A RIVIERA BATTLE

Greymouth Evening Star, 16 November 1934, Page 12

A RIVIERA BATTLE

STRUGGLERS WHO GIVE UP, I took a fried up into the mountains to-day to sco a “lost world” of the Riviera, tho very existence of which does not seem to be suspected by the foreigners along the Cote d’Azur, says a writer in the “Manchester Guardian.” This extreme south-eastern corner of France was ceded to her by theltalians within the memory of old inhabitants still living. Feudal warfare has raged over it sporadically since the dawn of history. The Saracens and the Genoese, the men of Piedmont and the men of Provence, the sturdy, stocky little fellows of the tiny republics of Moiiaco, Roquebrune, and Menton, the vassals of the Counts of Ventimiglia, and the Grimaldi Princes have growled and wrangled and fought and bit and scratched over every mile of it. Pirate bands from Algiers have raided it and occupied parts of it for centuries. Troops from Sardinia and Naples, and even an Austrian army, have marched and countermarched among its rocky wastes. Wo took the early morning bus up to the ridge of the last divide before the present Italian frontier. Thence we began our scramble down to the coast, through the terraces of the tillers of the soil who have given up the struggle. First catch your hare, was the old recipe. The laborious folk who lived here once had first to catch their soil, on the steep sides of the wild jumble of mountains, grubbing it out of nooks and corners, among the welter of weather-split fragments of rock —wind-driven dust from down below and fallen brown leaves which had scuddled along before the gales of perhaps two millions of years. Millions of years? you repeat, sceptically. Well, here is food for thought; the Mediterranean, like all warm, salt, lake seas, is getting shallower. When the people were living whose skeletons you will see in glass-topped coffins in their home of 25,000 years ago, in the grotto of Grimaldi, just inside the Italian frontier, the sea came up to their “door.” To-day sea level is 30ft. below. I can show you secluded little beaches on the w’est side of Cap.Maitin, of the same level as Grimaldi cavern, which were left high and dry 25,000 years ago; rock pools, Waterworn pebbles, base-eroded buttresses of limestone— everything is still there but the ripples of the Mediterranean, which are now 30 ft. lower. Again, I can show you boulders we passed today, above the 2000 ft. level, containing the same shells one now finds on the seashore, cockles, and small scallops. These boulders are chunks of blue clay which were at the bottoiii of the Mediterranean. If the sea took 25,000 years to drop 30ft., how long did it take" to drop more than 2000 ft 1

GRUBBING OUT THE SOIL. Yes, first the mountaineers grubbed out their soil with their triangular-’ bladed spades, used like pickaxes. That is the way that the earliest pre-his-toric men dug, with the deer-antler picks which you will find in museums. Then they spread it over a terrace shelf a few feet wide. The rocks and boulders were separated from the soil arid skilfully formed into a ceriientless wall, usually some six feet high, dropping to the next terrace. Every trickling spring and every gully through which storm water rushes from time to time was led by aqueduct or little claw-lined terraces, to enable the crops and vines to survive the recurring droughts from each ihid-May till midSe in te and ei out of the mountain sides, up and down ravihes we passed all day. We counted the tiers of terraces creeping up each mount until they had to halt at the foot of sheer precipices well over 1000 miles of terrace, had they all been joined in one line—and practically all derelict. Agriculture has cliahgOd. The people no longer live on the land up above, no longer are self-sufficing. They must move closer to the markets down along the Rivieran coast. No cunning artificers, no carpenters, no bootmakers nbl* weavers of wool and linen remain fib above, to barter their indispensable services for flour, milk, and butter, fowl and fruit and vegetable. Week bv week mountaineers give up the struggle. Every time I go up there I find more derelict farms, charming little places in exquisite settings of rock and waterfall arid olive grove, to-day we found a group of little farms abandoned. Only a stealthy little cat slipping in and out under barndoor reriiaihed. . But thi's latest phase of mans retreat is only 70 years old. Seventy years ago the population up above was stili far too small to cultivate much the greater part of tile terraces, Oven had it migrated front its villages. It farmed just the patches around isolated houses or near hamlet arid village. The 1000 miles of derelict terraces had long been derelict. Now a mile of properly-tended terrace garden and orchard, in this superb climate, produces a year s food for fifty persons. What traces remain of these tens of thousands of simultaneous tillers of the soil, who, too, gave up the struggle or were wiped out by foe or disease? None. Church records show that these mountains were thickly populated here and there in the time of our Alfred the Great. Their houses have gone, apart from rare reinains of ruined forts. Their graveyards have gone, their money, their metalware. In caves with entrances blocked by landslides, in underground caches, in this dry, sunbaked soil, and in niches of the rocks great quantities of their bones (probably with their jewellery) and their metal implements and weapons and then coins must be hidden, well preserved. The Rivieran Babylon must have many a wonderful hoard to reveal up there, after landslides, to the chance passerby.