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By Root 2386 0

minutes’ silent observation, Sylvie drove on, cutting inland over flat land again. Then they were stopped on a levee, and looking over the Camargue, she said. Michel would not have recognized it. The delta of the Rhone River had been a broad triangular fan of many thousands of hectares, filled by salt marshes and grass; now it was part of the Mediterranean again. The water was brown, and dotted with buildings, but it was water nevertheless, the flow of the Rhone a bluish line out there crossing the middle of it. Arles, Sylvie said, up at the tip of the fan, was a functioning seaport again. Although they were still securing the channel. Everything in the delta south of Arles, Sylvie said proudly, from Martiques in the east to Aigue-Mortes in the west, was covered by water. Aigues-Mortes was dead indeed, its industrial buildings drowned. Its port facilities, Sylvie said, were being floated and moved to Arles, or Marseilles. They were working hard to make safe navigational routes for ships; both the Carmargue and the Plaine de la Crau, farther east, had been littered with structures of all kinds, many still sticking out of the water, but not all; and the water was too opaque with silt to see into. “See, there’s the rail station— you can see the graineries, but not the out-buildings. And there’s one of the levee-banked canals. The levees are like reefs now. See the line of gray water? The levees are still breaking, when the current from the Rhone runs over them.”

“Lucky the tides aren’t big,” Michel said.

“True. If they were it would be too treacherous for ships to reach Arles.”

In the Mediterranean tides were negligible, and fishermen and coastal freighters were discovering day by day what could be safely negotiated; attempts were being made to resecure the Rhone’s main channel through the new lagoon, and to reestablish the flanking canals as well, so that boats wouldn’t have to challenge the flow of the Rhone when returning upstream. Sylvie pointed out at features Michel couldn’t see, and told him of sudden shifts of the Rhone’s channel, of ships’ groundings, loose buoys, ripped hulls, rescues by night, oil spills, confusing new lighthouses— false lighthouses, set by moonlighters for the unwary— even ordinary piracy on the high seas. Life sounded exciting at the new mouth of the Rhone.

After a while they got back in the little car, and Sylvie drove them south and east, until they hit the coast, the true coast, between Marseilles and Cassis. This part of the Mediterranean littoral, like the Côte d’Azur farther east, consisted of a range of steep hills dropping abruptly into the sea. The hills still stood well above the water, of course, and at first glance it seemed to Michel that this section of the coast had changed much less than the drowned Camargue. But after a few minutes of silent observation, he changed his mind. The Camargue had always been a delta, and now it was a delta still, and so nothing essential had changed. Here, however: “The beaches are gone.”

“Yes.”

It was only to be expected. But the beaches had been the essence of this coast, the beaches with their long tawny summers all jammed with sun-worshiping naked human animals, with swimmers and sailboats and carnival colors, and long warm thrilling nights. All that had vanished. “They’ll never come back.”

Sylvie nodded. “It’s the same everywhere,” she said matter-of-factly.

Michel looked eastward; hills dropped into the brown sea all the way to a distant horizon; it looked like he might be seeing as far as Cap Sicié. Beyond that were all the big resorts, Saint-Tropez, Cannes, Antibes, Nice, his own little Villefranche-sur-mer, and all the fashionable beach resorts in between, big and small, all drowned like the stretch under them: the sea mud brown, lapping against a fringe of pale broken rock and dead yellow trees, with the beach roads dipping into dirty white surf. Dirty surf, washing up into the streets of deserted towns.

Green trees above the new sealine tossed over whitish rock. Michel had not remembered how white the rock was. The foliage was low