Labyrinth

CHAPTER 30

Carcassonne

TUESDAY, 5 JULY 2005

Alice felt her spirits lift as she drove away from Toulouse.

The motorway ran dead straight through a green and brown fertile landscape of crops. Now and then she saw fields of sunflowers, their faces tilted from the late afternoon sun. For much of the journey, the high-speed railway ran alongside the road. After the mountains and undulating valleys of the Ariege, which had been her introduction to this part of France, it appeared a more tamed landscape.

There were clusters of small villages on the hilltops. Isolated houses with windows shuttered and a clocher-mur, the bells silhouetted against the pink dusk sky. She read the names of the towns as she passed-Avignonet, Castelnaudary, Saint-Papoul, Bram, Mirepoix-rolling the words over her tongue like wine. In her mind’s eye, each promised the secret of cobbled streets and history buried in pale stone walls.

Alice crossed into the departement of the Aude. A brown heritage sign read: Vous etes en Pays Cathare. She smiled. Cathar country. She was quickly learning that the region defined itself as much by its past as its present. Not just Foix, but also Toulouse, Beziers and Carcassonne itself, all the great cities of the southwest living still in the shadow of events that had taken place nearly eight hundred years ago. Books, souvenirs, postcards, videos, an entire tourist industry had grown up on the back of it. Like the evening shadows lengthening in the west, the signs seemed to be drawing her toward Carcassonne.

By nine o’clock, Alice was through the peage and following the signs for the city center. She felt nervous and excited, strangely apprehensive, as she picked her way through gray industrial suburbs and retail parks. She was close now, she could feel it.

The traffic lights turned green and Alice surged forward, carried along by the flow of traffic, driving over roundabouts and bridges, then suddenly in countryside again. Coarse scrub along the rocade, wild grasses and twisted trees blown horizontal by the wind.

Alice cleared the brow of the hill and there it was.

The medieval Cite dominated the landscape. It was so much more imposing than Alice had imagined, more substantial and complete. From this distance, with the purple mountains thrown into sharp relief behind in the distance, it looked like a magical kingdom floating in the sky.

She fell in love immediately.

Alice pulled over and got out of the car. There were two sets of ramparts, an inner and an outer ring. She could pick out the cathedral and the castle. One rectangular, symmetrical tower, very thin, very tall, stood higher than everything else.

The Cite was set on top of a grassy hill. The slopes swept down to streets filled with red-roofed houses. On the flat land at the bottom there were fields of vines, fig and olive trees, wigwams of heavy ripe tomatoes in rows.

Reluctant to venture closer and risk breaking the spell, Alice watched the sun set, stripping the color from everything. She shivered, the evening air suddenly chill on her bare arms.

Her memory provided the words she needed. To arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

For the first time, Alice understood exactly what Eliot had meant.