was impossible to see one another at a distance of two or three yards; and I was the only one of the seven to know the locality. So that nobody might be left in the lurch, we took hands and I placed myself at the head of the chain. For some minutes we played a regular game of blind-man’s-buff, leading to nothing. No doubt, on seeing the clouds drift up, Delacour, who knew the Ventoux, had taken advantage of the last gleams of light to hasten to the shelter of the Jas. We resolved to make for it ourselves as quickly as possible, for already our clothes were streaming with rain inside as well as out. Our white-duck trousers were sticking to us like a second skin.

A serious difficulty arose: the hurrying backwards and forwards, the twisting and turning, while we looked about us, had reduced me to the plight of a person whose eyes are bandaged and who is then made to spin round on his heels. I had lost all sense of direction; I had not the least idea which was the southern slope. I questioned this man and that; opinions were divided and most uncertain. The upshot was that not one of us could say where the north lay and where the south. Never in all my life had I realized the value of the points of the compass as I did at that moment. All around us was the mystery of the grey haze; beneath our feet we could just make out the beginning of a slope here and a slope there. But which was the right one? We had to make a choice and to launch out boldly. If, by bad luck, we went down the northern slope, we risked breaking our bones over the precipices the sight of which had but now filled us with dread. Perhaps not one of us would survive it. I passed a few minutes of acute perplexity.

‘Let’s stay here,’ said the majority, ‘and wait till the rain stops.’

‘That’s bad advice,’ replied the others, of whom I was one, ‘that’s bad advice: the rain may last a long while; and, wet through as we are, we shall freeze on the spot at the first chill of night.’

My worthy friend Bernard Verlot, who had come from the Paris Jardin des Plantes on purpose to climb the Ventoux in my company, displayed an imperturbable calmness, trusting to my good sense to get us out of our scrape. I drew him a little to one side, in order not to increase the panic of the others, and revealed my terrible fears to him. We held a council of two and tried to make up by the compass of reasoning for the absence of the magnetic needle.

‘When the clouds came,’ I asked him, ‘wasn’t it from the south?’

‘From the south, certainly.’

‘And, though one could hardly perceive the wind, the rain slanted slightly from south to north?’

‘Yes, I noticed that as long as I could see anything. Isn’t that enough to tell us the way? Let us go down on the side from which the rain comes.’

‘I thought of that, but I have my doubts. The wind is not strong enough to have a definite direction. It may be an eddying breeze, as happens on a mountain-top surrounded by clouds. There is nothing to tell me that the direction is still the same and that the wind is not now blowing from the north.’

‘I have my doubts also. Then what shall we do?’

‘What shall we do? That’s the difficulty! But look here: if the wind has not changed, we ought to be wetter on the left, because we got the rain on that side until we lost our bearings. If it has changed, we must be more or less equally wet all over. Let us feel ourselves and decide. Will that do?’

‘Yes.’

‘And suppose I’m wrong?’

‘You’re not wrong.’

The matter was explained to our companions in a few words. All felt themselves, not outside, which would not have been enough, but right inside their underclothing, and it was with unspeakable relief that I heard them unanimously declare their left side to be much wetter than the right. The wind had not changed. All was well; and we determined to go towards the rain. The chain was formed once more, with myself at the head and Verlot in the rear, so as to leave no stragglers behind. Before starting, I asked my friend, for the last time:

‘Well, shall we risk it?’

‘Yes, let’s risk it; I’ll follow you.’

And we plunged blindly into the formidable unknown.

We had not taken twenty strides, twenty of those strides which one is not able to control on a steep slope, before all fear of danger was over. Under our feet was not the empty space of the abyss but the longed-for ground, the ground covered with small stones, which rolled down in long torrents. To all of us, this rattling sound, denoting a firm footing, was heavenly music. In a few minutes we reached the upper edge of the beeches. Here the darkness was even greater than at the top of the mountain: we had to stoop to the ground to see where we were walking. How, in the gloom, were we to find the Jas, buried away in the dense wood? Two plants, the assiduous haunters of places frequented by man—the Chenopodium bonus-Henricus, or good-king-Henry, and the common nettle—served me as a clue. I swept my free hand through the air as I went along. Each sting that I felt told me of a nettle, in other words, a landmark. Verlot, in the rear, also lunged about as best he could and let smarting stings make up for the lack of vision. Our companions had but little faith in this style of reconnoitring. They spoke of continuing the furious descent, of going back, if necessary, all the way to Bédoin. Verlot, more trustful of the botanical insight with which he himself was so richly endowed, joined me in pursuing our search, in reassuring the more demoralized and in showing them that it was possible, by questioning the plants with our hands, to reach [211]our night’s lodging in spite of the darkness. They gave way to our arguments; and, not long after, pressing on from one clump of nettles to another, our party arrived at the Jas.

There we found Delacour, as well as the guide with our luggage, sheltered betimes from the rain. A blazing fire and a change of clothes soon restored our wonted cheerfulness. A block of snow, brought from the valley near by, was hung in a bag in front of the hearth. A bottle caught the water as the snow melted: this was the cistern for our evening meal. And the night was spent on a bed of beech-leaves, rubbed into powder by our predecessors; and they were numerous. Who knows how many years had passed since that mattress, now a vegetable mould, was last renewed!

Those who could not sleep were told off to keep up the fire. There was no lack of hands to stir it, for the smoke, which had no other outlet than a large hole made by the partial collapse of the roof, filled the hut with an atmosphere fit to smoke herrings. To obtain a few mouthfuls of breathable air, we had to seek them in the lower strata, with our noses almost on the ground. And so we coughed and cursed and poked the fire, but vainly tried to sleep. We were all afoot by two o’clock in the morning, ready to climb the highest cone and watch the sunrise. The rain had stopped, the sky was glorious, promising a perfect day.

During the ascent some of us felt a sort of seasickness, caused first by fatigue and secondly by the rarefaction of the air. The barometer had fallen 5·4 inches; the air which we were breathing had lost a fifth of its density and was therefore one-fifth less rich in oxygen. Had we been in good condition, this slight alteration in the air would have passed unnoticed; but, coming immediately after the exertions of the day before and a sleepless night, it increased our discomfort. And so we climbed slowly, with aching legs and panting chests. More than one of us had to stop and rest after every twentieth step.

At last we were there. We took refuge in the rustic chapel of Sainte-Croix to take breath and counteract the nipping morning air by a pull at the gourd, which this time was drained to the last drop. Soon the sun rose. Ventoux projected to the extreme limits of the horizon its triangular shadow, whose sides became brightly tinged with violet by the effect of the diffracted rays. To the south and west stretched misty plains, where, when the sun was higher in the heavens, we should be able to make out the Rhône, looking like a silver thread. On the north and east, under our feet, lay an enormous bank of clouds, a sort of ocean of cotton-wool, whence peeped, like islands of slag, the dark summits of the lower mountains. A few tops, with their trailing glaciers, gleamed in the direction of the Alps.

But botany called our attention and we had to tear ourselves from this magic spectacle. The time of our ascent, in August, was a little late in the year; many plants were no longer in flower. Would you do some really fruitful herborizing? Be there in the first fortnight of July; above all, be ahead of the grazing herds: where the Sheep has browsed you will gather none but wretched leavings. While still spared by the hungry flocks, the top of the Ventoux in July is a literal bed of flowers; its loose stony surface is studded with them. My memory recalls, all streaming with the morning dew, those elegant tufts of Androsace villosa, with its pink-centred white blooms; the Mont-Cenis violet, spreading its great blue blossoms over the chips of limestone; the spikenard valerian, which blends the sweet perfume of its flowers with the offensive odour of its roots; the wedge-leaved globularia, forming close carpets of bright green dotted with blue capitula; the Alpine forget-me-not, whose blue rivals that of the skies; the Candolla candytuft, whose tiny stalk bears a dense head of little white flowers and goes winding among the loose stones; the opposite-leaved saxifrage and the musky saxifrage, both of them packed into little dark cushions, studded in the first case with purple flowers and in the second with white flowers washed with yellow. When the sun’s rays are hotter, we shall see fluttering idly from one tuft of blossom to another a magnificent Butterfly with white wings adorned with four bright-crimson spots, surrounded with black. ’Tis Parnassius Apollo, the beautiful occupant of the Alpine solitudes, near the eternal snows. Her caterpillar lives on the saxifrages.

Here let us end this sketch of the sweet joys that await the naturalist on the summit of Mont Ventoux and return to the Hairy Ammophila, who was lurking yesterday in her legions under the shelter of a stone when the misty rain came and enshrouded us.

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