The country was now all brown and green; and, surfeited with beauty, it seemed to me that here was nothing great.  We sped through Aspres; through Serres, on its rocky promontory; and on through Laragne, whose ancient inn with the sign of a spider gave a name to the town.  Pointed brown-green mountains were crowned with pointed green-brown ruins, hoary after much history-making; and at the pointed mountains’ brown-green feet those avant-courriers of the South, almond trees, had sat down to rest on their way home.

Still we flew on; but at Sisteron Jack slowed down the motor.  Here was something too curious for even spoiled sightseers to pass in a hurry.

The town struggled hardily up one side of a gorge, deep and steep, where the Durance has forced its patient way through a huge barrier of rock whose tilted strata correspond curiously on both sides of the stream.  Driving down to the low bridge across the river, we gazed up at the town piled high above our heads, culminating in a fortress which, cut in a dark square out of the sky’s turquoise, looked old as the beginning of the world.

Sisteron was brown, too, but not at all green; and beyond, for a time, the country was still in a grim brown study, though it ought to have remembered that it was now laughing Provence.  It gave us crumbling chateaux, high-perched ancient rock villages without stint, and even a house (in the strangely named village of Malijai) where Napoleon had lain, early in the Hundred Days; but not a smile or a wild flower.  Then, in a flash, its mood changed.  The savage land had been tamed by some whispered word of Mother Nature, and grew youthfully pretty under our eyes.  The poplars, in their autumn cloaks of gold, fringed the road with flame, and scattered largesse of red copper filings in our path; the dark mountains drew up over their bare shoulders scarfs of crimson, and the sun flung a million diamonds into the wide bed of the Durance.

Night was falling as we drove into the lazy-looking Provencal town of Digne, where all was green and sleepy, at peace with itself and the world at large.  Even the beautiful Doric chateau d’eau was green with moss, and the water of its fountain laughed in sleep; the famous basilica showed grey through green lichen; its wonderful rose window had a green frame of ivy, and the strange, sculptured beasts guarding the door had saddles of green velvet mould.

We slept at Digne, and made an early morning start, the car plunging us almost from the first into scenery which only Gustave Dore could have imagined.  Gnome villages and elfin castles clung to slim pinnacles of rock which seemed to swing, like blown branches, against the sky.  Wild grey mountains bristled with rocky spines, and trails of scarlet foliage poured like streams of blood down their rough sides, completing the resemblance to fierce, wounded boars.