Up and Away

     I sat on the edge of the wall and held my arms out so I could no longer see it under me. Though I'm well aware that Mont Ste Victoire has been solidly standing for a thousand times longer than I will ever live, and the wall was probably put there a hundred years before I was born, I could feel them both move under me.
     In the 1870s a troupe of church-goers did the same two-and-a-half hour hike I had just done, but with ten feet of metal on their backs. The cross now erected on the peak of Mont St Victoire is visible from miles away, has now rusted and charred in a hundred and fifty years of weathering, and makes a simple, omnipresent statement: we were here.
     It's easy to see why people build churches on high points. The walk up took us sixteen Erasmus students from sea-level to over a kilometre in the air, and each rest-stop was punctuated with sounds of awe and breathless, admiration-filled statements. In our last half hour, barely anyone spoke as we navigated the loose gravel and white stones that litter the sheer path to the top. It did feel like a pilgramage, but, for most of us, not a religious one.
     We were, nevertheless, heading for the church. If trekking up carrying just what one might need for a night's stay on a mountain was hard - sleeping bag, two jumpers, 50cl of rum and some brioche - I can't imagine the strength it must have taken to get all sorts of building materials way up there, and how many nights in the open it must have taken. For us, hundreds of years later, there is the church and a long dining hall to sleep in, and every inch was filled with trekkers speaking French, English and German, resting tired feet and playing very heated games of dominos.
     Fortunately we were sharing the church with some French boyscouts who very generously lit our fire for us, and then proceeded to sit around their own and harmoniously sing something that would have been more at home in a monastary than next to us rowdy anglophones. We responded in kind with shouts of Wonderwall, American Pie and Hotel California, but the French drowned us out with cries of disgust when someone chimed in with You Don't Know You're Beautiful...
     The church was not cold to sleep in. I didn't touch my second jumper, or my hastily-packed ski socks. La chaleur humaine, the embers of a fire, and, maybe, the rum, kept us all so warm a few of us went to sleep outside and spooned under the stars.
     This mountain, this feat of human tenacity and strength, the church, the stars, all of it- is just twenty minutes away from central Aix-en-Provence by bus. The bus costs one euro. The only reason I'm not going back as soon as my timetable allows is that singing into a fire and walking up and down mountains does not do good things to the human body. My throat hurts. My head hurts. My face hurts. My arms, legs, back and, well, just about any other body part you care to name, hurts. I have scratches down my arms from swinging around trees, and my nose is running like nobody's business. But as soon as I'm back in shape, I'll be up there again, trekking the pilgrimage to the stars.