The Serpent of Stars

by Jean Giono

  “No, you should have said that a moment ago. I need everyone. I want to save what can be saved, but I need men. If it’s true, if you have hit them, take your chances; too bad for you, I’m keeping you here.”

  Then he asked, “And the dogs—”

  And then, along the embankment of the path where they could be seen as though it were broad daylight because of the moon’s reflection on the glaciers, we noticed the dogs running with their heads down toward the valleys.

  I returned to my boss to tell him all this and I thought of that shepherd’s “It’s as bad as that,” and it seemed to me that somehow we must have gotten ourselves into deep trouble of some very strange kind.

  I told the shepherd from Pontet what I thought.

  He pointed to the sky, but I didn’t see anything.

  “Remember when the sun set yesterday.”

  I tried to remember. Nothing.

  “You didn’t smell the sulfur?”

  “No!”

  Then I remembered that the day before I had played my flute just as the sun went down. And I picked up my flute and sniffed the holes. And then, yes, I smelled the sulfur.

  “It’s the planet,” he said.

  DAWN ARRIVED like any other. No different, except for our flock, still all clotted together like bad milk, and our dog, who could not stop trembling and wouldn’t leave my side. I went to my boss’ hut.

  “Macimin!” I cried.

  But the hut was empty. He had grabbed his blankets, shoulder bag, staff, and flask, and he had taken off. A shiver ran up my spine especially as the dog came to sniff the empty hut, looked up at me, looked at the sheep, and then took two little steps across the grass. The sheep were asleep. The dog took off, extending himself into a long gallop. Then, the sheep stood up. It was understood; they had risen and they hadn’t shaken their heads like sheep just waking up, but instead they tilted their ears to catch the whistling of the grass under the galloping feet of the dog, to trace his route. The dog stopped in his tracks; he sniffed the wind; he tried to lie low, to make his way back toward me along the lower, hidden trail. Then a huge mass of sheep, packed together belly-to-belly, rolled forward to block his path.

  I took my staff and started to run, crying, “Fédo! Fédo!” when I heard Bouscarle’s voice in my ear, “If you have hit them, too bad for you.”

  And I stayed on my hillock to watch.

  All the clots of sheep were on the move like clouds in the grass. They ran, making great circles, following a plan they cried out to one another in an entirely new kind of bleat. The panic-stricken dog was dancing about in the thick of them. Finally, they surrounded him, and he knew that his last moment had arrived. He no longer put up a fight, but I saw the sheep close in on him, engulf him, trample him, trample him to death, with the great mindfulness required of a thing that has to be done well.

  I ran toward the rocks. From there, you could look down over our whole region and then the “Vermeil” meadow and a bit of Norante. Above, I found the boss stretched out on the ground, his hat over his eyes, and fourteen of our poor men, their lips white with fear.

  Because, below, it was like a thunderstorm had struck. A stampede of running sheep filled the valleys. It tore up the fences. It seethed in beasts who leaped against our rocky hill. It ripped up the earth, and it ran in torrents as determined as rushing water. In the midst of this noise, we heard the village below sound its alarm. When night came, the boss lifted his hat. He said to us, “Count the fires.”

  We focused our eyes to count the watch fires. There were no longer any more of ours. Far off, on the mountain’s large back, there were the other herds from Arles, Crau, Camargue, Albaron. And someone said, “Master, there are the five Crau fires, the three Albaron fires, and ten for the Camargue.”

  “Watch them carefully,” the boss told him.

  He stared wide-eyed until it hurt. He stayed there a good minute, and then he cried, “Master, master, they’re going out, they’re going out, no more Albaron fires, no more fires for the Crau, no more for the Camargue. Nothing’s left, master, nothing, they’ve all gone out.”

  The boss lay down again, and covered his eyes with his hat. As though he were speaking to himself, we heard him say, “Over there, too. So, it’s the great revolt.”

  So that was what I saw, me, a little shepherd, something seen only once in a hundred years, this revolt of the beasts, on an order that came from the sky, with the smell of sulfur. This was what I saw, and this was what I did.

  I took up my flute, and I played very softly, for myself, I played this fear in my heart and the great voice of the mystery. That night, throughout the world, there was a terrible noise of sheep bleating and of bells from the church towers, of wooden houses cracking, and the cries of men, and the cries of women, and a great angry stream which hurtled down the steps of the mountains.

  Bouscarle said, ‘Play for us all.”

  Then, I took a good mouthful of air, and with all the fullness of my breath, I began to play the flute for us all.

  IT WAS getting late. Only a little meadow of sun remained up high on the hill between the evening overflowing into the valleys and the sky gleaming like new iron. We climbed toward Césaire’s. He was there in front of his clearing, his arms dangling at his sides, his hands heavy with clay. The kiln was smoking.

  In a little grass nest, the shepherd carried his sheep milk cheeses tucked in his arm.

  “I saw the sheep pass by,” said Césaire, between mouthfuls. “They made the day tremble. They poured over the whole road.”

  I spoke, too, of the herds from that morning, that great flood of animals running through the straits of Mirabeau and their stop near the fountain.

  The shepherd listened. Then he asked for the postal calendar. He looked at the card, pointing to the days with his finger. Then he said, “This is the day, or rather, the night, this is the night. Césaire, we ought to leave.”

  Césaire looked at the pale woman, the red-haired girl and the children, then me.

  “And him?” he said.

  “Him? We’ll take him along.”

  I believed we were leaving for a gathering of the shepherds. The haste with which everything had been decided, the slow advice of the white woman, “Take your coat, take along the blanket, let him have grandfather’s coat,” left me a little nervous in the end. Then the shepherd looked at the county map on the other side of the calendar and I saw his finger trace far into the white of the back country.

  Then Césaire said, “We’ll have to borrow Chabrillan’s horse, and so we’ll have to leave right away because if we don’t, the farm gates will be closed and we’ll lose more time when there’s none to spare.”

  Then I asked softly, “Are we going far?”

  “We’re going there!” said the shepherd.

  I looked at where his finger pointed. It was the Mallefougasse plateau.

  I only knew of the Mallefougasse because I had heard talk of it. All the stallholders I had kept company with before finding shelter under the thick, leafy branches of Césaire and the shepherd had spoken to me of that country at one time or another. Each time, it was the end of the world. But I especially remember Pierrinet the horse dealer, when he placed his hand sideways, half on the café table, half off it, and what he said to me, “Mallefougasse is like that. It’s still a little bit attached to the earth. Although. . . ! But, above, below, it’s all sky. It’s like something stuck out into the sky. The sky is all around that land like a sucking mouth. Do you understand?”

  I had understood then. I understood much better now. I understood that finger resting on the flimsy calendar map, Césaire who was borrowing a horse, and everything that was going to carry me, rolled in the grandfather’s coat, toward that land the sky sucked like a mouth.

  At the Chabrillans’, the gates were closed.

  “I knew it,” said Césaire, “when you’re in a hurry, it’s always like that.”

  We banged on the gate with our fists and our feet; that
set the iron chains clanging. We cried out, “Bartholomé! Bartholomé! Of all the luck! Are you going to wake up or not?”

  The farm went on sleeping, eyes shut tight. But the dogs howled in the yard.

  “All the same, we’re making a hell of a noise,” said the shepherd. “What if they aren’t there?”

  “That can’t be it,” said Césaire, “there’d have to be some disaster. They have a little girl. They wouldn’t have left her alone.”

  He bellowed once more, “Bartholomé!” and then he added hoarsely, “Christ, I’ve done in my vocal chords!”

  But this time, a little line of light shone around a closed shutter. The shutter began to open.

  “Who’s there?” demanded a woman’s voice.

  “Ah!” cried Césaire, relieved. “Is that you, Anaïs? What a lot of sleep for such a little woman! Wake up Bartholomé.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Ah, Anaïs, come on, unplug your ears. It’s Césaire from the pottery. You know who it is, Bartholomé!”

  “He isn’t here.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He went to the village!”

  “He’s crazy!”

  “No, he needed to see Pancrace, and Pancrace is only there in the evening, so he had to stay.”

  “We want you to lend us Bijou,” said Césaire, “and the cart. The three of us have to go that way, and it’s alright with your Bartholomé.”

  Anaïs remained silent for a moment, and then she said, “I don’t open the gate. I’m afraid at night, I don’t open it. Wait for Bartholomé.”

  “But we don’t have time, Anaïs. Are you crazy or what? You know very well that it’s me. You can hear me talking. What, you don’t recognize the way I talk? For goodness sake, it’s me! Once more, it’s me, Césaire, and Barberousse the shepherd, and someone from town, a friend. Come on, open up, cheese head!”

  She remained, up against her idea there in her window. She leaned with her bare arms on the bar and she answered everything Césaire said with her “yes, but . . . ,” “yes, but. . . .”

  “Yes, but, you know, there are times . . . it’s like this, it seems like a voice but it isn’t, . . . times at night, it’s the work of the devil. It seems like Césaire, and then you open up, and then. . . .”

  And Césaire was completely out of patience, pacing in circles like a mule on the threshing ground, and Barberousse was swearing into his beard, when Bartholomé arrived, carrying a lantern. The lamp gave him a shadow a kilometer long.

  “Ah!” he said, “yes.” Then, yes again, but he didn’t have the time to get his bearings. Césaire pushed him through the gate, and from there to the stable, and soon Bijou, all harnessed, arrived.

  “Close it, close it!” cried Césaire. “We only have time to leave.”

  Already two rises of land were rolling us into the great wave of hills, far from the gates where Bartholomé stood, lantern raised.

  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.

  “It 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.

  “You 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.

  “Too 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

  IN 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 flesh. Because the occupation of the masters of beasts is something like water which runs through the fingers and which cannot be held. Because that odor of suint and wool, that odor of man cooked in his own sweat, that odor of ram and goat, that odor of milk and of full ewes, that odor of nascent lambs rolled in their slime, that odor of dead beasts, that odor of herds in the high mountain summer pastures, that is life, like the brine of the great seas.

  RETURNING toward Saint-Martin-l’Eau, we saw rising out of the beauty of the sunrise the perched village of Dauphin. Césaire let us wait for him by the bridge and he took the shortcut to lead Bijou back to his stable. The shepherd went into the Largue up to his knees. He bent over the water, watching the slow life below. With his hand, he fished out a barbel round as an eggplant, and then he drew from a hole a long angry eel that flipped around his arm. Césaire came back from above with fistfuls of green peppers. At that moment, the sky was milky and the day promised to be beautiful. As we arrived at the pottery, the young sorceress arrived, too, skin and bones, covered with dust, dust packed hard on her thin legs by a long night of running. Then I understood that she had run behind our cart. We skinned the still-live eel, and the skin billowed in the wind. We put the barbel on an iron grill and, over a fire of vine shoots, it all began to cook; the eel in a fennel stock, the fish on the grill. The girl carefully basted the fish with oil.

  The sh
epherd worked a bit. He learned with a sigh that the ewe Joséphine had given birth and he went to wipe off the lamb with swabs of grass. Then he brought it to us, still all trembling, all sticky, all surprised. The smell of newborn lamb mixed with the smell of our soup, our fire, and then came the smell of the dawn, that scent of awakened earth and trees coming back to life. The sky began to moan again softly under the sun.

  We blamed all we had missed the night before on that fear-ridden Anaïs. It was that great drama of the earth that the masters of beasts put on every year, the night of the summer solstice.

  I RETURNED to Manosque by the most convenient route. The walking, my strength, the eel soup had given me heart and I rolled along the paths like a stone, but I was hungry for that great thing of the spirit and I couldn’t think of anything else. Insensible to the beautiful flower of sky, to all the hoopoes that were learning to fly around me, I went along and my thoughts, like a fledgling bird, learned to fly, too. They took off in the direction of that odor of newborn lamb.

  “No more rest!” I had written to Césaire. This is what I said to him:

  “This is what you must do, watch carefully for the date and the time for me. Try to find out, let me know exactly. Twenty opinions are better than one. Then, I put you in charge of the whole business because, you know, I am so far away from it all, I am so far from it, because, when all is said and done, I haven’t been able to completely disengage myself from the easy life, because I have a family that is used to it, because Manosque isn’t a big town, but it’s a town all the same. Do you know what I mean? I’m telling you this so that you will know that I’m putting the whole business in your hands. I know that I myself could never learn the time and date. I would have to go spend days and days in the hills and it would be exactly the moment I close my eyes when that red scarf would pass, and once more I would miss everything. Watch well and then tell me when it is close to the time. I’ll arrange to be ready day or night. Send me a message, and I’ll come up at once. Warn Anaïs and Bartholomé and, if perhaps you could get a faster horse.... Ah yes, Césaire, if only my life were like yours. To hollow out a burrow and to live there with only those you love for company. Maybe I would have had a witch daughter, too. Now, it’s too late. A hug for everyone there.”