The Serpent of Stars by Jean Giono Read Free Book Online Page A

were rolling us into the great wave of hills, far from the gates where Bartholomé stood, lantern raised.
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    IT MIGHT have been eleven o’clock at night judging from the Reillanne church tower bells, but it was hard to tell because of the wind and especially because of the swinging wagon, creaking and groaning in the hard waves of the earth.
    Then we entered the great Sans-Bois wilderness and the stars leaned down right to its slatted sides.
    â€œIt will take us three hours,” said the shepherd.
    Our pilot was Césaire. He looked at the sky to find the path. The stars, it seemed, marked it.

    â€œYou see,” he said, “we are going to pass between that one and that one.”
    Then he pulled on the bit a few times to wake up Bijou who was fast asleep.
    We went down into the depths of the earth, as if into whirlpools. We heard jaws closing over the emptiness of our wake, or we rose again to the fragile and trembling summit of a hill in all the muted noise of the stars.
    At other times, a wide flat stretch carried us along without dip or rise; coasting smoothly, we glided over a plateau. Bijou’s big hoofs lapped the sand. Then it seemed to us that over there, in front of us, other vessels sped along. Then we saw they were immobile, as if anchored. The pilot pulled on the leather helm and we skimmed past huge rustling chestnut trees like reefs. The night frothed under such flights and frolics, and the heavy swimming of boars ripped apart the juniper bushes. On our vessel, there were three of us. Césaire, who was looking for the path of stars, and Barberousse, who didn’t say a word, and me. Ever since I had felt the heaving breath of the earth under the boat, I was as lost as a kitten and I hung for dear life onto Césaire’s velour jacket.
    We reached the great slope. Barberousse let out a cry. Césaire used all his strength to come to a stop. All three of us stood up on the trembling boards of the cart.
    As far as the eye could see, the plateau descended toward the distant chasm of the Durance. There were so many stars overhead that in the gray light, you could make out the short spray of the heather and lavender, and below, very far away and very much lower, the scaly skin of the Durance.

    â€œToo late,” cried Barberousse.
    He pointed out to us, off in the distance, four large squat fires which were no longer anything but coals. The whole great slope of the plateau flowed with herds. You didn’t see them, you heard the noise of their cascade, and the shepherds’ whistles, and the swaying of the lanterns that they rocked slowly in the night to give the sheep a rhythm to walk by. The alpine roads already sounded like streams. Too late! The shepherds were leaving.
    Ahead of us, a great land had just been swallowed up as if by the sea.

III

    I N THE PRECEDING PAGES, YOU WILL have found an obsession with water and the sea. That’s because a herd is a liquid thing, a marine thing.
    From Crau to the Alpe, there are only dry rivers, streams which transport cicadas and lizards. The herds climb into the thorns and the furnaces of dust. Yes, but this flood grating the ground with its belly, this wool, this deep, monotonous noise, it all gives the shepherds souls that possess the resonant movement and weight of the sea.
    Summer days on the mountain plateaus, the shepherd stretches out in the grass with his face to the sky. The clouds have a life of seaweed and algae, blooming grasses in the breasts of the wave like fountains of milk in the breasts of women. Sometimes, when the expanse is all blue, after the north wind passes, a little white sail still makes its way in the high winds toward the horizon’s distant ports.

    Finally, this love shepherds have for water and the sea, this obsession which, up there, on the high ground, makes them speak of pilots, helms, sails, waves, sand, spray, flight, swimming, gulfs, and depths, this great affinity is traced deep in their