Keeping to the edge of the plain, the road goes eastwards to Lunel, which stands in the great vine-growing plain. In the Place de la Liberté one may see a small facsimile of the New York statue of Liberty by Bartholdi. The church is Romanesque in part. From Lunel a détour of a most profitable character may be made to Aigues-Mortes (meaning ‘stagnant waters’), one of the dead ports of that blighted land called the Carmargue. The road passes through Marsillargues and St. Laurent-l’Aigouze, and for the last three kilometres runs parallel with the Beaucaire Canal, which has to some extent reanimated the ancient walled town from which St. Louis embarked for the Holy Land in 1248 and 1270. The lofty walls and square towers, without any machicolation to relieve their grim strength, were built by Philippe-le-Hardi, and are said to have been copied from Ascalon, in Syria, even as the Château Gaillard was based on the experience Richard I. gained in the Holy Land. It was the Crusades that seem to have brought the town into being, and, like everything connected with those unsuccessful efforts to roll back the Mohammedan power, Aigues-Mortes, being surrounded by fever-producing swamps, was doomed to failure from the first day St. Louis founded it. But the constant depletion of the population in the past--at the rate, it is said, of five or six a day in the spring out of a population of 1,500--has given the modern antiquary a walled medieval town only comparable to Carcassonne and Avignon, and in some respects of greater interest than either. [Illustration: No. 17. MONTPELLIER TO AIX-EN-PROVENCE.] From Lunel to Nîmes the country is a vast vineyard, with here and there an Aleppo or an umbrella pine or a few olives. NÎMES To the tourist who has never seen Roman remains outside a museum, or has only looked dully at a few foundations of Roman walls _in situ_, Nîmes brings the reality of Rome’s power before his eyes with such overwhelming vividness that he begins to forget the remoteness of the civilization which raised these enduring monuments. That the vast amphitheatre, the perfect temple to Caius and Lucius Cæsar, the gateway called the Porte d’Auguste, the complete aqueduct known as the Pont-du-Gard, and the Roman tower, 90 feet high, called the =Tour Magne=, date from the early years of the Christian era, or even before the birth of Christ, seems at first easy to grasp. But these structures stand so imposingly among the buildings of 2,000 years later which have grown up around them that there comes in time a feeling almost of incredulity. Perhaps some clever French architects have done most of the building, one thinks; but a glance at the stonework of any of these great works shows that the restoration that has taken place has been of a trifling character, the main work in the case of the arena having been the clearing away of the later accretions which were hiding the Roman fabric.