Yama has the luggage already packed in the auto when I reach the hotel and we are shortly off, jumping instantly back, or rather forward, from the fourteenth to the twentieth century. Madame smiles an adieu from her seat by the door and keeps on knitting, as those women of France have ever done through sunshine and sorrow, days of happiness and days of blood. As we speed away, Jean catches sight of the Madonna high up on the mountain and heaves a great sigh, regret I suppose at the recollection of all those neglected confessions. CHAPTER III THE ROAD TO ARLES--THE CAMARGUE--RUINS OF ARLES--THE "ALISCAMPS" Leaving Aix down in her bowl in the hills with the silvery olive and flowering almond and plum trees framing her quaint old face, we roll on over the finest stretches of highway I have ever imagined. This is the level land of the mouth of the Rhone and in the next two hours we have three bits of road of ten miles each, and all as straight as a string drawn taut. What speed we seem to make; how the wind sings, and how exhilarating! The machine, a ---- of some twenty-four horse-power, makes now about forty-five miles an hour; yet we feel when one of ninety horse-power passes as though we were at a stand-still. During the morning hours our route lies through many old towns; each of which has its memories. This one of Salon holds the castle of the astrologist Nostradamus and in her church of St. Laurent he lies buried. From Salon our way leads directly west and we skim along for twenty miles through the flat land but see nothing of the Rhone until we reach and pass through Arles. Then we bring up suddenly upon its very brink with its yellow floods rolling southward at our feet. On our right are the gateways of the famous old city of Arles, but my eyes are drawn off and away across the river and out over the fantastic land of the Camargue, a land more akin to Africa than to Europe,--that great "Field of Reeds" between the two branches of the Rhone, only a few feet above the level of the sea, where the ibis, Egyptian vulture, and the flamingo are to be found. The whole is so low and so covered with salt that it glistens and glitters under the morning's sunlight, while the air quivers and shifts above it, and is full of the mirage, taking on strange forms and fantastic shapes as the eye wanders over it. [Illustration: THE PORTAL OF THE CATHEDRAL OF ST. TROPHIMUS, ARLES By permission of Messrs. Neurdein] The people out there are as wild as the cattle which roam its plains, and their manners and customs as oriental as those of the Arabs who invaded the land centuries ago, while its one town, Les Saintes-Maries, has all the characteristics of an African town of the desert, and there Mary Magdalene, Mary of Salome, and Mary the mother of James, landed to escape persecution.