Magic Mountain

I nipped a few leaves and rubbed them between my fingers to smell. These wild plants, toughened by the elements and rocky mountain soil, release a concentrated explosion of perfume far more potent than any cultivated variety or store-bought herb.

Some 40 minutes later, after reaching the priory and its small chapel, we had worked up a sweat and were pared down to our T-shirts. We passed several other groups of hikers, already on their way down, who tended to be either young and fresh-faced or comfortably well into retirement.

We continued climbing the steep, staircaselike trail to the cross at the summit, and here we discovered one of the reasons for the bluish tone of the mountain. Up close, the rocks looked as though they had been painted with quarter-size dabs of blue paint -- actually a buildup of lichen. If the rocks of Sainte-Victoire look to be living things, it is because they are.

As we reached the final hump of the ridge, we were whipped by unsettling blasts of wind that howled around us. The temperature suddenly seemed to drop 20 degrees.

For the first time that day, we were able to look out on a 360-degree panorama of the Aix countryside and beyond. To the north was a line of snow-covered Alps; to the south, Marseilles and the sea.

The cross itself, erected in the early 1870s, stands about 62 feet tall. The central pillar and arms are each made of four iron tubes bound with a decorative thorn motif and braced against the elements with steel cables. The cross has had to be renovated and fortified numerous times against the violent mistral -- winds that periodically rip down from the Rhone Valley, wreaking havoc and chipping away at the foundation of the cross. Yet the same winds turn the skies of Provence one of the most limpid blues on Earth.

Each of the four sides of the monument bears an inscription in one of Provence's four historical languages. The side facing Aix is in Provencal; facing Paris, French; facing Marseilles, Greek; and facing Rome, Latin.

Cezanne is said to have been passionate about the history of his ancestral land, as well as a practicing Catholic. He was certainly obsessed with this mountain. Yet he never painted the cross; in fact, he edited it out of the landscape. Perhaps he thought little of this man-made monument, sitting up there so defiant against nature. Then again, he'd spent much of his own life building his own monument to Sainte-Victoire -- not from stone and metal, but with brush and paint.

Robert V. Camuto last wrote for Travel about Bolzano (Bozen), Italy.