The Mas-de-Giraud is an old farm of the Lords of Barbentane, and we went in to await the keeper appointed to come and meet us. In the main kitchen, all the farm hands, ploughmen, winegrowers, and shepherds are sitting at the table, solemnly, silently, and slowly eating their meal and being served by the women who have to wait to eat until the men are finished. Presently the keeper arrives with the cart. He is a real Fennimore-Cooper type, a trapper on land and water, fish-warden, and gamekeeper, known locally as the Stalker, because he can always be found in the morning mists or at nightfall stalking amongst the reeds, or stock still in his small boat watching over his keep nets on the open water and the irrigation channels. It may be this work of perpetual lookout that makes him so silent and focussed. And yet, as the cart full of rifles and baskets trundles along in front of us, he gives us news of the hunt, the number of over-flights, and the location where the birds of passage have been brought down. As he talks, he melts into the landscape. The cultivated earth gives way to the true, untamed Camargue, amongst the pasture and the marshland, and the irrigation channels shine in amongst the goose-foot plants as far as the eye can see. Bunches of tamarisks and reeds form little islands on a calm sea. There are no tall trees; the immense evenness of the plain is unbroken. The animal sheds have roofs that slope down almost to ground level. The roaming flocks, lying in the salt grass or making their way as they nuzzle around the shepherd's red cape, don't disturb the landscape's regular flow, dwarfed, as they are, by the endless space of blue horizons and open sky. Just as a rough sea is still the sea, so a sense of solitude and immensity emerges, heightened by the relentless mistral, which, with its powerful breath, seems to flatten yet enlarge the landscape. Everything bows down before it. The smallest shrubs bear the imprint of its passage, and stay twisted and bent over southwards in an attitude of perpetual flight.... II THE SHACK. The roof and walls consist of dried, yellowing, reeds. This is the shack, which is to be our meeting place for the hunt. A not untypical house of the Camargue, it has a single, vast, high room with no window, getting its daylight through a glass door kept fully shuttered at night. All along the huge, rendered, whitewashed walls, the gun-rack waits for the rifles, the game bags, and the wading boots. At the back, five or six bunks are placed round an actual boat mast which is stepped into the soil and reaches the roof which it supports. During the night, while the mistral is blowing and the house is creaking everywhere, the distant sea seems nearer than it is, its sound carried by the freshening wind, and gives us the impression of being in a boat's cabin.