Free The Serpent of Stars by Jean Giono Page A

two deep, bass Cs, one at the beginning of the scale, one at the end. These somber notes are always there, ready to sound the alarm at each end of the song.
    When all you know is how to play the flute, you only blow into the seven pipes by making the reeds flow before your mouth. That makes a flute song. But, if you’ve grown accustomed to the tympon from long use and when you truly know how to play it, that adds the leavening to the dough, believe me. Right in the middle of the songs, there’s the deep note that sets ringing the whole black basin at the bottom of your heart meant to hold your reserve of tears. Then, you remember in a flash the days of distress. The harsh mountains appear, climbing the sky like she-bears, and the flute song becomes a lyric of life, a verb alive as the day, made at once of joy and sadness.
    You can recognize true tympon players by two very specific signs. This is what they are. When a shepherd sits down, the dog comes to lie beside him, the flocks remain a little farther away. If he’s a tympon player, every time, you’ll see a sheep approach, lay its head on the man’s
knees and wait for solace. The second sign is that a tympon player, when he’s alone, when he’s walking alone along his way, he looks behind him ten times, twenty times, to try to see what is back there following him, whose steps he hears in his head.
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    THE GARGOULETTES are the water flutes. There are two kinds. One is made out of elder wood. They are like pipes. The other is made out of glazed earth. They are like pitchers, and they imitate bird songs.
    With little gargoulettes, you can very easily hunt quail or any bird with a trilling song. They imitate them, they call to them, they sound exactly like the female. But the gargoulettes the shepherds use are very big. Their song is at once bird song and horse whinny. Ten men blowing hard into ten gargoulettes can make music that turns you to salt. You have only enough time to raise your eyes to search the sky for a flying winged horse.
    The instrument isn’t beautiful, just a pipe or a pitcher, and it takes enormous breath to move and puncture water. The players bind their cheeks with a handkerchief or a scarf. Gargoulette music has great power over animals. After just a little, it makes them mad for love, females as well as males. It has the power of springtime. Extending from where a man plays a gargoulette alone on a hill, you can see the rays afterwards, the marks in the grass of all the love struggles of beasts who heard him. They radiate out like the spokes of a wheel.
    So there is the whole orchestra. Above, on the ridge, the wind harps, here, next to the stage, the tympon and gargoulette players. This time, there were twelve of them. Everything is invention, even in the music. They don’t play traditional tunes. They set off in a flurry, without knowing where they are going, improvising on their own sounds. Before
beginning, they say, “With us, you are going to travel far!” And then they play.
    So this is what I myself saw in all that. The harps make the sound of the earth which rolls along over the routes of the sky; the tympons, the sound of men, words and steps, and the sound of beating hearts; the gargoulettes, the sound of the beasts who are born, make love, bellow, and die. All that as if, all of a sudden, you had the ears of a god.
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    AS FOR the actors, first of all, there’s the Sardinian. The Sardinian, well, he’s at the very center of the stage, and he’s the one who begins. The others are there, mixed in with the audience; they aren’t designated in advance. They are there just to lean toward their neighbors to tell them, “Wait till you hear what I’ve got to say!”
    The Sardinian cannot go on any longer. He calls, “The Sea,” for example. And, all of a sudden, it’s someone near you who begins to answer. Everyone shouts to him, “Stand up, stand