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of Bavella, not even in Switzerland, Lebanon, or on the islands of Indochina.
    Bavella est ce que j’ai vu de plus beau en fait de forêts
, says van de Velde, adding this warning:
Seulement, si le touriste veut la voir dans sa gloire, qu’il se hâte! * La hache s’y promène et Bavella s’en va!
The ax is abroad and Bavella is disappearing. And indeed, nothing in the Bavella area today is as it must then have been. It is true that when you first climb to the pass from the south, coming closer and closer to the rocky peaks, which are violet to purple in color and are often surrounded halfway up by wreaths of vapor, and then look down from the edge of the Bocca into the Solenzara valley, it seems at first as if the wonderful forests praised by van de Velde and Lear were still standing. In truth, however, no trees grow here except those planted by the forestry department on the site of the great fire of the summer of 1960: slender conifers which cannot be imagined lasting a single human lifetime, let alone for dozens of generations.
    The ground under these meager pines is largely bare: I myself saw not the slightest trace of the wealth of game mentioned by earlier travelers—
le gibier y abonde
, writes van de Velde. Ibex were once extremely abundant here, eagles and vultures soared above the rock slides, hundreds of siskins and finches darted through the canopy of the forest, quail and partridge nested under the low shrubs, and butterflies fluttered everywhere around you. The creatures ofCorsica are said to have been strikingly small, a phenomenon that sometimes occurs on islands.
    Ferdinand Gregorovius, who traveled in Corsica in 1852, mentions an entomologist from Dresden whom he met in the hills above Sartène, and who told him that the island had struck him as a paradise garden on his first visit, particularly because of the small size of its fauna species, and indeed, writes Gregorovius, soon after he met the Saxon entomologist he had several sightings in the forest of Bavella of the Tyrrhenian red deer,
Cervus elaphus corsicanus
, now long since extinct, an animal of dwarfish stature and almost oriental appearance, with a head much too large for the rest of its body, and eyes wide with fear in constant expectation of death.
    Although the game that once lived in such abundance in the forests of the island has been eradicated almost without trace today, the fever of the chase still breaks out on Corsica every September. During my excursions into the interior of the island I repeatedly felt as if the entire male population were participating in a ritual of destruction which long ago became pointless. The older men, usually wearing blue dungarees, are posted beside the road all the way up into the mountains; the young men, in a kind of paramilitary gear, drive around in jeeps and cross-country vehicles as if they thought the countryside were occupied, or they were expecting an enemy invasion. Unshaven, carrying heavy rifles, menacing in their manner, they look likethose Croatian and Serbian militiamen who destroyed their native land in their deranged belligerence; and, like those Marlboro-style heroes of the Yugoslavian civil war, the Corsican hunters are not to be trifled with if you happen to stray into their territory.
    More than once on such meetings they plainly indicated that they did not want to talk to some chance-come hiker about their sanguinary business, and sent me on my way with a gesture making it clear that anyone who did not get out of the danger zone very quickly might easily be shot down. Once, a little way below Evisa, I tried to strike up a conversation with one of the hunters posted beside the road and obviously taking his task very seriously, a short man of around sixty who was sitting, his double-barreled shotgun across his knees, on the low stone balustrade which fences off the road at that point from the ravine of the Gorges de Spelunca, where it drops to two hundred meters below. The cartridges