“What a fine road it was, Monsieur Tartarin, wide and well kept, with its kilometre markers, its heaps of roadmender’s stones at regular intervals, and to right and left vinyards and pretty groves of olive trees.  Then inns every few yards, post-houses every five minutes... and my travellers!  What fine folk!...  Mayors and cures going to Nimes to see their Prefect or Bishop, honest workmen, students on holiday, peasants in embroidered smocks, all freshly shaved that morning, and up on top, all of you hat shooters, who were always in such good form and who sang so well to the stars as we returned home in the evening.

“Now it is a different story...  God knows the sort of people I carry.  A load of miscreants from goodness knows where, who infest me with vermin.  Negroes, Bedouins, rascals and adventurers from every country, colonists who stink me out with their pipes, and all of them talking a language which even our Heavenly Father couldn’t understand....  And then you see how they treat me.  Never brushed.  Never washed.  They grudge me the grease for my axles, and instead of the fine big, quiet horses which I used to have, they give me little Arab horses which have the devil in them, fighting, biting, dancing about and running like goats, breaking my shafts with kicks.  Aie!...  Aie!  They are at it again now....  And the roads!  It’s still all right here, because we are near Government House, but out there, nothing!  No road of any sort.  One goes as best one can over hill and dale through dwarf palms and mastic trees.  Not a single fixed stop.  One pulls up at wherever the guard fancies, sometimes at one farm, sometimes at another.  Sometimes this rogue takes me on a detour of two leagues just so that he can go and drink with a friend.  After that it’s ‘Whip up postillion, we must make up for lost time.’  The sun burns.  The dust chokes...  Whip!...  Whip!  We crash.  We tip over.  More whip.  We swim across rivers, we are cold, soaked and half drowned...  Whip!...  Whip!...  Whip!  Then in the evening, dripping wet... that’s good for me at my age...  I have to bed down in the yard of some caravan halt, exposed to all the winds.  At night jackals and hyenas come to sniff at my lockers and creatures which fear the dawn hide in my compartments.  That’s the life I lead, monsieur Tartarin, and I shall lead until the day when, scorched by sun and rotted by humid nights, I shall fall at some corner of this beastly road, where Arabs will boil their cous-cous on the remains of my old carcase.”

“Blidah!...  Blidah!” Shouted the guard, opening the coach door.

Chapter 25.

Indistinctly, through the steamed up windows, Tartarin could see the pretty square of a neatly laid out little township, surrounded by arcades and planted with orange trees, in the centre of which a group of soldiers was drilling in the thin, pink haze of early morning.  The cafes were taking down their shutters, in one corner a vegetable market was under way.  It was charming, but in no way did it suggest lions.  “To the south, further to the south.”  Murmured Tartarin, settling back in his corner.