When the Rhône enters that _département_ of modern France which bears the name Bouches-du-Rhône, it has already accomplished eight hundred and seventy kilometres of its torrential course, and there remain but eighty-five more before, through the many mouths of the Grand and Petit Rhône, it finally mingles the Alpine waters of its source with those of the Mediterranean. Its flow is enormous when compared with the other inland waterways of France, and, though navigable only in a small way compared to the Seine, the traffic on it from the Mediterranean to Lyons, by great towed barges and canal-boats, and between Lyons and Avignon, in the summer months, by steamboat, is, after all, considerable. Queer-looking barges and towboats, great powerful craft that will tow anything that has got an end to it, as the river folk will tell you, and “_bateaux longs_,” make up the craft which one sees as the mighty river enters Provence. The boatmen of the Rhône still call the right bank _Riaume_ (Royaume) and the left _Empi_ (Saint Empire), the names being a survival of the days when the kingdom of France controlled the traffic on one side, and the papal power, so safely ensconced for seventy years at Avignon, on the other. The fall of the Rhône, which is the principal cause of its rapid current, averages something over six hundred millimetres to the kilometre until it reaches Avignon, when, for the rest of its course, considerably under a hundred kilometres, the fall is but twenty metres, something like sixty-five feet. This state of affairs has given rise to a remarkable alluvial development, so that the plains of the Crau and the Camargue, and the lowlands of the estuary, appear like “made land” to all who have ever seen them. There is an appreciable growth of stunted trees and bushes and what not, but the barrenness of the Camargue has not sensibly changed in centuries, and it remains still not unlike a desert patch of Far-Western America. Wiry grass, and another variety particularly suited to the raising and grazing of live stock, has kept the region from being one of absolute poverty; but, unless one is interested in raising little horses (who look as though they might be related to the broncos of the Western plains), or beef or mutton, he will have no excuse for ever coming to the Camargue to settle. These little half-savage horses of the Camargue are thought to be the descendants of those brought from the Orient in ages past, and they probably are, for the Saracens were for long masters of the _pays_. The difference between the Camargue and the Crau is that the former has an almost entire absence of those cairns of pebbles which make the Crau look like a pagan cemetery.