Free The Serpent of Stars by Jean Giono

three long, dark and rumbling underground wells. The opening of the wells, capped by a hood of stone, remains locked with large key all day. The gate is only opened in the evening, just time for the women to draw buckets, to fill pails, to redden their hands on the rust from the chains, to wet their feet in the cool water, to laugh. . . . That particular shepherd, they say, wanted to drink and couldn’t. He was told it was too late. He argued. Arguments with men with goiters always end in yelling and stone throwing. Our shepherd climbed back up his hill to his pasture and there, he made his harp. He claimed, afterwards, to have made it to distract himself, having, of course, forgotten the star branded on his forehead by a piece of flint. What’s certain is that if this harp was made by chance, chance is a great master, because it gave it exactly the resonance of flowing water. It sounded like a huge singing spring. What’s more, having no pine-lyre at this elevation, the shepherd hung it in the branches of an oak. Thus, it was much bigger than usual and it entered the earth more deeply by long radish-like roots.
    At the first sounds of music, the whole village cocked its ear, grunted, grabbed pails and tubs, buckets, pitchers, jugs, and rushed toward the valley where the water seemed to be running. But only the wind ran there. They rubbed their eyes, they wondered aloud to each other, they
looked right and left without seeing anything, and yet the sound of water was all around them. At the edge of that dry valley, its stones cutting like a hot knife, they got so excited in their desire for live water, that under the sway of that harp, in the supple open air, they began to imitate the movements of swimming, throwing themselves head first onto the rocks, stretching out in the thorns, scraping themselves, scratching themselves, tearing at their goiters, bloody, drunk with despair and desire. Evening came, when the wells were to be opened. They were opened and from them poured, weaker but also blacker, that song of water which came to sing there through the spell of those huge oak roots thrust deep into the rock.
    Then there was complete chaos. They thought their water was escaping because some underground river had suddenly given way. Caliste went down into his well to touch the water with his hand and never came up again. And, assembled on the clearing that overlooks the valley of Saint-André, the whole village began to howl at his death like a family of wolves. Our shepherd, having gone too far, made a fast escape into the region of Briançon. Some hunters from Saint-André found the harp, cut the strings, and peace returned with the silence.
    So, this is a kind of music that must be measured out, the muted strings not used too much, or just used as a starting point, as a landing for letting the clear notes take wing and fly off. The muted notes have the sadness of doves’ songs. The wind is not perfectly round like a iron rod, but made of waves and undulations. It coos and warbles, and if the pleasant notes sound like bird calls, the muted notes weigh on your heart and make the clouds seem like fat pigeons.
    Here, the wind harps are at a distance from the clearing of at least a good thousand paces. They must be set up on the ridge to allow them
the life of the wind. Then, too, too close up, they would have cut off and killed the narrator’s voice. Up above, they are exactly in their place and their distant music is very much the base it must be in the drama.
    There are five harps. They are worked by five shepherds and conducted by a sixth who stays there on the stage and whistles through his fingers. Once for silence, twice for sound.
    Thus, through the play, the music of these harps unfolds. It doesn’t follow the turns in the action. It is distant and monotone like the voice of the world.
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    TH E TYMPON is that flute with nine pipes, the flute of play and of distress. It has one scale and