Dunes at the mouth of the estuary, which is really more like a drainage canal and, in rough weather, overflow from the battering waves. When the wind from the Gulf of Lion is blowing hard and the waves get really big, the sea tries to recover what has been stolen from it by nature’s own sedimentary contributions and by human silt. The whole marsh was once a vast bay: the sea penetrated inland to form an arc that mirrored the one formed by the mountains, and the waves licked the foot of the mountainous amphitheater whose peaks I can see now above the reeds and beyond the cultivated areas that extend beyond the oxide-rich wetland. In winter, the boundaries are clearer, unobscured by the greens of spring and summer: first, the ochers of the over-wintering reeds, then the dark green of the orange trees and, on the slopes, the very slightly lighter green of the pine trees; and above them, the bluish tones of the limestone. The bay has gradually been closing in on itself as the belt of dunes has grown higher and more extensive. The feeling one gets from this confused landscape — in which water alternates with mud that is sometimes more like shifting sand, and with terra that is only more or less firma — is that of an unfinished world (and it is: nature is slowly continuing the silting process, the mud remains part of the lagoon even as it’s swallowing it up; it is, simultaneously, birth and death), an unreliable still photo of the moment when God began to separate the waters from the earth, a shifting geography still in the process of being made, halted on the morning of the third day of creation, assuming that being made is different from being destroyed, for the same process that brought the marsh into existence is contributing to its disappearance. What engenders the marsh is also condemning it to extinction. It is, in any case, an undefined space, a half-made world, progressively becoming blocked by the heaps of sand deposited by the waves and by the mud brought down by the streams swollen with the autumn rains, with the sediment of corpses of millions of plants and animals, in short, putrefaction, what is now known as active biomass, to which we humans add our own residues; the remnants of our various projects linger like scars: canal-digging schemes that were failed attempts to drain the whole marsh and convert it into cultivable land, walls that were supposed to act as defenses and that are now mere ruins, rusty piping abandoned among the scrub, the remains of irrigation pools that lie unused or were never used, trash piles, garbage dumps, dunes worn down by bulldozers or by machines that blithely carried away tons of sand for construction work; but also fresh dunes on which grow endemic species of plant that resemble cat’s claws and some of which are, I believe, called just that. The bulky torsos of the mountains — whose feet, centuries ago, were licked by the sea — seem like bits of distant, abandoned scenery, the ruins of some ancient edifice. Before me, in the foreground, lie drifting spots of color, botanical detritus floating on the greenish mirror of the water, pushed gently along by the sharp knife of the mistral; at certain points, the peaks on the horizon seem to emerge out of nothing: beyond are the reedbeds, which stand plumed in white like feather dusters, they float on the flat surface of the water that the mud and the waterlilies either disguise or adorn. The passing clouds reflected on the surface create an illusion of a world in constant evolution, but which is, in fact, motionless, fixed as if in an old photograph, whose sepia tones precisely match the rusty colors of the winter reeds, faded yellows and ochers and a brown so dark it’s almost black, and which forms sooty clumps, the melancholy tombs of giants.