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But that is not all: the wash of the sea, its current settling west, and carrying with it the mud of the Rhone is gradually, but surely building up a fifth bar or bank, which will in time close the gulf from the point of Espignette to the bathing-place of Palavas, when the Gulf of Aigues Mortes will be converted into a second Etang de Berre.
To the Pierre Percée we went accordingly, and found it nothing but a common tunnel cut in a neighbouring rock, to draw off the waters of the Durance when swoln with avalanches, from the vale of Avignon, and supply a canal communicating with the Etang de Berre.
It was wonderful there, and strangely, almost terribly still. Once the sea had washed the feet of the cliff, dim ages ago. Now my eyes had to travel far to the Mediterranean, where Marseilles gloomed dark against the burnished glimmer of the water. I could see the Etang de Berre, too, and imagine I saw the Aurelian Way, and gloomy old Aigues-Mortes, which we were to visit later.
I tore myself, however, from all these rejoicings, which bored me very much, to go and see the haven of Bouc, the Martigues, and the pool of Berre, where but very little is required to complete a matchless piece of Nature's work and turn it into the finest port in the whole world I was deeply interested in all I saw, in company with Admiral Baudin and engineers, both military and naval, who had brought all the plans with them.
On leaving Marseilles by train for Arles, the line cuts through the limestone ridge of the Estaque, and the traveller passes from the basin of Marseilles into the much more extensive basin of Berre, surrounded by hills on all sides, a wide bowl like a volcanic crater, with the great inland salt lake of the Etang de Berre occupying its depths.
There was Port le Bouc, the Mediterranean harbour of the Etang, or watergate to fairyland, as Martigues was the door; Istre on its proud little height; Miramas and Berre, important in their own eyes, and pretty in all others when reflected in the glassy surface of blue water.
Within an easy run was a spot loved by artists, and beginning to be talked about Martigues on the Etang de Berre, a salt lake not far from Marseilles said to be picturesque. The Prince of Monaco was fond of motoring down that way. At the sound of a princely name her ladyship's mind made itself up with a snap.
What is now a great convexity thrust into the Mediterranean, perpetually gaining ground on the sea, was at the commencement of the present geologic epoch a great bay, and the waves of the Mediterranean broke against the cliffs of les Monts Garrigues, at Lodeve, the heights of Nimes and Beaucaire, against the limestone crags of the Alpines, and swirled against that calcareous spur that now separates the lagoon of Berre from the desert of la Crau.
Every traveller who goes to the Riviera, the old Ligurian shore, knows, but knows only by a passing glance, the Etang de Berre, that inland sea, blue as a sapphire, waveless, girt about by white hills, and perhaps he wonders that Toulon should have been selected as a naval port, when there was this one, deeper, and excavated by Nature to serve as a harbour.
Among his flowers, intelligently assisted by old Michel, he worked with a zeal bred of his affection for them; and after his workings, when the cool of evening was come, smoked his pipe refreshingly while seated on the vine-bowered estrade before his trim villa on the crest of the slope: the while sniffing with a just interest at the fumes of old Marthe's cookings, and placidly delighting in the ever-new beauties of the sunsets above the distant mountains and their near-by reflected beauties in the waters of the Étang de Berre.
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