Out the hotel by 0830, I hit a discernable wall of a sort of pastoral silence, save for the birds and occasional swell of wind, no typical urban cacophony. No distant hum of tire on asphalt, no footsteps or low chatter. The revelry noise of fireworks , shouts of ‘Bonne Anneé’ and the drunkard with a lost knob of volume control had given way to this meditative silence.
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| My hideous little troll car |
On the road, there were a few other cars and my Omega Man feelings subsided, but the wide open highway as I headed northwest into the countryside was a joy.
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| Panorama from the Rive droite, up river |
My quarry this a.m., my Holy Grail #1 of this trip: the Pont du Gard.
I arrived on the site about 0930. The only car in the large parking lot. Obviously the visitor center and museum would be closed. But access to the site itself? Fortunately no.
It is another quarter mile from the museum to the river along a tree-lined path, around a low hill. I passed a couple going in the opposite direction, walking their dogs, the only other people I would encounter for a while. The Pont eventually emerges through the trees and you are incrementally given view of it. By myself at the site I felt particularly dwarfed by the immensity of both the size and history of it. I had a vague notion that I had personally discovered the structure and felt that there was no overwhelming gap in time as you might think two millennia would feel.
Eventually more visitors would arrive to break the solitude. The next few hours are spent scampering among the rocks below the bridge, on the high valley walls on either side seeking the best vantage points, and on the Pont itself, marveling at the construction, the finesse and the continuous underlying monologue, “How the hell did they do this?”
The Pont du Gard is, simply, a civil engineering exercise: a growing city needs a reliable water supply. In the 1st century CE, the city was Nemauses (modern Nîmes) and a reliable water source was found at a spring to the NW of the Pont, 12 miles as the crow flies from Nemauses. However, because of terrain, the distance the water would travel would become 32 miles. The water source was only 56 feet above its arrival point, so the grade over the whole system only averaged 1:3000! A series of tunnels and bridges were built, but the Pont du Gard traversed the biggest barrier.
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| The center span is 80 feet. |
The Pont is an engineering marvel, regardless of the date of its construction. It is the singular revelation of the engineer’s art: overcoming severe constraints, pushing technology, eschewing the complex in favor of the (apparently) elegantly simple, leaving the perception of aesthetics to the functionalism of the materials and structural concept. Boasting superlatives from the ancient world, such as the largest arch span (80 feet), seem to be trivial nuggets. The immensity and longevity of the Pont seem apt description enough.
Henry James once remarked the sentiment of my initial encounter of this beautiful structure, “The hugeness, the solidity, the unexpectedness, the monumental rectitude of the whole thing leave you nothing to say – at the time – and make you stand gazing. You simply feel that it is noble and perfect, that it has the quality of greatness... When the vague twilight began to gather, the lonely valley seemed to fill itself with the shadow of the Roman name, as if the mighty empire were still as erect as the supports of the aqueduct; and it was open to a solitary tourist, sitting there sentimental, to believe that no people has ever been, or will ever be, as great as that, measured, as we measure the greatness of an individual, by the push they gave to what they undertook. The Pont du Gard is one of the three or four deepest impressions they have left; it speaks of them in a manner with which they might have been satisfied.”
En Gard(e)!
