However, one must not attribute a monopoly of the power of evolving such visions to the Field of Pebbles, for the author goes on to relate how in after years, one of his boys, while picking gooseberries, "saw a little man of his own height with a peaked cap, red jacket, and green breeches."
Moreover, strange to say, the same thing happened to his wife when a girl of thirteen, so that one cannot account for the marvel by heredity, that convenient explanation of mysteries. Sun on the head, the author supposes, must have caused all these experiences.
"But why," he adds, "should the sun on the head superinduce a vision of Kobolds? Is it because other people have suffered from the sun that the fables of little men, brownies, pixies, gnomes, fairies, is to be found everywhere? Or--is it possible that there is such a little creature only visible to man when he is subject to certain influences?"
[Illustration: ON THE VERGE OF LA CRAU. _By E. M. Synge._]
We first approached this forsaken region in the train, when the sun was beginning to get low, and wonderful tragic lights were showing along the western horizon. The olives and the pleasant farmsteads had been left behind, and we found ourselves rushing on through the evening glow into a limitless desolation. And suddenly there flashed past close to the train a tall, dark shadow and a little station, and then another shadow and another, till presently the shadow grew continuous except for recurrent flashes of light, pulsing steadily as the train raced on; and we found that the line was bordered on one side with an immense wall of cypresses, and between their trunks one caught glimpses of the white wilderness beyond. For miles this sombre rampart runs on and on beside the line protecting it from the mistral which sweeps with terrible violence across these huge spaces. The stones are described by many writers as gigantic, but they look not more than about a foot in diameter in this southern part of the plain, and in the neighbourhood of St. Martin-en-Crau they appear rather smaller and of extraordinary uniformity of size and shape.
But not only is the eye amazed by this tremendous extent of water-worn stones (there are really two other lesser Craus beside the Crau d'Arles): the imagination is startled by the extraordinary depth of this strange deposit, an average of from ten to fifteen metres; that is at the lowest estimate over thirty feet, and at the highest forty-five feet.