YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY THE PYRENEES BY THE SAME AUTHOR PARIS HILLS AND THE SEA EMMANUEL BURDEN, MERCHANT ON NOTHING AND KINDRED SUBJECTS ON EVERYTHING r. THE GATE OF THE ROUSILLON H. Hello c, del. THE PYRENEES BY H. BELLOC WITH FORTY-SIX SKETCHES BY THE AUTHOR AND TWENTY TWO MAPS SECOND EDITION METHUEN & CO. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON First Published . . June 3rd, igog Second Edition . . igio TO GILBERT MOORHEAD IN PIOUS MEMORY OF PAMPLONA, ELIZONDO, THE CANON WHO SHOT QUAILS WITH A WALKING-STICK, THE IGNORANT HIERARCH, THE CHOCOLATE OF THE AGED WOMAN, THE ONE-EYED HORSE OF THE PENA BLANCA, THE MIRACULOUS BRIDGE, AND THE UNHOLY VISION OF ST GIRONS. PREFACE THE only object of this book is to provide, for those who desire to do as I have done in the Pyrenees, a general knowledge of the mountains in which they propose to travel. I have paid particular attention to make clear those things which I myself only learned slowly during several journeys and after much reading, and which I would like to have been told before I first set out. I could not pretend within the limits of this book, or with such an object in view, to write anything in the nature of a Guide, and indeed there are plenty of books of that sort from which one can learn most that is necessary to ordinary travel upon the frontier of France and Spain ; but I proposed when I began these few pages to set down what a man might not find in such books : as — what he should expect in certain inns, by what track he might best see certain districts, what diffi culties he was to expect upon the crest of the mountains, how long a time crossings apparently short might take him, what the least kit was which he could carry into the hills, how he had best camp and find his way and the rest, what maps were at his disposal, the advantages of each map, its defects, and so forth. The little of general matter which I viii THE PYRENEES have admitted into my pages — a dissertation upon the physical nature of the chain, and a shorter division upon its political character — I have strictly limited to what I thought necessary to that general understanding of a mountain without which travel upon it would be a poor pleasure indeed. If I have admitted such petty details as the times of trains, and the cost of a journey from London, it is because I have found those petty details to be of the first importance to myself, as indeed they must be to all those who have but little leisure. I have in everything attempted to set down only that which would be really useful to a man on foot or driving in that country, and only that which he could not easily obtain in other books. Thus I have carefully set down directions as minute as possible for finding particular crossings and camping grounds, for the finding of which the ordinary Guide Book is of no service. My chief regret is that the book will necessarily be too bulky to carry in the pocket ; for it is meant to be not so much a lively as an accurate companion to the general exploration of those high hills which have given me so much delight. CONTENTS PACE I. The Physical Nature of the Pyrenees . i II. The Political Character of the Pyrenees 48 III. Maps ...... 80 IV. The Road System of the Pyrenees . . 108 V. Travel on Foot in the Pyrenees . . 146 VI. The Separate Districts of the Pyrenees . 199 1. The Basque Valleys . . . 200 11. The Four Valleys (Beam and Aragon) . 214 in. Sobrarbe ..... 230 iv. The Tarbes Valleys and Luchon . . 247 v. Andorra and the Catalan Valleys . . 259 vi. Cerdagne . . . . . 276 vn. The Tet and Ariege . . . 283 viii. The Canigou . . . . 291 VII. Inns of the Pyrenees . . . 300 VIII. The Approaches to the Pyrenees . 324 Index ....... 333 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS The Gate of the Rousillon . The Upper and Lower Slope The Pic d'Anie from Oloron The Culminating Point of the Range The Gates of Andorra The enclosed Valley of Bedous On the Upper Aston . Near the Fontargente Mist on Sousseou The Pic du Midi d'Ossau The Summit of the Marbore The Ridge of the Maladetta The Embalire from the Spanish Side The Wall of the Cerdagne . Frontispiece FACING PAGE Si 78 no 139149172182 221 232255266 278 LIST OF MAPS General Sketch Map of the Pyrenees The Basque Valleys . The Four Valleys The Sobrarbe .... FACING PAGE I 200214 23I The Passage over the Col de la Cruz and the Col de Gistain .... The Tarbes Valleys and Luchon . The Catalan Valleys and Andorra The Cerdagne .... The Ariege and Tet Valleys The Canigou ..... 241248 258 276283 291 Carcassonne Nnrbonm J Y X Peaks. qtfrtlOj -Hktershed-ValleyFloors ••Frontier li.Ri*SSS'.-Jftv:> rftheTet Plan H only two valleys, but each is much longer and more important than any of the eight just mentioned, and these two great valleys run, not parallel to each other, nor north and south as do the eight western ones, but at a steep slant : the one (that of the Ariege) goes westward, and the other (that of the Tet) eastward. Save for these two main valleys no regular features can be discovered in the eastern portion ; all is here a labyrinth of dividing and sub dividing lateral ridges, and the only thing giving 1 8 THE PYRENEES unity to the group is this system of two great trenches which run up towards each other, the one from the Plain of Toulouse, the other from that of Perpignan, to meet on the high land of the Carlitte group. Strictly speaking, the western valley is not wholly that of the Ariege, but those of the Ariege and Oriege combined, and it is further remarkable that no regular passage exists from the one depression to the other, but by a curious topographical accident, which will be described later in the book, the crossing from the Ariege to the Tet has to be made by going over on to the south side of the range, and then back again on to the north side. The importance of these two main valleys upon the eastern half of the northern slope of the Pyrenees is sufficiently evident from the historical fact that each determines a great historical district : the one, that of the Ariege, was the country of Foix, the other that of the Tet, was the Rousillon. And while the eight small western valleys running parallel to each other separate local customs and dialect alone, the ridge of the Ariege and the Tet may almost be said to have separated two nationalities, and owed ultimate allegiance for a thousand years, the one to a Gallic, the other to an Iberian lord. Beyond the valley of the Tet and eastward of the Canigou runs the little fag end of the range, which falls into the sea at Cape Cerberus, and is called the "Alberes." Here there is but little distinction between the northern and the southern side, the general shape of a sharp ridge is maintained PHYSICAL NATURE OF PYRENEES 19 throughout, but the height lowers more and more as the sea is approached. These hills are everywhere passable ; the ancient road into Spain which crosses them, should count, geographically and historically, rather as a road crossing round the Pyrenees at their sea end, than as a road crossing the chain. to A Pyrenean valley upon the French side always presents the same main characteristic, and this is true not only of the main valleys, but of the in numerable lateral valleys which ramify from the main valleys in all directions. The characteristic of these French Pyrenean valleys is that they are sharply divided by very narrow gorges into two or more level basins. These level basins in the smaller valleys and on the high levels where there is pasturage and no habitation are called "Jasses"; the large and low ones are called "Plains" or "Plans"; but they are the same in their essential feature, which is a level floor more or less wide, bounded by the steep hills upon either side, and ending and beginning with a rocky gate through which the valley stream cascades. The whole formation suggests the former existence of great and small lakes, which burst their way through the gorges at some remote time. These gorges are very rarely of any length, a point in which the Pyrenees differ from the Alps. Here and there, especially in the lime stone formations, you do get long and difficult passages. One, the Cacouette in the Western Pyrenees, in the upper waters of the Gave-de- 20 THE PYKEJNEJKS Mauleon, is not only very profound but absolutely impassable, like the Black Canon of Colorado, but it does not lead from one part of a valley to another. It occupies the whole of the upper valley ; and in general, you will not find a Pyrenean stream running, as do the Alpine streams, for some miles between precipices. 9000 Plan I Each main valley has a clearly marked mouth where it debouches upon the plain ; by this I do not mean that perfectly flat land comes up to and meets the hills in every case; on the contrary, at the mouth of most of these valleys are moraines left by old glaciers, but I mean that the character and aspect of the hills visibly and immediately changes, and that each of the valleys has a distinct final " gate" where it meets the lowlands, just as a river will meet the sea at a definite mouth. Now each of these openings has its characteristic town. PHYSICAL NATURE OF PYRENEES 21 Mauleon, for instance, is at the mouth of the last Basque valley, Oloron at the mouth of the Val d'Aspe, Lourdes at the mouth of the valley of Argeles, etc. Further, these towns at the mouths of the valleys have invariably chosen for their site, whether they be prehistoric or medieval, some rock on which to build a citadel ; and in every case a castle is still to be found holding that rock. Lourdes, Foix, Mauleon are excellent examples of this. Higher up the valley, the first plain above the mouth will, as a rule, contain the first mountain town. Thus Argeles lies above Lourdes, Bedous and Accous above Oloron, Laruns in the first flat of the Val d'Ossau, etc. According to the length of the valley and the number and size of the Jasses, there may be one or more such towns enclosed by the mountain sides; thus in the valley of Lourdes we have Argeles, and above it Luz ; in the valley of Soule we have Tardets above Mauleon, and higher still we have Licq. But all the valleys, whether they contain one or more of these upland towns, have, just under the last watershed, a hamlet or village usually giving its name to the Port or Col — that is the Pass into Spain — above it, and the reason of this is evident enough ; habitations were necessary as a place of departure and arrival for the crossing of the mountains. Of such are Gavarnie, Urdos, Morens; and the rest. These high villages have least history, least wealth, and until recently had the worst com munications. For much the greater part of the year 22 THE PYRENEES they are lost in snow, and there was an interval between the making of the great roads and the beginning of modern tourist travel when they were in peril of destruction. The new great roads drew away wealth and visitors from all but a very few, and but for the beginning of modern mountaineer ing they had hopelessly decayed. Even so famous a place as Gavarnie, the best known of all the valley heads was dying in the middle of the century. There are days now when it is at the other extreme : fine days in August when, for the crowd of rich people, you might be at Tring or at some reception of the late Whittaker Wright's. Even to-day, one or two of them, however clean or kindly, are odd in the way of poverty. I have known one where they had no butter and never had had any butter, and another where I was charged 8d. instead of 5d. for a bed because it was the season. The typical Spanish valley differs, in the centre of the Chain at least, from the typical French valley. With the exception of Andorra (which reminds one in all features of the French side ; for it has the same enclosed plain, the same steps and rocky gorges between, the same J asses, and the same arrange ment of towns and villages) the greater part of the valleys, whether Catalan or Aragonese, are not only broader and their streams larger than on the French side, but their arrangement also is different, most of them lack wide pasturages, nearly all of them lack enclosed plains, and there has been no motive to penetrate them since the building of the new roads, for travel upon this side is rare. PHYSICAL NATURE OF PYRENEES 23 The Spanish valley, therefore, often many days' walking in length, never direct, and forming a sort of little province to itself, will have towns and villages scattered in it, haphazard and thinly. Very often a considerable town will be found at the very end of the valley, as Esterri in that of the Noguera Pallaresa, or Venasque in that of the Esera. The lateral communications from one Spanish valley to the next are usually more difficult than those between the French valleys ; for many months they are impossible, and there is no such general arrangement of towns on the plain holding the approaches to the valleys as in France, for the reason that the whole plan of the mountains on the Spanish side is far more troubled and irregular. Thus the first town of the Aragon is Jaca ; but Jaca is right in the mountains, and nothing at the outlet of the hills 50 or 60 miles down the valley makes a head town for Jaca. Jaca is a bishopric on its own. On the Gallego there is nothing but a succession of villages of which Salient right up at the head of the valley is among the largest : it is almost a little town and so is Biescas close by. The Cinca and the Esera have indeed a town upon the plains at Barbastro, but the Noguera Ribagorzana has none, nor has its sister the Noguera Pallaresa, while the Segre has its bishopric and chief town right up in the highest hills at Urgel, and there is nothing to compare with that town until you get to Balaguer. The southern side of the watershed differs greatly 24 THE PYRENEES in general structure from the northern, and must be separately recorded. There are indeed certain accidental similarities. The enclosed valley of Andorra to the south recalls the enclosed valley of Bedous or Accous to the north, and the very high first miles of the torrents, just under the main range, do not differ much whether they are found on the north or on the south side of the mountain. But the general plan and contour of the range presents a great contrast on either side. The main feature of the southern slope is, as I have said, a series of parallel ranges pushing out like ramparts in front of the main heights. If you follow a French valley (on the western part of the Pyrenees at least) you will finding it running fairly north and south to the point where it debouches upon the plain some 20, or 25 miles at most, from the watershed. A Spanish valley will at first appear to have the same character, but just when you think you are in sight of the plains (for instance, just after leaving Canfranc upon the banks of the Upper Aragon) you see — beyond the first lines of flat country, and barring the view like a great wall — another high range : in this case the Sierra de la Pefia, the ridge of rock which takes its name from the " Peha-de- Oroel," a mountain with its eastern end just above Jaca. Beyond this again you have the San Domingo ridge, and to the east of it, another running also east and west, the Sierra de Guara. Pamplona again is situated at the mouth of a true Pyrenean valley (that of the Arga), not very diffe- PHYSICAL NATURE OF PYRENEES 25 rent from the valleys to the north. It stands also on a plain, but immediately in front of it runs another range of hills, and if you climb these, you find yet another, strictly parallel and straight, standing before you and masking the approach to the Ebro. This formation in parallel outliers continues as far east as the Segre valley, that is for full three-quarters of the length of the Spanish Pyrenees, and in a sense it continues even further east than the river Segre ; for the Sierra-del-Cadi, though it joins on to the main ridge at one point, is essen tially an outlier in slope and formation. This parallel formation sometimes comes quite close to the central range, as for instance, in the Colorado peaks close to Salient and Panticosa, and the long ridge to the south of Bielsa and El Plan. Indeed the characteristics of Sobrarbe, as this countryside is called, consist in these long parallel ridges. One result of this formation is, as I have said above, that the river valleys do not run straight, as they do to the north of the range, but are thrust round at right angles when they come up against these ridges. Sometimes they will eat their way through a ridge, as do the two Nogueras, and the Arga itself south of Pamplona ; but the greater part of the rivers on the Spanish side suffer the diversion of which I speak, and none more than the river Aragon, which gives its name to the whole central kingdom ; for the Aragon, after having run south and straight for a few miles, like any northern river, suddenly turns westward, and runs under the foot to Sierra-de-la- Pena for two days' 26 THE PYRENEES march. According to its first direction, it should fall into the Ebro somewhere near Saragossa ; as a fact it does not come in until far above Tudela. Another result of the formation is that the moun tain tangle stretches much further on the Spanish side than it does upon the French. If you stand upon the Pass of Salau where the French have made, and the Spanish are making, a high road, you have before you to the north, at a distance of less than 10 miles, the railway and a fairly open valley. Fifteen miles at the most, as the crow flies, you have the main line and the true lowlands at St Girons. But if you turn and look out in the opposite direction over the valley of Esterri and the higher Noguera Pallaresa, you are looking over 60 miles of moun tain land. From the high ridge, which is your stand point, to the summit of El-Monsech, which is the final rampart of the hills beyond the plains of Lerida, is more than 50 miles, and the slopes of that rampart take you nearly another ten. A further consequence of this formation is that communications are very difficult to the south of the Pyrenees. The traveller naturally ascribes the lack of communications to the character of Spanish government. It is not wholly due to a moral, but partly to a material cause. The main Spanish railway from Saragossa to Barcelona may be com pared to the main French railway from Toulouse to Bayonne, but the Spanish side everywhere suffers from its great wide stretch of wild mountain land. Toulouse itself is little more than 50 miles from the crest of the mountain. Saragossa is half as much ^vref****** *e* 28 THE PYRENEES again. The Spanish Pyrenees push out civilisation, as it were, far from them. Lerida, a large town of the plains, is quite 60 miles from the watershed in a straight line. Pau or Tarbes are less than thirty. The difficulty and expense with which the civilisation of the plains, and the things belonging to it must reach the remote upper Spanish valleys largely account for the curiously high degree of their isolation from the world. Many thousands of men are born and die in those high valleys, with out ever seeing a wheeled vehicle, and without knowing the gravest news of the outer world for two or three days after the towns have known it. It is not easy in such a system to establish general divisions. We saw that this was simple enough upon the French side : eight main valleys to the west of the "fault," and two large sloping ones on the eastern limb. In the Spanish Pyrenees, the nearest thing one can get to a classification is first to group together the Basque valleys of Navarre, the streams of which all flow down to meet at last near Lumbier and fall into the Aragon a few miles further south. Next to take the group of valleys along the mouths of which stands the great Sierra de la Pefia, of which the chief is the ravine of the Upper Aragon. These dales, which have at their extremities the huge masses of the Garganta and the Pic D'Anie, form the original stuff of Aragon. These few square miles were the seat from whence that race proceeded which fought its way down to the Ebro, and to the sources of the Tagus, and which can claim the Cid Campeador for its historic type. Next comes the PHYSICAL NATURE OF PYRENEES 29 group of valleys beginning with the Gallego and ending with that of Venasque, which forms the eastern limb of Aragon, and has borne for many centuries the title of " Sobrarbe." Next to consider the two Nogueras as the Western, the Cerdague and Andorra as the Eastern Catalonian land. It should be noted that the fine tenacity of Spain in general, and of these hills in particular, has preserved with exactitude the ancient and natural divisions of the land. The long unbroken ridge which encloses the Basque valleys is also the frontier of Navarre. The unity of Aragon survives in the present administrative division of Jaca. The eastern valleys are still called the " Sobrarbe," and the " fault," or break between the two main lines of the Pyrenees, still forms an historical and racial break to the South as to the North of the chain. Beyond it eastward begins the Catalan language, and the next group to consider are the great Catalan valleys of the two Nogueras and of the Segre. The two Nogueras ultimately fall into the Segre, but in the mountain regions the three form three large parallel valleys, each with a character and nourishment of its own and all Catalan. Of these three, the Segre is the most striking ; its upper waters are the centre of the flat valley of the Cerdagne, the only natural passage from the North into Spain, and one of its earliest tributaries nourishes the Republic of Andorra. East of the Segre valley, and of the Sierra del Cadi which bounds it, no classification is possible. It is a labyrinth of little valleys. A flat welter of 30 THE PYRENEES hills running down everywhere to the sea, and narrowing at the extreme end into Cape Cerberus : these last crests, as I have said, take the name of " Alberes." This contrast in structure between the northern and the southern side of the range runs through many other aspects of the hills beyond structure alone. We have seen that it affects the type of civilisation, leaving the deep but short French valleys far more open to the culture and influences of the plains than were the Spanish just over the watershed. There is much more. The fall of the light is in itself a contrast. The slopes of the Spanish mountains, and especially of the high mountains, look right at the blazing sun. They are more bare of wood, much, than are the French slopes. They are more burnt. Water is less plentiful. Insects are more numerous, and there is less cultivation ; but one cannot say that there is, as a rule, a scantier population. Small villages and hamlets are rarer in the remote gorges, but small towns a little lower down are common, and apart from the population economically de pendent upon summer tourists in France, it might be doubted whether the Spanish side were not as well garnished as the French ; one might venture to imagine that in the Dark, and early Middle, Ages, when the full effect of the natural condition of the mountains could be felt, the population of either side was sensibly the same. The highest peaks are upon the Spanish side, but it does not show splendid isolated masses of rock PHYSICAL NATURE OF PYRENEES 31 like the two Pics-du-Midi, or lonely masses like the Canigou. On the other hand, the general character of the rocks is more savage and more fantastic, and it is upon the south side of the range that one most feels creeping over one that sentiment of unreality or of a spell, which so many travellers in the Pyrenees have been curious to note. The local names express it upon every side. There is " The Mouth of Hell," " The Accursed Mountain," " The Lost Mountain," "The Peak of Hell," "The Enchanted Hills " or " Encantados," and hundreds of other legendary titles that express, as well as do the mountain tunes, the sense of an unquiet mystery. The Spanish side is again remarkable for true rivers running in considerable valleys everywhere east of Navarre. Though the rainfall is less upon the southern side than upon the northern, yet, because the catchment areas are broader, the streams running at the bottom of the Spanish valleys are larger and more important. A glance at the map will show upon the French side a whole series of parallel river valleys running down from the summit into the plains to join the Adour or the Gironde. Armagnac and Beam are crowded with them. A man going eastward from Bayonne to Pau, from Pau to Tarbes, from Tarbes to Toulouse, will cross more than forty streams all spreading out like a fan from the central axis of the Lannemezan Plain ; a man going eastward below the Spanish foot hills from Melida, let us say through Huesca to Lerida, will find but half-a-dozen 32 THE PYRENEES of such water crossings. Again, you have between the Soule and the Labourd, between the Val d'Aspe and the Val d'Ossau, between the Val d'Aure and the Garonne, distances of 8, 10, or at the most 12 miles, but the distance between neighbouring Spanish valleys (if we except the near approach of the Gallego and the Aragon), is always much greater. Between the Noguera and the Segre, for instance, there is at the nearest point, 20 miles ; between the two Nogueras, another 20 ; between the last of these two rivers and the Esera, quite 20 more. The whole Spanish side with the exception of Navarre is thus built up of consider able valleys, comparable to those of the Tet and the Ariege alone upon the northern slope. The details of Pyrenean structure will concern a man travelling on foot more than do these general lines, though the whole aspect of the range must be grasped before one can understand its details. The separate peaks and valleys, the intimate structure of the range is remarkable everywhere for its abrupt ness. It is this physical feature in the Pyrenees, coupled with the absence of snow, which gives them the highly individual character they bear. Fantastic outlines are not to be discovered in these hills so frequently as in the Dolomites, nor are wholly isolated hills common, though such few as exist are very striking, but for day after day a man wandering in the Pyrenees sees cliffs more regularly high, a greater succession of rocks more precipitous, and a more permanent succession of the upper and the lower slope PHYSICAL NATURE OF PYRENEES 33 connected summits above him than in any other European range. The absence of snow is a further sharp character istic in the range. The essential feature of an Alpine, landscape is the snow ; and it is not only the essential feature of that landscape to the eye, it is the condition which controls the lives of those who inhabit, and of those who visit, the valleys. You can still wander a trifle in Switzerland. Even to-day I have come to villages where foreigners were still thought comic, and an ignorance of the German tongue was still thought amazing. But though you can wander, your wandering is strictly limited. Above a certain line you can go forward only with technical knowledge and in a special way. You are upon ice or snow. All climbing in the Alps depends upon this, and most of travel as well. A man may pass many days for instance in the upper valley of the Rhone, and then pass many days more in the upper valley of the Aar, but to go from one to the other he must take one of two strictly defined paths, unless he is willing to undertake special work requir ing technical knowledge and particular aids. The hills between the two valleys are not a field for his exploration ; they are a great mass of impassable and unapproachable land, all frozen, and diversified only by very narrow valleys inhabitable nowhere but at their base. No one could lose himself for many days upon the Wetterhorn, the Jungfrau, or the Finsteraarhorn ; you can approach these mountains for the glory of the thing, but they are not a countryside. Now in the Pyrenees almost all 3 34 THE PYRENEES the surface of the mountains, say 250 miles by 60, is at your disposal. It is this and a local custom of live and let live which make the pleasure of them inexhaustible ; and which, combined with certain protective methods of their own, make it certain that the Pyrenees will never be overcome or changed by men. They are too large. This surface of some 15,000 square miles is diversified in a manner fairly continuous throughout the chain. The valley floors are given up to cultivation in their lower part, their upper parts consist of damp close pastures, and between the two types of level are to be found, as we shall presently see, sharp gates of rock through which the river saws its way in a gorge. Above the valley floor, and at the end of it, where the stream springs out below the watershed (such springs bubbling up suddenly through the porous rock are called Jeous), steep banks of two, three and four thousand feet, broken almost invariably here and there into precipices, forbid the way ; and these, in perhaps half their extent, are covered with enormous woods of beech below (mixed often with oak) and of pine above. When you have climbed up these slopes through the forest or over the naked rock, you come, in the last heights, either to large grassy spaces, which often sweep right over the summit of a lateral ridge, and sometimes extend over both sides, even, of the main watershed (as, between the Val d'Aran and Esterri) or else — more commonly — upon a jumble of jagged rocks and smooth, perpendicular or over- PHYSICAL NATURE OF PYRENEES 35 hanging slabs, which defend the final secrets of the range. The succession of these features is nearly universal. The only places where they are modified are the two lower ends of the range. There the rocks sink, the hills are rounded, the precipices disappear in the last Basque valleys, while the Alberes at the other extremity of the chain against the Mediterranean are at last mere toothed rocks. All between (with the exception of the Cerdagne, which is a country to itself) is built up in successive bands of valley floor, steep forest, or steep rock, broken with limestone precipices, and finally on the highest ridge sweeps of grass or jagged edges of stone. It is this character in the last ridge of the Pyrenees that determines the nature of a passage over them, and since a passage from valley to valley is the chief business of the day when one is exploring the range, I will next describe these crossings, for the method of them is very different from that of other mountains, and has largely deter mined the history and customs of their inhabitants. In other high mountains you will either find snow above a certain level and covering for most of the year most of the passes, some of the passes for all the year, or, as you go further south, you will commonly find many gaps which long years of weathering have reduced to easy slopes, or you will find great differences in slope between the one and the other side of the range ; as, for instance, the difference between the long valleys that lead up 36 THE PYRENEES eastward into the Californian Sierras, and the sharp escarpment which falls eastward upon the desert side of those heights. In all other ranges that I have seen or read of, save the Pyrenees, there is at least great diversity in the opportunities of crossing, whether natural or artificial. There is great diversity, as a rule, in the natural crossings ; some are quite easy ascents and descents on either side (as the Brenner Pass over the Alps) ; some, though difficult, are notably lower than the average height of the range (as the Mont Genevre from the Durance into Piedmont) ; some, these more rare, are deep gorges cleft right through the range (as the Danube gorge through the Carpathians). Now it is characteristic of the Pyrenees that in the main part of their length no such diversities appear, save that there are two kinds of summit surfaces on the high cols, rock and grass : the grass the rarer. If anyone looks closely at the Somport, especially noting the line which the old track took before the modern road was made, he will agree that it is a pass which, though steep, had no " edge " to it, so to speak. The grass would take any kind of traffic. The same is true of course of the Cerdagne, the only broad valley across the Pyrenees. But the Somport is well to the west end of the range ; the Cerdagne is well to the east end. All the main part between could take no vehicle, and has crossings of a kind which I shall presently describe : sharp, the escalade difficult, the first descent upon the far side, or the last ascent upon the near side, steep. PHYSICAL NATURE OF PYRENEES 37 There is perhaps an exception to be found in the case of the Bonaigo, but this pass also presents difficulties to wheels upon its western side, and in the lower valley at the gorge. In general the crossings of the Pyrenees every where display certain characters rare or absent in other ranges, which are first that they are very numerous (a feature due to the absence of snow), secondly, that they are very high, thirdly, that they hardly ever involve any true climbing, and fourthly, that they nearly always involve some considerable care on the part of the wayfarer and are somewhere dangerous either upon the northern or the southern side. This can be well illustrated by a particular example in the few miles between the Pic D'Aneu and the Canal Roya. Here there is a range no part of which descends much below 2100 metres nor rises much above 2300. There are two distinct saddles where a man can cross on foot, and neither is appreciably lower than the peaks of the range, which are but lumps of rock a little higher than the grassy ridges from which they spring. Any man knowing the country and with a fairly good head could trust himself to half-a-dozen places westward of the two which I have mentioned (which are called the Col D'Aneu and the Port of Peyreget). Nevertheless the easiest of them, the Port de Puymaret, easy as it is upon the French side, gives some pause upon the Spanish. The traveller finds himself, once over the crest, within a few yards of a rocky edge, beyond which there is apparently 38 THE PYRENEES nothing but air, and, thousands of feet beyond, the precipices of the Negras. If he will approach that rocky edge he will see that everything below it is easily negotiable, and when he has once reached the floor of the Spanish valley beneath he will perhaps wonder why it seemed so difficult from above. In truth it is not really difficult at all, but the scramble looks dangerous, and it is one which most men, other than regular climbers, would think twice about when they first saw it from above. If all this is true of the Peyreget, it is still more true of the other crossings in its neighbourhood to the right and to the left. Were the Pyrenees surmountable at comparatively few passages, these would have been so thought out and perhaps improved as to make them regular and well-known passes, which the traveller could easily deal with. It is the very number of the crossings which add to their difficulties. The people who live upon either side are indifferent in their choice among so many difficult passages, and with the exception of one or two quite modern made roads with which I shall presently deal, there are some hundreds of Cols and Ports all having in common a character of difficulty, and few naturally so much more easy than their neighbours as to concentrate travel upon them. This feature may be summed up in the expression that the crest of the Pyrenees is rather one long ridge slightly serrated than (as in the case of most other ranges) a succession of high mountain groups separated by low saddles. PHYSICAL NATURE OF PYRENEES 39 Of all the accidents that strike one in connection with the crossing of these hills nothing strikes one more than the accident of time. A Port is always a day and a long day. Here and there quite excep tionally there may be food and shelter upon either side within six or seven hours one from the other ; but as a rule if you propose to sleep under cover upon either side, your effort will demand a long summer's day, and it is best to look forward to a night camp upon the further side of the range. Before continuing the description of these passages, or any rules by which one should be guided in attempting them, it may be well to speak for a moment of the few practised and conventional tracks. First of these come, of course, the high roads. At present, over the frontier, these are but four in number (for the low passes to the east of the Canigou may be neglected), Roncesvalles, the Som port, the Pourtalet, and the Cerdagne. Of these the Pourtalet has been but recently opened, and is still in process of being widened upon the French side. Moreover, it is so nearly neighbouring to the Somport (there is but 8 miles between them), that it hardly affords a true alternative crossing. A fifth highroad across the watershed is that which crosses it at Porte from the valley of the Ariege into the Cerdagne, but this road is essentially a lateral one. It lies wholly in French territory, it joins the French road through the Cerdagne, and you cannot go by it down the valley of the Segre. It only crosses the watershed on account of an 4o THE PYRENEES accidental divergence of this to the south, in the upper valley of the Ariege. These four carriage roads are all that lead, at present, over the political boundary of the Pyrenees. Another is in construction over the Port of Salau, but it is not finished upon the Spanish side. The French desire several others to go over by the Macadou, Gavarnie, etc., but their own preparations are not completed and the Spanish are not even begun. Apart, however, from these highroads, which are carefully graded, possess an excellent surface, and are traversable by any vehicle, there are a certain number of crossings which travel has rendered familiar, and whose facility is well known. Thus, the Embalire from the Hospitalet on the upper Ariege into the Upper Segre in Andorra is a perfectly easy slope of grass, though high. Again, the Bonaigo, though there have been natural difficulties in the lower valley to be surmounted, and though there is not even a track across it, is a per fectly easy roll of grassy land barely 6000 feet high. A high road leads as far as Esterri on the Spanish side ; another goes from France on the northern side,, right up the valley of the Garonne, beyond Viella, to the paths at the very foot of the pass, so that the gap between the two highways is but a few miles in length. The Port de Venasque again, though but a mule track, is constantly used, and, though steep and high (close upon 8000 feet), presents no difficulties at all, and is almost a highway between the two countries. PHYSICAL NATURE OF PYRENEES 41 The Port de Gavarnie is similarly constantly used and may be taken like any other mountain path. Certain other passes form an intermediate category. They present no difficulties to one who is acquainted with the neighbourhood, but either the whole path is difficult to trace or its last and highest portion is dangerous, or there are precipices upon its lower slope, or in one way and another they cannot be regarded as constant and regular communications of international travel, though the inhabitants use them continually. Of such a kind is the Port d'Ourdayte ; of such a kind are the passages from the Aston into Andorra, and of such a kind are most of the passages just west of the Port de Venasque. If one applied the test of asking where the Pyrenees could be crossed in doubtful weather, not half a dozen places could be found beyond the four high roads ; and even if one were to ask in what spots they could certainly be crossed by a stranger without chance of failure, the number of passages would prove less than a score. All the rest of the ridge from the Sierra del Cadi to the Basque mountains is the rocky wall I have described, with innumerable notches more or less practicable, but all difficult, and nearly all requiring a detailed knowledge of either slope. There are one or two other features needing explanation before I close this introduction to a physical knowledge of the range ; thus the reader should be acquainted with the many groups of lakes and tarns which stand just under the highest peaks and ridges in groups : they are 42 THE PYRENEES highly characteristic of the Pyrenees. There is a cluster of half a dozen at the western base of the Pic du Midi d'Ossau, another cluster sur rounding the neighbourhood of Panticosa, another in the summit of the Encantados between the Maladetta group and the valley of the Noguera, another very famous one well known to fishermen high up in the knot of mountains whose summit is the Carlitte, and there are many isolated small lakes which the map discovers. But whether in groups or isolated, one feature is common to all these lakes of the Pyrenees — first, that none is of any size ; secondly, that all, or very nearly all, are quite in the highest parts of the hills immediately under the last escarpment ; and thirdly, as a consequence, that it is rare to find a lake which the presence of wood and the neighbourhood of habitation render suitable for camping. It is worth remembering that, unlike most moun tain systems, the Pyrenees do not, even in sudden storms, endanger one as a rule by a rapid increase in size of the torrents ; one has not to fear spates so much as one might imagine from the multiplicity of the streams on the northern side or the large area of the valleys on the southern. This truth, of course, must not be exaggerated nor too much advantage taken of it. That part of a stream which will be just traversible after several fine days may become just too violent to cross after' a few hours of rain, but I have never seen those sudden changes of level from a rivulet to a considerable torrent which one may so often see in British PHYSICAL NATURE OF PYRENEES 43 mountains, which are common enough in Scandinavia and even in the Alps, and which are a regular condition of travel in the Rockies. Why this should be so it would be difficult to say. The great area of forest upon the north might account for regularity upon that slope, but it would not account for it upon the Spanish side. And one would imagine that snow in large masses, which is lacking in the Pyrenees and present in the Alps, would rather tend to regulate the flow of rivers ; but whatever be the cause, the evenness of level is what one used to other ranges will first remark when he has to cross and recross under different conditions the higher streams of this chain in summer. There should lastly be noted the absence of any important glaciers, a feature due to the absence of snow fields. On the summit of the Cirque de Gavarnie, on the summits of the Pic d'Enfer and the neighbourhood, on the summits of the Maladetta group, and in one or two other parts, there are small glaciers, but they form no general feature in the landscape of the Pyrenees, and have no effect upon travel. Lastly, the climate of these mountains should be noted : it is a very important part of the conditions which determine travel upon them. The rain-bearing winds blow from the Atlantic eastward, and if the Pyrenees stood upon either slope equally accessible to the sea, it is possible that the Spanish side would be the more deeply wooded 44 THE PYRENEES and the best watered. The sudden trend westward of the Spanish coast, however, at the corner of the Bay of Biscay, causes the wet winds from the Ocean to lose most of their moisture to Galicia and the Asturias, before they can strike the Pyrenees them selves from the south, while the same winds, coming around the range from the north, come upon the Pyrenees immediately after leaving the sea. The result of this is that the French side is through out its length more heavily watered than the Spanish side ; but on either side there are three zones which, though not sharply distinguishable one from the other, are sufficiently remarkable. The first is that of heavy rains, and, what is more important for purposes of travel, of continuous rain and frequent mist. It stretches all along the western end of the range, and only begins perceptibly to change with the heights of the Pic d'Anie and the precipitous barrier of the upper valley of the Aspe. West of this line — that is, in all the Basque-speaking country — you have deep pastures upon either side of the range, and all the marks of the damp in the timber and the mode of building, the vegetable ' growth and the animals of the place. Snow falls later here than in the other parts of the Pyrenees, for the double reason that the neighbourhood of the sea makes the climate milder and that the hills are less high. In most places, for instance, communication is not cut off between the north and south valleys of the Basques, and men can usually cross from Ste Engrace to Isaba at all seasons. PHYSICAL NATURE OF PYRENEES 45 The next zone (the eastern frontier of which is very vague) may be said to stretch, according, to the year and the accident of weather, certainly as far as the Catalans and the valley of the Noguera on the east, and sometimes as far as the valley of the Segre itself. In all this central part of the range (which may normally be said to include more than half its length) the French or northern side is densely wooded and heavily watered, the Spanish side more dry and bare ; but even the French side slowly shows a change of climate as one goes east ward, the forests remain as dense, the rivers as full, but the days are certainly finer and mist less fre quent. On the Spanish side the change as one goes eastward is less striking, because the whole climate is drier. It is to be remarked that if mist gathers upon the northern side of the hills when one is attempting a pass, one may fairly count upon its disappearance upon the Spanish side in this section ; and, in general, the whole of the southern slope, from the valley of the Aragon to that of the Noguera, is of a dry and equal nature, somewhat barren and burnt, not only from the lack of moisture, but also from exposure to the sun. The lack of moisture on the central Spanish slope, by the way, is not a little aided by the curious formation of the frontier of Navarre, and the separation between the Basques and the Aragonese ; this consists in a long ridge of high land, the upper part of which is known as the Sierra Longa, which runs south and a little west from the Pic d'Anie. The effect of this lack 46 THE PYRENEES of moisture and excess of heat upon the central Spanish side is not only felt on the heights of the mountain, but also and more particularly when one approaches the Plains. These in France are northern in type, full of greenery, and amply watered. In Spain, on the contrary, they are quite arid, and if one comes in to Huesca by train upon a Sep tember evening, and looks out the next morning over the flats that run up to the Sierra de Guara, one has all the impressions of a desert, though these lands are heavy corn-bearing lands in the summer. Finally, the third, or eastern, section of the hills is Mediterranean in character throughout. The Canigou is much more heavily watered than the Sierra del Cadi, its corresponding Spanish height. But the olives on the lower slopes, the carpet of vineyards on the flats, the presence everywhere of bright insects, the quality of the light and the aridity of everything which does not happen to be planted with trees, gives to this eastern corner of the Pyrenees the same aspect that you may notice on the Mediterranean hills of Southern France, Liguria, or Algeria or the Balearic Islands, for all these landscapes are of one kind, and binding them all together is not only their burnt red look, but also that tideless intense blue of the Mediterranean, the hot white towns, and everywhere the Lateen sail upon the coasts. These differences of climate also determine the seasons in which the mountains may best be visited, for the Basque district is at your service (especially PHYSICAL NATURE OF PYRENEES 47 in its western part) from the spring to the late autumn of the year ; the central valleys can be everywhere travelled in only from late June to mid-September ; the eastern end, again, from the Segre and beyond it, is open to you from spring to autumn. "~^--.- „/- II THE POLITICAL CHARACTER OF THE PYRENEES ~t£ T 'HE Political character of the Pyrenees corresponds to the Physical character which has been described. The high crest is the bond and division, from the beginning, between two societies which are connected by such common social habits as mountains im pose — which therefore fall under similar local customs, which have a common jealousy of the civilised power on the plains below them, and which support each other in a tacit way against the stranger, yet which, from the be ginning, have different governments and (especially in the high central part) deal with different corporate' traditions — to the north the Bearnese, to the south Aragon. The easier passes to the west and the east of the chain permit a more or less homogeneous com munity to straddle across either end of the mountains, and to hold upon both slopes the sea roads that pass along the Atlantic and the Mediterranean*/ The people thus astraddle of the eastern end have come to be called the Catalans. That astraddle of 48 POLITICAL CHARACTER 49 the western, a highly distinct group of men with language, traditions and physical characteristics wholly their own, has always been known by some title closely resembling their modern name of Basques. The foundation, therefore, upon which Pyrenean History is built, or (to use another metaphor), the germ from which it has developed and which explains its course, is a tripartite division of the inhabitants, corresponding, as I shall presently show, to the physical features of the chain : an eastern or Catalan, a western or Basque, and a central group whose characteristic it is to sub-divide according to the deep valleys into which it is separated, but which falls into two main societies, the one north of the chain which becomes the group of French counties whose typical government is Beam, the other south of the chain, which assumes at last for its title " The Kingdom of Aragon." The first matter to be noticed with regard to this tripartite division is the exactitude of its bound aries. One might imagine that the language, the habits, and the clear characteristics of any group would merge easily into those of its neighbours upon either side. This is not the case. The Basque type — much the most particular — ceases abruptly upon the watershed between the Gave d'Oloron and the Gave d'Aspe to the north of the range, upon the watershed between the Veral and the Esca to the south of it. The Catalans, with a dialect, mind, and dress wholly their own, are found to the north from the sea up to the Col de Puymorens, and every- 4 50 THE PYRENEES where east of the Carlitte mountains ; in the Ariege valley and just over these heights, and on the further side of that Col, they are changed. To the south of the range they extend everywhere from the sea to the valley of the Ribagorza. Cross westward from that Catalan valley to the Esera. There, after hours of scrambling, down by the rocks and deserted tarns, you may towards evening find a man ; that man will show the slow gestures, the silence, and the elaborate courtesy of Aragon. The mountain ridges which divide these various peoples are sufficient to mark their boundaries ; but they do not suffice to explain why the Catalan, the Basque, the Aragonese, the Bearnais should cease suddenly here or there. True, the high lateral ridges which are so striking a peculiarity of the Pyrenees form barriers with difficulty passed, but these barriers are found just as high and just as precipitous and savage between two valleys of the same speech and nation as between two of different allegiance. Thus the wild jumble of mountains, " the Enchanted Range," cuts off the Catalans of Esterri from the Catalans of the Ribargozana. To pass them is something of a feat for anyone not of these hills — for much of the year they are closed to the native inhabitants. Their passage is hardly more of a task or more precipitous than the passage from Aragonese Venasque to Aragonese Bielsa, or from Bearnais Gabas, in the Val d'Ossau, to Bearnais Urdos, in the Val d'Aspe. An explanation of the unity which rules over each group, Basque, Central and Catalan, can only THE PIC D'ANIE FROM OLORON POLTTTC-AL CHARACTER 51 be given by referring each to the plains at the mouths of the valleys. It is the towns at the entry of these plains that form the markets and rallying places of the mountaineers and that determine their groupings. Oloron is the link between the two Bearnais valleys I have mentioned. Urgel binds Catalan Andorra to Catalan Esterri. Why, how ever, the groups should lie exactly where they do it is impossible to determine, for no records reach beyond the Romans. All we can say is that the Pic d'Anie, the first high peak east ward from the Mediterranean, forms the boundary stone of the Basques, as it does the chief physical mark dividing the high central ridge from the easier western passes ; that the tangle of difficult and im possible peaks just eastward of the Maladetta are the boundary of Catalan south of the range, the similar but less abrupt tangle of the Carlitte, their boundary upon the north. How these nations arose, whence they wandered, whether their differentiation has arisen upon the spot out of an earlier homogeneity or is due to the conflict of invaders — of all this we know nothing. The place names of the Pyrenees, like those of all Spain, and half Gascony, do indeed afford a curious speculation which arises from the high pro portion of names that are certainly Basque, though out of Basque territory. Of this language I shall write later : for my present purpose the point I would desire the reader to note is the sharp contrast which exists between that idiom and the idioms around it. There is no mistaking a Basque word, 52 THE PYRENEES and yet these are found in all the Pyrenean range and to the north and south of them in -a hundred place names, attached to hills, rivers and towns where Basque has been unknown throughout all recorded history. It' is even plausibly . suggested that the Latin " Vascones," the French "Gascon" is equivalent to " Basque," and the late Mr York Powell, the Regius Professor of History at Oxford, would say in speaking upon this matter that "Gascon was Latin spoken by Basques." He possessed that type of education, rare or unknown in our universities, which made him capable of individual judgment in departments of living knowledge where his colleagues could but repeat words taught them from a book. This quality reposed upon a wide acquaintance with all matters of European interest. His diverse reading and considerable travel enabled him to balance human evidence in a way hopeless to his less fortunate neighbours in the University, and his conclusion on this important detail of history has always recurred to me when I have examined some new point in the early history of these mountains. There must, however, be set against the general conclusion that the Basques are the remnant of a people once universal from the Garonne to the Pyrenees, and throughout the Iberian Peninsula, the fact that they present a marked physical type utterly distinct from others upon every side. That a race of such a character, vigorous, attached to the soil, in no way nomadic, should have abandoned a large territory is difficult to believe; moreover, there is no case in all the recorded history POLITICAL CHARACTER 53 of Western Europe of one people ousting another, and the process is manifestly physically impossible, save among nomads. Jews or Arabs could pro pagate and even believe such a theory. To Europeans it is laughable : the peasants and cities of Europe never have been, nor ever can be, largely displaced. All we know is that these place names exist throughout Spain and all over the Pyrenees, and that the million or so who speak the language whence such names are derived now occupy a tiny corner only of the vast territory over which those names are spread. The rest is guesswork. Ignorant as we are of the origin of the differen tiation between Basque, Bearnais, Catalan and Aragonese, an historical fact quite certain — though no document proves it — is the extreme antiquity of these classes of men. That all Pyrenean history reposes upon their separate existence must be evident to anyone who has watched the commercial manner, the mercantile vivacity, the whole mentality of the Catalan, and has contrasted it with the quiet chivalry of Aragon. Different military fortunes, different economic outlets, and different accidents of central government may possibly account within the historic period for the contrast between the Aragonese and the people of Beam, Bigorre or Comminges. No such forces can account for the gulf that cuts off the Catalan and the Basque at either end of the chain from the inhabitants of its high central portion. Infinite time is the maker of states, and two thousand years could never have 54 THE PYRENEES determined societies so sharply separate. We must regard their constant and immemorial presence in the Pyrenees as the first and enduring principle to guide us in the history of those mountains. From this fundamental truth, which leads the prehistoric into the historic, one must proceed to another political fact of high importance, which is that while the watershed of the range has but partially separated customs and local thought, and that only in the centre of the range, it has neces sarily served as a political boundary whenever a high civilisation found it necessary to establish such a strict line. The boundary and the watershed may not exactly coincide — they do not exactly coincide even in the highly organised condition of modern society ; but in the two historical periods of strict policy, the Roman and our own, the crest of the range has marked, and marks, an obvious boundary for most of its length. The political distinction between Hispania and Gaul cut the Basque nation into two, following the mountains from Roncesvalles to the Pic d'Anie : it cut the Catalan people into two, following the water parting from the two Nogueras to the Mediterranean. It followed the central chain, indifferent to the similarity or difference between the northern and the southern valleys. To-day the political distinction between Spain and France follows nearly the same line. The reason of this was, and is, twofold. First, that a clear physical boundary easily definable and of its nature permanent — the crest of a chain, a broad river, or what not — necessarily recommends itself to PCTLTTTCSTL CHARACTER 55 a bureaucracy in search of simplicity and economy in the work of a great political machine. We see it in the new countries to-day, where the instinct of organised government for easily definable and exact limits takes refuge in establishing parallels of latitude as state boundaries in the absence of marked physical lines. Secondly, in the case of mountains, and especially of mountains as sharp and as boldly set as are the Pyrenees, the fatigue of climbing, the absence of carriageways, made each valley dependent for its connection with the central government upon some town of the plains, and the authority of a provincial magistrate could not but run, as ran the physical instruments of his rule, up from Huesca northward to Salient — for instance, or up from Jaca to Canfranc, and so to the summit of the ridge ; or up from Oloron southward to Accous, and so to Urdos. As the messengers, writs, powers of each proceeded, the way would become harder, the pro gress more doubtful. It was obvious and necessary that the boundary of either jurisdiction should lie upon the pass. And though the inhabitants of the northern and the southern valleys might be accus tomed to a regular intercourse across the crest, the Roman agents of a distant central government could not but have depended upon cities far removed to the south and to the north of the watershed, as to-day the police of Tardets, let us say, and of Isaba, two towns of one speech, refer respectively through Pau and through Pamplona to Paris and to Madrid. It is in the interplay of these two jarring political 56 THE PYRENEES forces, the permanent national seats of Basque, Catalan, etc., and the use of the range as a political or official boundary, that the political character of the Pyrenees resides ; and as their history begins with the Romans, to whom we owe the first knowledge of the Pyrenean people and the first use of the Pyrenean boundary, it will be well to consider it under territories divided as the Romans divided them, by the main range, and to follow first the development of the northern slope. The historical origins of the French Pyrenees are sharply divided in history by that wall which cuts oft all that Rome made from' all that Rome inherited. Rome made of the barbarians a new, world, but before she began that task Rome had inherited everywhere within a march of the Mediterranean a belt of land whose civilisation was similar to, always as old as, and sometimes older than, her own. It was a municipal civilisation dependent Upon the arts and religion proper to a city state. It built, whether temples or ships, as Rome would build them : it was one thing ; it is almost one thing to-day ; and its bond at Antioch as at Saguntum, at Marseilles as at Athens or Alexandria, was, and is, the universal water of the Mediterranean. To such cities and their territories Rome fell heir. Little proceeded from her to them save first the sense of unity, and later the Faith, and of the whole system, the belt which stretches from Valencia to Genoa, now broadening to the plains of Nernosus (Nfmes), now narrowing to the rocky ledge of the Portus Veneris (Port Vendres), concerns the first POLITICAL CHARACTER 57 evidence of Pyrenean history ; for it was from a corner of this belt — between Tarragona and Narbonne — that the advance of civilisation inland and along the Chain proceeded. A century before the four imperial centuries which made our Christian world, a century before Augustus Caesar, Rome had fully occupied and impressed that soil — to the south Gerona and the Catalan fields, to the north the rich floor which lies under the Canigou and has come to be called the Rousillon. Thence the Roman advance north of the hills proceeded. The chief town of the sea-plain — whose name " Illiberis " is so strongly Basque in form — Rome took for the central municipality of that plain, and made it the capital of the coastal district. This hill and citadel, at which Hannibal had halted a hundred years before, preserved as a bishopric for thirteen hundred years a memory of the Roman order. Constantine formed its diocese, rebuilt it, gave it his mother's name of Helena. The sea by which it lived has withdrawn from it. It has sunk to be a little country town, " Elne." Roscino, which lay also upon the coast march of Hannibal, has sunk to something smaller still, yet, by some accident, gave the province, in the dark ages, its name of Rousillon which it still retains. These two towns, the fruitful plain about them, the Port of Venus (which is now Port Vendres), formed the municipal structure of this district, the last corner of the great province whose headship lay at Narbonne. Its nominal boundaries included all the vale of the 58 THE PYRENEES Tet ; it extended as far as now extends the Catalan language, and was bounded, as that is bounded, by the great form of the Carlitte and its high lakes and snows. All between that mountain and the sea, all the eastern decline of the range and the slope north of it, was ancient land, and had been ploughed and held and walled by men of the Mediterranean civilisation long before Rome inherited it. With the much longer stretch that runs from the upper Ariege to the Atlantic it was very different. This was of what Rome made, not of what Rome inherited. Before the coming of Roman govern ment it was barbarous, and the many tribes or petty states, whose number various guesses of antiquity record (they were perhaps as numerous in their subdivision as the valleys), stand in three main groups when first the civilisation to the east of them began to record their existence : these three were first the Convense, south of Toulouse, and all about the upper waters of the Garonne. Next to these came the Auscians, and finally, over the Basque end of the hills towards the ocean, was the seat of the Tarbelli. The whole point of view of antiquity differed from ours in speaking of such tribes, nor is it easy to pick out from the scraps of observation that have come down to us the kind of information that we want. Sometimes a name survives, sometimes it does not ; sometimes we get a hint of a variety of race, most often we lack it. It is the very meagre- ness and eccentricity of the information upon a barbarous race and custom which affords such opportunities to our dons for those forms of POLITICAL CHARACTER 59 speculation which they love to put forward as dogma, the most absurd example of which, perhaps, is the interpretation and enlargement of Tacitus' " German ia." It is therefore exceedingly difficult to know of what kind were these people beyond the old Roman pale. We do not know what language they spoke. We only know that, like other Gallic communities, they centred round fortified places, that their pacification was easy, and that, like everything else in Western Europe, they were of an unchangeable kind. The whole district between the Garonne and the Pyrenees came to be called, during the first four centuries of our era, " The Nine Peoples." The Convenae are early noted to have attached to them upon their right and upon their left, to east and to west, the Consovanni and the Bigerriones. The first of these were (to follow the high authority of Duchesne) organised as early as the first century ; what is now St Lizier was their old capital and later their bishopric, which takes its present name from Glycerius, a Saint of the sixth century. They held all those hills of' which St Girons close by is now the centre. The Bigerriones are not heard of until the mention of them in the Notitia of the fourth century. They must have held Bigorre, and the three valleys which I have called the valleys of Tarbes. Tarbes — then Turba — was their capital, and was and is their bishopric. The Auscians do not concern us. They and the three groups into which they are later distinguished held the western plains and foot hills. The Tarbelli 60 THE PYRENEES held both the foot hills and the mountains of the west ; their capital was at Dax. They also split into, or are later recognised as three separate groups, making up with the two other sets of three " The Nine Peoples," under which title all this country below the Pyrenees became permanently known. But of the three only the Civitas Benarnensiwm, whence we get the name Beam, and the Civitas Elloronensium, with its capital at Iloro, which has become Oloron, concern us. The capital and soon the bishopric of the Civitas Benarnensiwm was at Lescar, as far as we can make out, and Lescar bore the chief sanctity in Beam until that country was swept by the Reformation. The sovereigns of Beam were buried there, even the Protestant sovereigns, and it remained a bishopric, whose bishop was the President of the Parliament of Beam, until the Revolution ; but it was the Reforma tion which destroyed its original character of a capital. We have therefore, with the earliest ages of our civilisation, five peoples holding the northern Pyrenees, the Consevanni, the Convenae, the people of Bigorre, the Bearnese, and the Elloronians. It is remarkable that in such a list, our Roman originators and their geographers overlooked the Basques. The category ends precisely at the present limit of the Basque tongue. For the Val d'Aspe, of which Oloron is the town, is the first French-speaking valley. Why it is that we hear nothing of the Basques it is difficult to say, especially as the second of the great Roman military roads POLITICAL CHARACTER 61 went right through their country. Bayonne, which is the Basque's town of the plains on the north, is heard of in the fifth century. It has a garrison ; but no bishopric until the tenth. Pam plona, which is their town on the south, was known before the beginnings of our Christian history. But the Basques themselves are not known to us from the Romans. The name of the Consovanni survives locally. The country round St Girons is still all one countryside and called the " Conserans." Of the Convenae we have a pleasant legend in St Jerome telling how Pompey got together all the brigands of the mountains, drove them northward hither, and forced them into a garrison (a stronghold which, like Lyons and the rest, was one of the many " Lugdunums "). It was destroyed early in the dark ages, and later revived by St Bertrand, a little way off in his Episcopal town. Their name survives in the district of Comminges. The Bearnese name of course survives and so does the Bigorrean, while the Elloronean, though no longer the title of a district, is preserved in the town name of Oloron. All this country, not only that of the five tribes along the mountains, but the whole territory occupied by the nine peoples (who afterwards became twelve), lay in a profound peace under Roman rule, and we may be certain of its increasing wealth throughout the first four great formative centuries of our era. The advance of Rome upon the Spanish side was of a very different kind. Rome, after the Carthaginian wars, inherited broad belts of civilised and half 62 THE PYRENEES civilised land. All the Mediterranean slope below the mouth of the Ebro, and a belt quite three days' marches wide inland to the north of that river, was full 'of ancient populated towns, alive with the full civilisation common to every shore of the inland sea. So, we may be certain, were the broad plains of the south where the most complete and earliest absorp tion of the Celtiberian in Roman speech and ideas took place. The advance into the north-west and therefore along the Pyrenees covered more than a century of strict and perpetual warfare, which was intermixed by the civil wars of the Roman com manders. The extremities of the Asturias were reached in the century before the birth of our Lord, but the advance was not, as upon the north, a rapid expansion beyond the old boundaries. It took the form of siege after siege and battle after battle, in which those numerous and crushing defeats, which Rome (like every truly military power) reckoned to be a necessary part of history, interrupted the slow progress of her law. The Celt-Iberian towns were walled and strong ; their resistance was painful and tenacious ; there was no sudden illumina tion of a willing people by a new culture, such as had taken place in Gaul, rather was northern Spain kneaded by generations of warfare into the stuff of the Empire. When the work was accomplished, it was complete throughout the Peninsula ; and though the silent strength of the Basques prevented the Roman language from invading their valleys, the ad ministration of the whole territory south of the POLITICAL CHARACTER 63 Pyrenees must have been as exact and as bureau cratic as that to the north of it. There was, however, this great difference due to local topography between the Spanish and the French hills, that the municipalities upon which Rome stretched her power, as upon pegs, were less common, were farther apart, and approached less nearly to the central ridge upon the southern than upon the northern side. What you see to-day south of the Pyrenees is what you might have seen at any time in the last 2000 years — a very few scattered towns, still the centres of government, and all the rest rare isolated villages living their own life, free from the criminal, and, by a regular payment of small taxes, half independent of the civil, law. Alone of the true mountain sites, Jaca in the middle, Pamplona and Urgel at either extremity, were bishoprics. Huesca, St Laurence's town, a fourth centre, is in the plains. For the rest the confused storm of hills ending in those parallel ranges, pushed right out on to the burnt flats of the Ebro, forbade the establish ment of a municipal civilisation. Upon all this land to the north and to the south of the mountains came, after five hundred years of a high civilisation, the slow decline of culture, and the infiltration of the barbarians. In a sense the nominal divisions between the barbaric kingdoms has its importance, for they help us to understand changes of dynasty and of custom. But they were of no political effect. The mass of the people knew little of the chance soldiers who, with their mixed retinues of Roman, Breton, German, Slav, and the 64 THE PYRENEES rest — some able, some not able to read the letters of Rome — sat in the old seats of office, issued their writs through the still surviving Roman Bureaucracy and from palaces which were but those of decayed Roman governors. For the greater part of Western Europe, and especially of Gaul, this process of decay was one into which Europe slowly dipped as into a bath of sleep, and out of which it rose more rapidly through the energy of the Crusades and of the renewed Pontificate into the splendour of the Middle Ages. But the Pyrenees suffered in this matter a peculiar fate. When Spain was overrun by the Mohammedan, and when in the first generation of the eighth century the Asiatic with his alien creed and morals had even swept for a moment into Gaul, the Pyrenees became a march : at first the rampart, later, when they were fully held, the bastion of our civilisation against its chief peril. It is this episode by which the Pyrenees became the military base of the advance against Islam — an episode covering the whole life of Charlemagne and after him the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries — which gives them their legendary atmosphere and fills all their names with romance. The northern slope, during the long business by which Gaul became itself again, was but a remote border province. The new life of Gaul, after the shock which had so nearly destroyed Europe was over, sprang from Paris. The influence of Paris radiating upon every side built up again accuracy of knowledge, unity of government, and general law. To this influence the Pyrenees seemed the most POLITICAL CHARACTER 65 remote of boundaries. The valleys were little affected by the growth of the French Monarchy ; they remained for centuries broken into a maze of half-republican customs, of tiny independent lord ships, guarded and menaced by separate and jealous walled municipalities upon the plains — all of this vaguely and slowly coalesced into larger districts, doubtful of their sovereignty and perpetually struggling upon their boundaries and their sub- boundaries. In this development nothing was more striking than the way in which this remote border at first looked rather to the south, where the interest of religious war was ever present, than to the north, whence government was slowly coming towards it. The French Pyrenees fought and felt with the whole range, not with the plains. Jaca in the worst time, when it was the only mountain bishopric free from the Mahommedan, counselled with and was per haps suffragan to Eauze. Urgel sat in the provin cial Synod of Narbonne. As the success of the Reconquista pushed the noise of crusade further and further from the range, the northern valleys looked more and more towards their northern towns. Their nominal allegiances grew stricter — as of Foix to Toulouse — and every French bishopric was bound more and more to its northern metro politan, the Spanish sees to the new metropolitans of the Ebro. At last an issue was joined between Northern and Southern France of the first moment to the unity of Gaul itself and of all Christendom. The 5 66 THE PYRENEES Crusades, the knowledge of the East, the awakening of the intelligence and of its appetites, had bred throughout the wealthy towns of what had been from the beginning Roman land, a desire to be rid of the restraints of fixed religion. The South of France began to move towards its pagan past. It was a movement which had already had its strange echo in the north, a movement which in England had only been pulled up at the last moment by the martyrdom of St Thomas. Here in Gaul, in the sunlight, and backed by so much gold, the rational and sensual revolt became a larger thing, and when various sources of disruption, speculation, and achievement had met in one stream, it was commonly called the Albigensian movement. The issue was decided, after heavy fighting, in the early thirteenth century, and the victory was with the cause of the unity of Europe. Toulouse (the true centre of the storm) and its lord were conquered. Northern barons swept down, held no small part of the southern land, and from that time onward the French Pyrenees are normally dependent on Paris. Two exceptions survived, the straddle of the Basque across the chain and the straddle of the Catalan. The Basque had his country of Navarre upon either side of the chain ; with it werit Beam, and these were independent of the French crowm The Catalan, able to traverse the chain by the flat floor of the Cerdagne, preserved the unity of his mountain province, and the Roussillon counted with Spain. Apart from this easy passage into the Roussillon from the south, by way of the POLITICAL CHARACTER 67 Cerdagne, the isolation of the Roussillon was the more easily accomplished from the long spur of the Corbieres, which runs north and east towards the sea and cuts off from France the wealthy plain of which Elne had once been, Perpignan had later become, the capital. This arrangement endured, in name at least, until the seventeenth century. The last heir of Navarre was also the heir nearest to the French throne at the close of the religious wars, and as Henry IV. of France he united the two crowns. A man who, as a boy, might have rejoiced at that union, could have lived to see, under Mazarin, the signing of the Treaty of the Pyrenees, which gave the Roussillon also to the French Crown. The date of this final arrangement coincided with what is ironically called "The Restoration" in England: this date, which definitely closed the power of the English Monarchy, and substituted for it the power of a wealthy oligarchic class, coincides throughout Europe with the struggle between absolute central government for the equal service of all, and local aristocratic custom. In England the latter con quered ; in Spain and France the debate was decided in favour of the former. Such centralised governments could .but further define and insist upon a new boundary, and from that time onward, for 250 years that is, the Pyrenees have been once more as they were under the clear ad ministration of Rome, a fixed political boundary ; and, save certain exceptions that will be mentioned later, everything north of the chain has been ad- 68 THE PYRENEES ministered from Paris, and has slowly accepted, side by side with the local tongue, the tongue of Northern France and the habit of a centralised French" government. South of the chain the process by which Christen dom recrystallised out of the flux of the dark ages, followed a different course ; it was a process to which Spain owes all her national characteristics, for out of the mountains a Spanish nation was formed, and from its various communities, as from roots, the Catholic kingships grew southward until they once more reached Gibraltar. To understand this process, it is necessary to consider factors absent in the topography of the Gaulish plains, and especially the factor of that un conquerable tangle of mountains which occupies all the north-western triangle of the Peninsula. The ocean boundaries of the Iberian quadrilateral are nearly square to the points of the compass. It is not so with the internal divisions that mark off its central part. Here the edges of the high and arid plateaux, the deep trenches of the rivers, the mountain ranges, the boundaries of the plains at their feet, run slantways from north-east to the south west. This slant determined the boundaries of Mohammedan expansion, while the Asiatics and Africans still retained the energy to advance ; it determined the successive frontiers of the Re- Conquest, as our race slowly ousted the invader and reached at last the sea- coast of Granada. The Arab and the Moor were masters of Narbonne and all the Roussillon on the east, when, on the west, they POLITICAL CHARACTER 69 could not cross the mouth of the Mulio a hundred miles to the south. They were at Jaca within a day's march of the watershed along the Roman Road, when, to the immediate west of it, they could not hold Fuente ; they could not even reach Pamplona, though that western town is two marches at least from the main crest. Toledo was reconquered a generation before Saragossa, though Saragossa is by nearly two degrees more northerly, because Toledo was west of Saragossa. The last Mohammedan king dom was crowded, after the thirteenth century, into the extreme south-east, as the surviving remnant of the free Europeans of the Peninsula had been crowded into the extreme north-west in the eighth. If the boundaries of undisputed Mohammedan rule be traced for various dates, the receding wave will be found in general to follow curves that lead, 70 THE PYRENEES like the main features of the land, from the north east downwards towards the Atlantic. This main character in the geography and history of Spain, the south-westerly trend of the mountain ridges, largely determined the fortunes of those fighting bands of mountaineers who ceaselessly pressed southward until they had wholly driven out the invader and reconstituted the unity of Europe. It determined the first advance to be, not from the Pyrenees, but from the Asturias, and the first captain connected with the Christian resistance after the overwhelming of all that civilisation, Pelayo (from whose blood Leon, Castille, Aragon, and Navarre descend) had his stronghold, not in the Pyrenees, but a week's march to the west, along the Biscayan coast at Cangas. Within the decade of the invasion he had checked the invader in his own hills at Covadonga. All the eighth century is full of that successful spirit in the north-west — but nowhere else. Alfonso, the husband of Pelayo's daughter, struck the note with his boast, "No pact with the infidel," and the tradition or prophecy that Christendom would regain the south, springs from him. He conquered down to the Douro, over what is to-day the mountain frontier of Portugal ; he began those long cavalry raids into the heart of Moorish land, He rode into Astorga, into Zamora, into Segovia itself — within sight of the central range of the Guadarama : riding back with booty, harassed and harassing, nowhere permanently fixing himself save in the towns of the west, upon the Lower Douro, but building on the POLITICAL CHARACTER 71 ridges of his defence, those block-houses, the "Castille" from which, long after, the frontier province began to take its name. All the ninth century that spirit grew. The body of St James was found under the Star at Compostella — its shrine became the national sacrament as it were, a perpetual refreshment for arms, and a symbol, in its wild isolation among the rocks of Galicia, of the impregnable places from which the Reconquista drew its ardour. The advance continued. The frontier counties consolidated and were named. Leon was permanently held, Burgos was founded. If one takes for a date the opening years of the tenth century, just after Alfred had saved England also from the pagan, and just after the Counts of Paris had saved northern Gaul, there is a full Spanish kingdom standing up against the Mohammedan power, a king has been crowned in Leon and has died in peace at Zamora. The cavalry raids have pushed — once at least — to Toledo. All the north-west lay permanently Christian beyond a line that ran from the corner of Gaul to the Douro and down the Douro to the sea ; and this united triangle of Roman land formed a base from which the pushing back of the alien could proceed. How did this disposition of forces affect the Pyrenees? Let it first be noted that the newly organised Christian country lay wholly to the west of. the range. In the Pyrenees themselves the Mohammedan flood had washed every , valley. 72 THE PYRENEES The crest had been traversed and retraversed ; both slopes were for a moment held by the invaders. Abd-ur-rahman had sent or led his thousands by the Roman roads of Roncesvalles and Urdos and over the Ostondo and the lower passes of the west. The mule tracks of these rocks had been twice crowded with the white cloaks of the Arabs. In the east, Narbonne was held for fifty years, and with it all the Catalans. Even in the high centre of the chain, where there is no passing between the Somport and the Cerdagne, wherever there was something to rob or to destroy, the invaders had penetrated. There was not here, as in the Asturias, untouched land. When the crest of the wave retreated, when the Mohammedan came back defeated from Gaul, the high valleys attained — it may be guessed — a savage independence. Jaca has legends of its battle at the very beginning of the Independence, before Charlemagne had come to the rescue, and from all the valleys of the Sobrarbe, bands of men must have been perpetually volunteering for skirmishes down into the plains. Navarre was the natural leader of the movement, the largest and the most fertile belt of Christian land, but the little lordship upon the Aragon, fight ing down south and east towards the Ebro, the western count of the Asturias fighting down south and west, cut off the advance of the Basques ; and though Navarre in the period of birth and turmoil which is that of Gregory VI I. 's reform of the .Papacy, of the establishment in England and in POLITICAL CHARACTER 73. Sicily of Norman power, and of preparation for the Crusade, was the head of all the southern Pyrenees and called itself an " Empire," it was blocked by the double line of advance, and the Basques, upon the foundation of whose tenacity and courage, as upon a pivot, the Reconquest had pro ceeded, took little more part in the wars ; but the Basque stirp of Navarre gave its first king to Aragon, and the son of that first king, Sancho, raided so far as Huesca and was killed beneath its walls ; his son again, Peter, took the town two years later just as the hosts of Europe were gathering for that first great march upon Jerusalem which threw open the curtain of the Middle Ages ; and his son, Alfonso (who had united in one crown Leon and Aragon), went forward under his great name of the Batallador, and twenty years later (1 1 19) swept into Saragossa, the last of the Mohammedan strongholds in the north. Thus were the west and the centre of the Spanish slope recovered for our race and civilisation. Meanwhile Catalonia upon the east had been since Charlemagne, since the early ninth century, a march of Christendom ; but it was not until the same creative period which had brought forth the leadership of Navarre and the advance from Aragon, the Normans, Hildebrand, and the resurrection of Europe, that Catalonia began to go forward. Its first true monarch was- Berenguer the Old, who lived round and about the date of Hastings, and was first master of the whole province. He also founded and 74 THE PYRENEES maintained the Cortes of Barcelona. His son, for a moment, raided the Balearics, and when he died Catalonia and Aragon, united under one crown, saw the alien finally driven from these mountains. All the plain from far beyond the base of the hills was now permanently held by strong and united kingships which pressed forward to the Ebro valley, and finally saved all the Spanish province of Europe. A lifetime later, the last of the foreign armies had been broken at Navas de Tolosa. Far off in the south Islam lingered, tolerated and on sufferance, but Spain was re conquered. For just 500 years Spain, a quarter of all that makes up our civilisation, had lain in peril between our religion and the other. I have said that with 'the thirteenth century, the Albigensian crusade upon the north, the destruc tion of Islam upon the south (the two successes were contemporaneous), the Pyrenees ceased forever to be a march between two civilisations, and became a mere political boundary between two provinces of Europe ; and I have said that the nature of that boundary was finally fixed in the seventeenth century, or rather during a period which stretches from the close of the sixteenth to just after the middle of the seventeenth. If that political boundary be examined to-day it will be found to coincide with the watershed, save at certain particular points, the character of which merits examination. I take for my boundaries, as throughout this book, Mount Urtioga on the west, and the beginning of — The Upper Irojfy valley <»» r on Southern slope /-/iVV-;^ French r VaJGar.'os on the northern slope yet Spanish j Frontier and Watershed identical thus (!*££_»£#€£ ¦< Frontier only \Watej-shad only ...... Very small Jasse containing source of the Gave d' Oloron on northern slope yet Spanish Upper vaJfey of the. S&qre on southern, slope- yet French anacajfed "the. French Cerdaujne " > of Ictnd on ern slope, at source of Ariege given to Andorra. Plan K 76 THE PYRENEES the Alberes on the east, which may conveniently be placed at the Couloum. In this distance, there is a slight discrepancy between the political boundary and the watershed here and there in the Basque valleys. Mount Urtioga itself, though upon the watershed, is entirely in Spain, and the sources of the torrents which feed the valley of Baigorry all rise a mile or so beyond the political frontier, which is here com posed of two straight conventional lines. The head waters of the Nive are wholly in Spain also, as is all the left bank of that river to a point four miles below Val Carlos. The right bank, however, is French, so far as the torrent Garratono. Thence forward from the sources of that torrent (that is, upon the Atheta) the frontier now follows the watershed, now leaves the very head-springs of the torrents in Spain until, a few miles further east, it makes a considerable invasion of Spanish territory, < not because the frontier itself bends, but because the watershed here goes northward in a half circle. All the upper valley of the Iraty is politically in France ; but from the Pic d'Orhy, where a definite? ridge begins, it follows the frontier strictly for mile after mile (with the exception of a curious little enclave which gives Spain two or three hundred yards of the head- waters of the Aspe), and there is no further exception throughout all the high Pyrenees until one strikes the curious anomaly of the Val d' Aran. I have said in describing the physical structure of the Pyrenees that the two main axes of those POLITICAL CHARACTER 77 mountains were joined by a sort of fault, a serpentine bridge of high land which united them from the Sabouredo to a point ten miles northward, the Pic De l'Homme overhanging the Pass of Bonaigo. The valley caught on the French side of this twist is the Val d'Aran, containing the upper waters of the French river Garonne. Geographically of course it is French, but politically it is Spanish so far as a certain gorge where is a bridge called the King's Bridge, and where the Garonne pours through a narrow gate of rock into its lower valley. The story goes that when the Treaty of the Pyrenees was in act of negotiation some one said diplomatically and casually to the French negotiators, " The Val d'Aran of course you regard as Spanish," and they, knowing no more of these mountains than of the mountains of the moon, said, " Of course." The true reason is rather that the gate in the mountains cuts off this upper valley from the lower gorges of the river much more than the low, easy, and grassy saddle of the Boniaigo cuts it off from the Spanish valley of Eneou just to the east of it ; and though the Val d'Aran may be geographically or rather hydrographically French, it is topographically Spanish, which is as though one were to say that Almighty God made it so. Another exception and a big one to the rule that the frontier follows the watershed, is, of course, to be found in the French Cerdagne. The true water shed here is coincident with the frontier as far as the Pic de la Cabanette in latitude 42° 35' 30". The watershed then goes on over the Port de Saldeu, 78 THE PYRENEES along the crest of the Port d'Embalire to the Pic Negre, and there it turns to the east along the ridge across the saddle of which goes the high road over the Col called Puymorens. It follows that ridge, not to the summit of the Carlitte, but to a lower peak called the Madides, three miles to the north east, runs along two miles of a high rocky ledge to the Pic de la Madge, and then there follows a difficult sort of hydrographical No Man's Land, the centre of which is the great marsh of Pouillouse, nor can you tell exactly where the watershed is for some miles in the forest below that marsh, for the same damp flat ground sends water into the valley of the Tet and into the valley of the Segre. Three miles to the south-west, however, it is clearly defined again in a low rounded lump of wooded land, it passes over the flat Col de la Perche and then follows the crest still going south-west up to the Pic d'Eyne, where again it becomes the frontier, and the frontier it remains until it reaches the Mediterranean. From the Pic de la Cabanette, all the way to the Pic d'Eyne, France and Mazarin politically took in by the Treaty of the Pyrenees a belt to the south of the watershed and extending down to a con ventional line which left Bourg- Madame French and Puigcerda Spanish ; an exception in this is a small strip beyond the Pic de la Cabanette, on the left bank of the Ariege, which, though geographically French, was given to Andorra, so that Andorra might smuggle more comfortably over the passes. The causes of this annexation of the French THE CULMINATING POINT OF THE RANGE POLITICAL CHARACTER 79 Cerdagne by Mazarin are clear enough when one remembers that the Roussillon (which is geographi cally French) passed to France by the same treaty. There is no way from the valley of the Ariege into the Roussillon except by going round this corner of the Cerdagne, at least no practicable carriage way ; the only other way is the difficult and high short cut described later hi* this book. If the frontier be carefully noted, it will be seen that it is designed merely to preserve a right of passage over this road. Jurisdiction was only claimed by France over the villages, and Llivia, being a town, stands in an island of Spanish territory in the midst of the French Cerdagne, as will be seen later when I speak of this district in detail. Such is the present political aspect of the Pyrenees, with Toulouse for their great French town in the plains, 60 miles away to the north, Saragossa for their great Spanish town in the plains, 100 miles away to the south, a string of towns just at their feet (Bayonne, Pau, Tarbes, St Girons, etc.) on the northern side ; on the south a rarer and less connected group, (Pamplona, Huesca, Bar- bastro, Lerida, etc. ) ; and against the Mediterranean the district of Gerona, shut in by the Sierra del Cadi (with its outposts) and the Alberes upon the Spanish side, the town of Gerona its capital ; the Roussillon, with Perpignan for its capital, shut in between the Alberes and the Corbieres on the French side. Ill MAPS ON E of the first ideas that come to a man when he thinks of wandering about an unknown bit of country is that it will be more fun if he does not take a map. There are places of which this is true : you discover for yourself, and it is more exciting. But it is not true of the Pyrenees. So little is it true of the Pyrenees that those who have no maps, that is, the local peasantry, never traverse a country until they know it well, and when they get into new country learn all they can from its inhabi tants, get themselves accompanied if possible, and keep to a path. You will find that the hunters who know the mountains are always local men. The Pyrenees are built in such a fashion and on such a scale that you not only can, but must lose yourself in the course of any long wandering unless you have some sort of guide to your hand. There is only one kind of travel off the road which you can possibly undertake without a map, and that will be pottering about one small district with a porter, a friend, or a mule to carry a tent and plenty of provisions ; but if you are attempting several crossings of the ridges, and especially if you are attempting such a task on foot, a map is absolutely necessary to you. MAPS 8 1 Whatever kind of map you take with you into the hills, you must also take with you a small compass, and that is why I mention that toy later in talking of equipment. You are perpetually asking yourself, as you compare the map with the landscape, which peak is which, and it is often essential to get the right one on the right bearings. Nothing is easier than to mistake one part of a ridge for another. If you are in bad weather or in the dark or enclosed, the compass gives you a general direction, as for instance upon the track I describe later in the great wood going to Foumigieres, and the compass further tells you at what point your valley begins to turn in a certain direction. Now a bend of this sort is very often the only indication you have for the exact place in which to branch off for a port, or to look for a cabane. Remember the variation, which is on the average for this range about 14 degrees, that is, the true north is 14 degrees to the right of the direction the needle points to. A map or maps, then, you must determine to take, and it next remains to examine what sort of maps are available for the whole range. There are but three of the greater countries in the whole world (to my knowledge, at least) which have sufficient and numerous maps, these are England, France, and Germany. I can imagine what reproach and criticism such a statement may bring from those who know the admirable work done in India, and the special but laborious surveys of, Italy and of the United States. But I do say 6 82 THE PYRENEES (as far as my travels extend) that maps valuable for the purposes of a man on foot and covering a whole country are confined to these three among the greater states. To tell the truth, there is but one large country that possesses perfect ones, and that is our own. Nowhere else in the world (to my knowledge, at least) has a complete survey of every detail of the soil been made, as it has been made, under the Crown of the United Kingdom. And if foreigners judge, as they are apt to judge, of our cartography by the excellent one-inch scale map alone, they should remember that we also possess the six-inch, and in some cases the twenty-five inch to supplement it. Neither France nor Germany can boast of such a survey. Now let me abandon this digression and discuss what maps are valuable in the Pyrenees. First, upon the Spanish side, there is nothing. Every one who tries to get a good cartographical indication of the approaches to the Pyrenees upon the Spanish side is baffled. Outside of my own experience, I have heard of many attempts and they have all failed. There is indeed a legend of a wonderful military map in Madrid or elsewhere, but I have never seen it, nor have I ever seen any one who has seen it. There is a good contour map extending outwards from Madrid in various sections, but it does not get anywhere near the Pyrenees. There is a geological map of Spain upon which some people fall back in despair, but it tells you very little about Spain except the geology. It is on an extremely large scale, ~^ if I remember right. MAPS 83 and it is horrible to have to use it even for the most general purposes of travel. There is a large general map of Spain, drawn in Germany, which is equally useless for the pedestrian ; it comprises the whole country within a space that could easily be hung over the chimney-piece of a small room. In a word, there is no map of Spain for the foot traveller upon the Spanish side. Everything of that kind which exists so far is (I again qualify the statement by adding " to my knowledge ") of French workmanship. It is therefore the French maps which the traveller must consider, and I will detail these in their order with their respective advantages. It must first be remarked that these maps are to be regarded as official and unofficial ; the official ones should be divided into those proceeding from the French War Office and those proceeding from the French Home Office. The importance of this will appear in a moment. Of the unofficial maps (which are very numerous) the most important by far is that published and printed by Schrader, and this is important only because it gives contours (at rather large intervals, it is true) on the Spanish side as well as upon the French. The map can be ordered of Messrs Stanford, and costs twelve shillings for the whole six sheets. Its value consists in giving the traveller details of all the difficult central bit between Salient and the Encantados. The French contours, as will im mediately appear, are easily obtainable elsewhere ; 84 THE PYRENEES but to know the Spanish side, the difficulties of the way between Panticosa (for instance) and Bielsa, Schrader's map is a great advantage ; it lis final on the heights, the steepness, and the changes in direction of the way. The official maps consist first of the War Office maps, the scale of which is -—^ and ^^. The first thing to appreciate with regard to the French maps, is that all of them whether from the Home Office or from the War Office (and in a country such as France the work of these two departments is very different), are based upon the 53^, survey. It was this survey, undertaken by the General Staff in the course of the nineteenth century, which formed the basis of every other map that Frenchmen use. Certain of its early details were slightly inaccurate, as the heights of the Pelvoux group in Savoy, which Mr Whymper, when he climbed those mountains, corrected. It is, how ever, the best monument of cartography left by the nineteenth century. Nothing has since appeared to rival it in any country upon the same scale. We must except of course the highly detailed large- scale survey of special districts, which may happen to' be, by a political accident, autonomous and wealthy. Belgium has a far better map, upon which indeed all modern work upon the Belgian battlefields is based. Switzerland also has a better map. But no such large area as that of the French Republic has upon so small a scale (much less than one inch to the mile) so complete a record of every track, wood, habitation, height, and water-course. MAPS 85 The j^s is merely a reduction of this map ; it is pf service to people who motor or bicycle, to any one who uses the high road, and who wishes to be able occasionally to wander into by-paths ; but for little local details and difficulties it should not be con sulted. It is useful advice to any one who desires to know the Pyrenees that he should consult before leaving home a map of the whole range upon the 3^^ scale, but travel in the hills with the ^ scale. The disadvantage, however, of the military map, accurate though it is, and full of detail though it is, lies in two points inseparable from the early con ditions under which it was produced ; the first of these is the use of one colour, that of printers' ink, so that the line marking a stream, a wall, or a path are similar ; the second derives from this, and is the confusion of so many small details, all in one colour and in black. There are no contour lines. The hatching, though bold, does not give exact heights, save where such heights are marked in figures, and what with the lines marking the paths in mountainous districts, the water-courses, the roads, the marks indicating the rocks, habitations, etc., the 8-^ map tends (though it still remains the best map for a very careful student, e.g., for a soldier on manoeuvres) to be somewhat crowded and confused. An appreciation of the demerits of these maps, and perhaps a certain rivalry between the two depart ments, led the French Home Office to undertake an Ordnance Map of its own. This map is in 86 THE PYRENEES various scales, of which the sheets showing the Pyrenees — the only ones that concern us — are in z&z and ^~ Let me explain the general qualities of both and the advantages and disadvantages attaching to either of these. Both are in colours, giving water-courses and lakes in blue, woods in green, roads in red, etc., and that is an enormous and immediate simplifica tion upon the old-fashioned black map. Both are brought up to date with more care than the military map ; both are less crowded with detail, and both indicate such civilian necessities as the telephone, telegraph, post-office, etc. On the other hand, neither contains hatching — the only true way of representing a country side to the eye— and neither gives that minute and exact multiplicity of markings which it is the boast of the military map to afford. The civil map is more practical, the military map more full of duty and more accurate. It must finally be remembered that the scale of the civil maps, even of -^~t is so small as to impede the setting down of details such as we have on a one-inch Ordnance Map. It is three to four times smaller superficially than our official map in England. Nevertheless, for reasons that I shall presently show, it is on the whole the best map to carry in the Pyrenees. The ^^, map is but a reproduction on a smaller scale of the ^^ map. It has the great advantage of contour lines, but the scale is so small and the contours so pressed together, that, though it is invaluable for giving a general and plastic impres- MAPS 87 sion of the chain (to look down on a general map of the Pyrenees on this scale is like looking down on a model of the French side of the range), it is of little use for telling one, as a contour map should tell one, exactly how much higher this spot is than that other spot. When you are climbing and you wish to identify your position, you have usually to estimate comparative heights on a delicate scale and at a short distance, for which the ~^-0 map is of very little use to you. One way of using the contours of the ^^, which is laborious, but not without value, is to trace the deeper contour lines in some particular district, which you are specially studying. These deeper contour lines stand out much more clearly than the inter mediate faint ones, which, as I have said, are too numerous for a mountain district. They can be followed clearly even in the dark shading of a steep ridge, and are set every hundred metres apart. When such a tracing has been made, neglecting the finer intermediate lines, you have a good work ing relief plan of the mountain you propose to deal with. Of all the area open to the climber and the man on foot in the Pyrenees, that upon the Spanish side of the frontier is the larger and wilder, and this for two reasons. First, because property and its attendant limitations is more developed upon the northern slope, so that the vast areas common to all, are, if anything, vaster upon the southern side, and secondly, that the formation of the range between the ramparts above the Ebro and the main chain, 88 THE PYRENEES covers a larger space than that between the main chain and the French plains. Yet, as I have just said, it is on the Spanish side that proper maps are lacking, and one must do the best one can to supplement them by the French extensions. A common plan guides all the French maps in their delineation of territory south of the frontier. Colours, contour lines, hatching, and every detail are omitted. Heights are given in certain cases (but those are rarer of course than on the French side). The names of towns and, in some cases, their telegraphic and postal communications are marked, but upon the whole the Spanish side upon the French maps has far less detail than is accorded for the territory to which the maps directly relate. However, let me explain the various advantages and disadvantages, for use upon the Spanish side, of the four types of French maps I have mentioned, The ^^ of the Ministry of War may be neglected ; whatever use it has upon the French side, it is negligible upon the Spanish. The 3^ map of the Ministry of War marks the main water-courses upon the Spanish side, the main peaks, and the main important ports and cols, with their heights, but it does not afford any indication of the shape of the country. It is a bare white space of paper with but few lines traversing it, one or two names, and one or two numbers on each sheet. On the whole it is better not to use the French military maps for the Spanish side ; here it is the maps of the Ministry of the interior which must chiefly be relied upon. Of these the — l— map is the 100,000 l MAPS 89 best. It is true that the colours, which are so valuable in the differentiation of the French side, are absent upon the Spanish, save in the case of water-courses, which are marked in blue upon either slope of the range. There is no indication of woods upon the Spanish side, as there is upon the French, and as this indication is useful for purposes of camp ing, the loss of it on the south side is often felt. Moreover, the absence of colour upon the Spanish side often makes one misinterpret the nature of the mountains upon these maps, giving to the whole a bare look, since the rocky and bare spaces on the French side are similarly left uncovered. On the other hand, the ^-^ French map does afford upon the Spanish side a very large number of detailed points of information. I will enumerate them in their order. 1. The general shape of the country is indicated by shading, the light being supposed to come (as is the case throughout this series of maps) from the north-west. 2. Steep rocks and cliffs, the presence of which should always be indicated to the traveller, are carefully marked upon either side of the frontier. 3. Paths, the importance of which the reader will presently appreciate, are clearly marked, with all details, as exactly as on the French side. 4. Every habitation is marked, and in the case of villages and towns, the number of inhabitants, the postal and other facilities. 5. Most of the heights are marked, though not so many as on the northern slope, but at any rate, oo THE PYRENEES the height of every important port, col, and peak appears. In general, it may be said that there is no map of the Pyrenees, immediately to the south of the frontier, equivalent to those of the districts which happen to fall within the French ;^, survey. This leads me to the principal drawback con nected with the use of the French ^~, maP uPon the Spanish side, which is, that it only includes such Spanish territory as accidentally happens to fall within each square blocked out in the French survey. The English reader is acquainted, it may be presumed, with the one-inch Ordnance Map, and he will have remarked, how, if it so happens that a little corner of land escapes the regular series of rectangles into which the one-inch Ordnance Map is divided, that little corner of land will have a map all to itself, though the greater part of the rectangular space so marked may be taken up by the sea. In the same way any little bit of French territory which projects beyond the scheme of rectangles into which the whole survey is divided, has, added to it, an outer part completing the map and extending into Spain ; where (as for instance on the sheet called "Gavarnie") the little piece of French territory so projecting is small in comparison with the whole rectangle, a considerable piece of Spanish territory will be included ; but where (as for instance on the sheet called " Bayonne ") the frontier very nearly corresponds with the survey, very little of the Spanish side will be included. From this it is easy to perceive that the maximum MAPS 91 amount of Spanish territory in any one map must be inferior either in width or in length to the full dimensions of each sheet, and that the total distance into Spain, which any one sheet can mark, south of the frontier, is less than the width of any one sheet. Now each sheet of the French ^^ map includes 1 5 minutes of a degree from north to south, that is, about 17 miles. One may say, therefore, that the amount of Spanish territory shown to the south of the frontier in this excellent survey is always less than one full day's journey. In many parts it narrows to far less than this. There are not a few parts of the range where even for those who make but short excursions on to the Spanish side, this drawback is of considerable effect. For instance, in the easy and pleasant excursion which takes one from Andorra to Urgel, the ^^0 map cuts one short at 420 30' below Andorra, and 42° 15' beyond the main road to Urgel, and no small part of the road lies south or west of this limitation. The ^^ map somewhat makes up for the de ficiency of the ^^ map, but not in a complete manner. The frontier sections of this survey (five in number) show Spanish territory to the extent of some 30 miles in the Basque country, they give but a tiny corner of the extreme east of the territory of Aragon, they give over 30 miles for the greater part of the north of that province, but in Catalonia the belt is restricted to far less. Moreover, the Spanish details afforded are much slighter than in the ^rr. There is no indication of the relief of the country, no shading, only the principal water- 92 THE PYRENEES courses and the principal highways and mule roads are marked. But it is here that the -^^ is useful, if one has the intention of walking for some days upon the Spanish side. Thus the direction from Castel-Bo in Catalonia to Esterri can be roughly drawn upon the ^ss, and will not be discovered so clearly in any other survey. It now remains to sum up the respective advan tages of these four maps for the general purposes of travel, and to give a few comments upon the uses of each. The -^^ military map will not be of great use to the traveller. It can only show him the main roads if he is motoring or cycling, and present him with a general view of the country for which the clearer ¦^^ map will serve his purpose better. The -§^- military map is the best for minute details, and if a man desires to ramble off and ex plore some special districts of this great range, it is the g^- map which will be of most use to him, though its value will be supplemented and greatly extended by using it in conjunction with the colour ^70 map of the Ministry of the Interior or Home Office. This last, as the reader will have seen, is the staple map, upon which every form of travel depends. If no other be purchased, this at least is always indispensable. It is well here to summarise briefly certain points in the reading of this map, which do not immedi ately appear on one's first acquaintance with it. First, the map is on too small a scale to show a MAPS 93 certain number of features which, though unim portant in the general landscape, are essential to the traveller on foot. This is true of rocks, for instance ; open rock, extending over a considerable surface, will always be marked, but hidden ledges, especially small ones, are more often not marked, and this may lead to disaster if one trusts the map too exactly. For instance, in the sheet numbered xi. 37, a range will be seen rising to the left of the main road, which bisects the map from north to south, I mean the range running from the Spanish frontier to the Pic-du-Ger. This ridge is intersected by two profound valleys, and the whole of it is a mass of greater or smaller limestone ledges, more or less masked in the density of the forests. Yet it is impossible to indicate these on such a scale, save here and there by sharp hatching. These limestone ledges are in this particular case such, that unless one knows the paths extremely well, it is impossible to cross the ridge at all, but one would have no idea of that from merely consulting the map. On the other hand, every rivulet, how ever small, is distinctly marked, and that is some thing of a guide when one has tried to ascertain one's position in a valley. This map has a further advantage of marking in the clearest way the paths by which the various ports are approached, and after a considerable use of it in many places, I can say that when you have lost the path, the indication afforded you by the ^^ map is invariably right — upon the French side. However unreasonably the line seems to acting upon the map, if it lies to the 94 THE PYRENEES left of a stream, or beneath a particularly clearly marked rock, then it is to the left of that stream, or beneath that rock that you must cast about if you want to find it, and if you find another path in another direction, you may be certain it is but a random track, which will mislead you, how ever clearly it may appear for the moment. When, in first using these maps, my companions and I neglected such information, it invariably led to trouble. For instance, in the lower crossings of the Sousseou, the map gives the path everywhere on the north, or right bank of the stream. There is a spot just before the first rocky "gate" of this ravine where all indication of further travel upon the right bank disappears, and on the contrary a fine- made path crosses over by a strong bridge to the further or left bank. We thought the map must be in error, and crossed by the b/idge, with the result that we spent a whole day cut off by a bad spate from the further side, and were for some hours in peril ; for the bridge once crossed, this false path disappeared within half a mile. If we had pinned ourselves to the map, kept to the north bank, and cast about in circles, we should have found the path again but a hundred yards or so further on, running precisely as it was indicated on the survey. The importance of the ^55 map m thus giving all tracks accurately will hardly appear to the reader unused to the Pyrenees, but it will be seen clearly enough when we come later to speak of travel upon foot in the mountains. It is a defect of the ^^ map that heights, though MAPS 95 accurately marked, cannot always be as accurately referred to the exact spots standing near the figures. This is because the heights are marked in pale blue ink, and the ambiguity is accentuated by that absence of contour lines which is the chief fault of the series. The method of marking is to point a small blue point close to the figures, and this dot marks the exact spot to which the figures refer. Where the figures are printed in a white space, and where there are no other features to interfere with them, this small blue spot is plain enough, but where they come upon woodland or steep shading, or other print, it is almost impossible to discover the dot. Thus, for instance, in the xi. 37, sheet to which allusion has just been made, a little lake will be found right upon latitude 420 50', just before its intersection with longitude 2° 40'. The height of this lake is given as 2 1 70 metres, and the small blue point to which that altitude exactly refers is unmistakably marked at the southern extremity of the lake ; but immediately to the right of those very figures, one of the highest peaks of the Pyrenees, the Bat Lactouse, marked 3146 metres, presents no point of which one can be certain. The frontier happens to cross this peak, and the little blue spot has got lost in the chain of black dots marking the frontier and in the print of the name of the mountain. As a general* rule, however, if you are in doubt as to what a figure may refer to, you are pretty safe in referring it to a peak, rather than to a pass or a group of houses in the neighbourhood. I have said 96 THE PYRENEES that the accuracy of the map is undoubted for the French side ; it is less certain upon the Spanish, where indeed its accuracy is not guaranteed. It is the best map to use upon the Spanish side (save for that restricted district over which Schrader's contour map applies), but do not, upon the Spanish side, take the map against the evidence of your senses, as you will be wise always to do upon the French side. The map is notably wrong upon the Spanish side where unfinished works are concerned ; it is not revised with the same frequency and care as upon the French side ; for instance, the big new road from Salient up to the French frontier goes in long winding zigzags, which make the total distance between eight and nine miles. The I-^^ map marks it in dots as though it were not finished, makes it far straighter than it is, and thus reduces the distance by nearly half. Finally, the -^^-0 map gives the best bird's-eye view of the whole district, and is the only one showing contours, and penetrating further upon the Spanish side than any other. It will be my advice to those who desire to take a walking tour of some length in various parts of the range, to equip themselves with the whole set of the ^^ maps (5 sheets), with the whole of the ~^ map, but only with such of the ^ (the uncoloured map of the Ministry of War) as cover small districts of the nature of which one is in doubt. Those, on the other hand, who purpose spending their time in one or two valleys only, should, without fail, purchase the sheets of the -^o survey covering that district, and MAPS 97 would do very well to add to these all the corre sponding sheets of the 8-^ survey. With these remarks, most that can be usefully told to my readers with regard to the maps of the Pyrenees has been told them, but perhaps a few final notes will not be without their use, thus : The English traveller must always remember that none of these maps comes up to the English one-inch Ordnance for accuracy and detail — the scale forbids this. Next, let him remember that the dates of revision of each map will differ, as do the dates of revision of ordnance maps in every country. For instance, I have before me, as I write, the -^z, of Luz, purchased in this year (1908) ; no date of revision is attached to it, but the new road (which is at present an excellent carriage road, one of the best in Europe, up the Gallego to the French frontier) is marked, at first as a lane, afterwards as a mule track. On the ^^ (Laruns sheet), purchasable this year, the new road is marked as existing for traffic, but not fully completed beyond a point about three miles from the frontier, and its true form is not given but merely indicated. It is evident that these, sheets were revised at different times (the Laruns sheet bears a date six years old), and that we must always take the later of any two impressions, if we can obtain it. The highways of the Pyrenees upon the French side especially, both by road and by rail, are being extended with such rapidity that every year makes a difference to the accuracy of the information conveyed. It remains to enumerate with their titles the 98 THE PYRENEES maps covering the district : in England they may be most easily obtained from Messrs Stanford, of 12, 13, and 14 Long Acre, London, W.C. This firm provide the j^ for the whole chain of the Pyrenees range mounted on canvas, the most useful map perhaps for motoring and cycling. Any sheet of the t^t- can also be obtained from them, as all are kept in stock, but by far the most convenient form in which to carry them is to have them folded in the stiff cover issued by the French Government : to get them in this form, a few days' notice in London will be needed. From the same firm the military maps can be procured in a similar manner, but I do not know whether all are kept in stock as a regular thing. In ordering the sheets of the ^~-a (if one does not purchase them as a whole), reference is made not to numbers, but to names. There are five sheets, " Bayonne," " Tarbes," " Luz," " Foix," and " Perpignan," the price of which in England is ios. ; the whole series can also be purchased mounted. The sheets of the —^ map may be referred to either by the names of their central towns, or by the index number of the series in which they are printed. It is difficult to say what numbers of these maps exactly cover the range, unless one knows how far from the watershed towards the plain the traveller intends to go. The smallest number sufficient to cover the actual watershed and the highest peaks is 16, or, for the whole frontier, 17. These sheets are by name (going from the Atlantic to the Medi terranean, from west to east), St Jean-de-Luz, Bay- MAPS 99 onne, St Jean Pied-de-Port, Mauleon, Ste Engrace, Laruns, Luz, Gavarnie, Bagneres-de- Luchon, Val- d'Arouge, St Girons, Mont Rouch, Perles, Ax-les- Thermes, Saillagouse, Ceret, and Banyuls. Re ferring to their numbers in the series upon the index map, they are respectively viii. 35, ix. 35, ix. 36, x. 36, x. 37, xi. 37, xii. 37, xii. 38, xiii. 37, xiii. 38, xiv. 37, xiv. 38, xv. 38, xvi. 38, xvi. 39, xvii. 39, and xviii. 39. It will be observed that in the index map of the I-^-0 series, the divisions running from north to south are marked in Roman numerals, those from east to west in Arabic numerals, and that the gradual increase in Arabic numerals from 35 to 39, corresponds to the gradual trend south ward of the Pyrenean chain from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. Very few of my readers will be concerned with the main crest of the range alone ; it will therefore be necessary to add to that list northward of the frontier (the lower Arabic numerals) the further sheet according to the district each may have chosen to travel in. A certain number of extra sheets are necessary to those who travel in the main chain only, for instance, "Perles" (xv. 38) includes within the limits of its sheet the frontier upon either side, but this frontier so nearly approaches the northern limits in one spot, that it will be quite impossible to travel in this part until we also add the sheet " Foix " (xv. 37), to the north of it. Even the little lake of Garbet, which is not three miles from the crest of the range, is half out of the map and half in. ioo THE PYRENEES Those who desire a complete collection of all the sheets of the ^^ survey, extending from the furthest mountain over the Spanish side up on the foothills into the French plain, may remark the following lists : in series viii. 35 ; in series ix. 35 and 36 ; in series x. 35, 36, and 37 ; in series xi. 35, 36, and 37 ; in series xii. 36, 37, and 38 ; in series xiii. 36, 37, and 38 ; in series xiv. 37 and 38 ; in series xv. 37 and 38 ; in series xvi. 37, 38, and 39 ; in series xvii. 38 and 39 ; in series xviii. 39 ; in all twenty-five sheets will cover the mountainous region in this survey, and any one who desires a complete map of the French Pyrenees, with as much of the Spanish side as the survey includes, should possess them all. The cost of the unmounted sheet in France is 8d., and of the mounted sheet iod. In England they are sold at is. The military map of s^5 is sold at is. a sheet, or 3d. a quarter sheet. The ^^ is, as I have said, sold in London at 2s., the five sheets ios. Schrader's map is in six sheets upon the scale of ."^o and with contours. It is essentially a climber's map. Detailed maps of special districts of course exist in many shapes, but they must be sought for in the periodical reviews, and in monographs in which they have appeared. Finally, it may interest the reader to know that in the Casino of Bagneres-de- Luchon he may, for 1 fr. 50 c, inspect a fully detailed relief map of the whole range on a scale somewhat larger than one inch to a mile, though the inspection of it rather satisfies curiosity than affords any guide to travel. MAPS IOI Schrader's map is of the greatest value for one particular piece of touring, which I shall describe later in these pages. Meanwhile it may be as well to add a further note upon it here. It is by far the best, so far as it goes, of all the Pyrenean maps ; it is due to private enterprise, and if the whole range had been done in the same way there would be no need to discuss any other type, it would amply suffice for all purposes. Unfortunately, whereas the range, within the limits laid down in this book, stretches in length from a degree east of Paris to nearly four degrees west of that meridian, covering, that is, four or five degrees of longitude, and stretches in latitude from 430 25' to at least 420, Schrader's survey covers only i£° in longitude (namely, from i° 10' west of Paris to 2° 40'), and in latitude extends over no more than half a degree, namely, from 42° 20' to 42 ° 50'. As the reader may see by comparing these bearings with a general map, Schrader's map is intended to include no more than the very high Pyrenean peaks : it is the result of many years of careful individual survey, begun before the war of 1870 and carried on to quite the last few years. Like the, French Home Office map, it is in the scale of I^^, and, like it, it is printed in colours, but unlike the Home Office map, it shows the invaluable feature of contours. You have an exact plan of the country before you, and in clear weather, with the aid of this map, you can fall into no error in connection with the relief of the land. The contours are at some distance, at 100 metres or 328 feet 102 THE PYRENEES apart, but this in such country is an advantage ; indeed, the cramping of the closer contours on the official ^5, map, greatly detracts from their useful ness. Not only are contours marked, but all rocky places are given with the greatest care, and the impression of relief is helped by shading as well as contour lines. The only drawback of the map, apart from its restricted area, lies in the absence of any indication of woods. As to the steepness, to which woods are often a guide, his contours amply make up for the deficiency, but for camping it affords you no indication. On the other hand, all cabanes and all paths are very clearly marked. All heights and distances with which you will have to do in these hills upon either side are marked in metres, save in the popular talk, which measures distances by the time taken to traverse them. With this I shall deal in a moment. Let me first deal with what is a constant source of trouble to English men on the Continent, the turning of the metrical system of measure into its English equivalent There are two ways of doing this. One is the application of quite easy and rough rules of thumb, the other is the more complicated process which aims at a fairly high degree of accuracy. It is the first of these of course which most people will want to know, and there are two simple rules, one for heights and one for distances. The rule for heights is, divide by 3, shift the decimal point one place to the right, and you have the height in England feet, within a certain limit of error, which I shall presently detail. MAPS 103 The rule of thumb as applied to measures of distance is to take the number of kilometres (a kilometre is 1000 metres, and is, as one may say, the French mile), divide by 8, and multiply by 5, and you have the corresponding number of English miles, within a certain limit of error, which I shall describe presently. For all ordinary purposes these two rules are sufficient, though in both cases they somewhat exaggerate. They make a French distance measured in English miles a little too far, and a French height, measured in English feet, a trifle too high. The exact constant of error is, in the case of the heights, 1.6 feet in every 100. Thus if your rough calculation gave you a height of 10,160 feet, the exact height ought to be just 10,000; you see upon the map in the blue figures referring to metres, "3048" (which happens by the way to be within two steps of the height of the Bac Lactous). You divide by 3, add a o, and get 10,160, and you know by the constant of error that the true height is just exactly 10,000 feet. The knowledge of this constant gives us a rough and ready method of getting a height within a very small degree of accuracy, and for any purposes where such accuracy is required, I recommend it. In consists in cutting off the last three figures, multiplying what is left by 4, and then again by 4, and subtracting that from your first rough calculation. It sounds complicated, but it does not take half a minute, and you will be well within two feet of any io4 THE PYRENEES height; for most heights you are likely to cal culate, you will be right within a few inches. For instance, you see 2403 in blue figures upon the map ; dividing by 3 and shifting your decimal point, you at once get 8010; there is your rough calculation, which you know to be a trifle in excess of the truth. Cut off the last three figures and you have left 8, multiply 8 by 4, and then again by 4, and you have 1 28 as the amount of your error. The peak is by this calculation 7882 feet high, and rough as the rule is you are within 20 inches of the truth : the exact height of such a peak in English feet is 7883.7624. . . . However, if you want absolute accuracy, multiply the French measure by 3.2808992, and you will be sufficiently near the truth to save your soul. As to distances, the exact proportion of error, when you turn miles into kilometres by dividing by eight and multiplying by 5, is 2 inches or so short of 50 feet too much in every mile ; when, therefore, you are dealing with a hundred miles, you are very nearly, but not quite a mile out in this form of calculation. The error is, within a very small fraction, 1%. If therefore you want an easy rule for turning your rough calculation into an accurate one, you cut off the last two figures and subtract from your total the figures thus left. For instance, 244 kilometres divided by 8 gives 30^, and that multiplied by 5 is 152.5; cut off the 52, leaving "1" on the left, subtract that 1 (making 15 1.5), and you are within a few yards of accuracy. As questions of distance, count nothing in mountains compared with questions MAPS 105 of height, I will make no mention of decimals, but proceed to a very different matter, which is the way of counting that the mountaineers have, and this you will do well to heed blindly. When you are tired and distracted and wondering perhaps whether you can push on, if you have the good luck to find a shepherd, he will tell you your distance to such and such a place in hours. The Spanish, the Gascon, the Bearnais, and the Catalan dialects all use the same words, so far as sound goes, for this kind of measure, and the Basque will never speak to you in Basque : it is part of the Basque tenacity never to do this. So if you find yourself in any part of the high hills where a man can talk to you of distances, you always hear the same sounds "Dos Oras," "Quart' Ora," "Mi' Ora," and the rest. This habit, as every reader knows, is universal throughout the world wherever true peasants exist ; but in mountains, whether they be Welsh or African, it is not only universal, but it withstands all the invasion of the modern world. What I would particularly impress upon any one going into the Pyrenees is this, that such a method of counting is exceedingly accurate, and is moreover the only accurate method. Nothing is more fatal to a civilised man of the plains than to take his little measuring stick and measure upon the map by the scale the distance between two points, saying, " It will take me so many hours." There was a Basque at Ste Engrace who very well expressed to me the contempt which mountaineers have for that method of the plains. A deputy of the French 106 THE PYRENEES Parliament had stopped in his inn, had thus measured the distance from the village to the pass, and would not believe that it could take three hours. It always takes exactly three hours. I have done it in four by careful dawdling, and the dawdling, when I came to reckon it up, had taken exactly one hour out of the four. Now, measured upon the map, that distance, as the crow flies, is precisely three miles, but it takes three hours none the less. You will not do it in less, and what is odder, you can hardly do it in more, for if you deliberately go too slowly, you are done for in no time, and if you halt, you will find that your halt fits in exactly to make the walking time three hours. Similarly, over the Pourtalet, from the last Spanish hamlet to the first French one, is six hours ; part of the way you may choose between a good road and a mule track, but whichever you choose it is six hours ; and there is nothing more astonishing in Pyrenean travel than the accuracy of this rough method. As I said just now, you must heed it blindly ; it is by far your best guide. The use of maps has one last thing to be said about it, which applies particularly to the Schrader map and to the ^~^, and this is that where you think you see a short cut, and the map gives you no track, there the short cut is to be avoided. I say it applies particularly to the Schrader and ~^t because these two maps are so particular in detail that you think their information must be enough without the further aid of a path. Moreover, the path sometimes takes such apparently need- MAPS 107 less turns that you are for escaping it by an easier cut. You will never succeed. You may indeed succeed in a bit of exceptionally hard climbing, you may not lose your life, but you will most certainly wish that you had never attempted the unmarked crossing of the ridge you have attacked. It is obvious that the exception to this doctrine would be found in a piece of genuine experiment. If you say to yourself for instance, " I can get over the shoulder of the Pic d'Anie into the valley of the rivulet beyond, which has no name, but which runs into the Tarn of Uterdineta," you will probably do it, but it will not be a short cut from the Val d'Aspe into the valley of Isaba, though it is the shortest way. These temptations for cutting across the hills come very often in one's first experiments in the Pyrenees; they get less frequent as one knows more of them. These mountains are full of vengeance, and hate to be disturbed. Note. — A convenient map for viewing the whole range is. the 4O0|O0o which is sold by Messrs Stanford, mounted in two sheets, and in a case. It is especially of use in showing a large belt of the Spanish side. Motorists in particular should see it. IV THE ROAD SYSTEM OF THE PYRENEES ^ttW -*L-S, TH] 1 y/ ?>y [ERE are two kinds of plat forms for tra vel in the Pyrenees, mule tracks and great, highly engineered, modern roads. No others exist. When, therefore, one is de scribing travel in the Pyrenees, one must separately describe the opportunities of wheeled travel open to all vehicles, however elaborate, and of travel on foot or with a mule. As the last will take up the greater part of my space, I will speak of wheeled' travel first. To understand what are the opportunities of this, one may take as one's standard the roads which can be traversed by a motor car. Those passages which a motor car cannot use cannot be used by a bicycle or a carriage, for the roads of the Pyrenees are, as I have said, either very good broad roads, well graded, and with a hard surface, or they do not exist ; the change is always abrupt throughout the chain from 10S ROAD SYSTEM OF THE PYRENEES 109 an excellent highway, carefully engineered, to a mule track. The scheme of Pyrenean roads, as it exists now, is, briefly, first : a couple of great lateral roads on the French side, which may be called the upper and the lower road ; next, four roads traversing the chain (six if you count the roads along the sea-coast at either end, which I omit — the one goes by St Jean de Luz, the other by the Pass of Lacleuse or La Perthuis) ; thirdly, a series of roads, numerous on the French side, rare on the Spanish, which pene trate the valleys but do not cross the chain, and end at a greater or less distance from the watershed. The main lateral road from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, along the base of the Pyrenees, links up all the towns upon the plains ; it joins Bayonne to Pau, Pau to Tarbes, Tarbes to St Gaudens, and so on through St Girons, Foix, and Quillan to Perpignan : this may be called the Lower Road. The upper road has been but recently completed. It is made up of sections, some of which are old highways, some links quite newly built, and the characteristic of the whole is that it skirts as nearly as possible the crest of the main chain, crossing at some places very high passes over the lateral ridges, and everywhere keeping right up against the high summits of the range. The whole line runs from Perpignan over the Col de la Perche up the Val Carol and over the Puymorens to Ax, Tarascon, and St Girons. At St Girons, it is compelled by the conformation of the country to touch the lower road, but it leaves it at once to pass from Fronsac to no THE PYRENEES Luchon ; thence through Arreau, Luz, Argeles, Laruns, Oloron, and Mauleon — all the high mountain towns — to St Jean Pied de Port, and thence back again to Bayonne. The four roads over the ridge into Spain lie all of them on the western side of the hills. They are, first, the road through the Baztan valley, which con nects Bayonne with Pamplona ; secondly, the Roman road over Roncesvalles, 12 or 15 miles to the east of this, which used to be the high road between Bayonne and Pamplona before the Baztan road was built, and which was during all history the westernmost road of invasion and communication between Gaul and Spain ; thridly, the road which goes over the Somport, which was also a Roman road and the chief one, uniting Saragossa with the French plains; fourthly, a road parallel to this and not 10 miles east of it, running over the Pourtalet Pass and joining the Saragossa road lower down. No other roads cross the range from France into Spain until one reaches the Mediterranean, and all these four lie within the first westernmost third of the Pyrenees. It would be quite easy to open other roads which should unite the last of the Spanish highways with the first of the French, notably over the easy pass of Bonaigo, where 20 miles of work would be enough, and through the Cerdagne, where there are no engineering difficulties. One such road is now in process of completion between Esterri and St Girons over the pass of Salau. Another, which was begun from the valley of the Ariege into Andorra r was abruptly stopped, and it will probably never be Jt h .% '/ w ¦ja3Xl-*-ys.~~< !t, ¦_ -a&f ^-,_ ^ 1 '< ('¦ THE GATES OF ANDORRA ROAD SYSTEM OF THE PYRENEES 1 1 1 completed. There are some half dozen other places, where a road could cross and where French are building their side of it : but the Spaniards are re luctant to meet them. Of the roads of the third kind, roads running up the valleys but not attempting to cross the moun tains, one may say that on the French side every valley has one or more good roads, the one draw back to the use of which in a motor is that you are compelled, unless you can take a cross road from one high valley to another high valley, to go back by the way you came into the plain. Not only has every valley its highway leading to the very foot of the main range, but often the bifurcations of the valley will have roads as well. Thus along the valley of the Nive you can go in a motor not only to St Jean Pied de Port, but also right up the eastern valley to a countryside called the " Baigorry " as far as U repel ; along the next Basque valley to the east, you can go from Mauleon in the plains right up into the hills as far as Larrau, but you cannot go to Ste Engrace, where the valley splits, because the track thither, though a good one, will not take wheels. You can go up the branch valley from Oloron as high as Aritte, and the main road up the Val d'Aspe (which is that leading to Jaca by the old Roman way), has lateral branches, one taking you to Lourdios, the other across the foot hills to Arudy and the Val d'Ossau. The valley of Lourdes has a road which, with the exception of the roads over the passes, goes nearest to the main watershed. I mean the road to Gavarnie ; and the Val d'Aure, which, 112 THE PYRENEES comes next to the westward, has a road going as far as Aragnonette, almost as close to the last cliffs as Gavarnie is ; and there is an embranchment to the east which takes one to the very foot at the Hopital of Rivanagon in one of the loneliest parts of the hills. The road to Bagneres de Luchon is carried some miles beyond that town, as far as the Hospitalet; which stands at the foot of the pass into Spain, The road to Viella in the Val d'Oran goes on up to within a mile or two of the pass of Bonaigo. A road from St Girons takes one up the valley of the Lez as far as Sentein, which, like Gavarnie, lies right under the main chain, while the road from the same town up the main valley of the Salient goes up to the watershed itself, and is being constructed to cross it, and to afford (over the pass of Salau) one more badly needed passage into Spain. The valley of the Ariege has a road all along it, almost to the sources of that river. It is continued through the Cerdagne and down the valley of the Tet into the Roussillon. There is not a main valley on the French side of the Pyrenees which has not its great carriage road, and most of the lateral valleys have now the same kind of communications. The journey up them is nearly always of the same kind, save the few which are prolonged to carry over the watershed into Spain. There is the succession of two or three enclosed plains or j asses after one has left the plains, the sharp pitch up to one flat, and then another, through short but steep rocky gorges, till we reach the little terminal mountain village, sometimes not more than a group of three or four buildings, lying ROAD SYSTEM OF THE PYRENEES 1 1 3 under the last escarpment, and in sight of the frontier ridge above it. Of this terminal sort was Urdos until Napoleon III. pushed the road out beyond it into Spain ; Gabas, until the Republic did the same with the road there ; and of this sort still an old Hospitalet, Sentein in the Val d'Aure, and though it is in a state of transition, for the road is now being pushed beyond it, of this sort is Gavernie. Little places almost as old as our race, with no history and no national memories, but with immemorial traditions, rooted as deep as the moun tains, were brought into the life of our time by that new activity of the French, which is to many foreigners so hateful, to many others so marvellous. On the Spanish side there are no roads of this kind penetrating the valleys except the incomplete road to Isaba from Pamplona by way of the Val d'Anso, and the short stretch from Saldinies to Panticosa. A road is being made up the Val d'Aneu, but it is not yet finished, and a road goes just so far up the broad Segre valley as Seu d' Urgel. All the other valleys have mule tracks alone. The general scheme of existing roads in the Pyrenees is roughly as upon the map over page, where it will be seen that much the greater length of the chain is impassable to a wheeled vehicle. Motoring sets a standard for every other form of wheeled traffic, I will therefore first speak of this kind of travel. The best road to take with a motor, if one wishes to obtain a general idea of the Pyrenees, is the Lower Road (by Tarbes and Foix) from ROAD SCHEME of the PYRENEES Plan L - ROAD SYSTEM OF THE PYRENEES 1 1 5 Bayonne to Perpignan ; one may then come back again from Perpignan to Bayonne by the upper road, many parts of which are of very recent con struction and which goes right through the highest part of the chain across the main lateral valleys of the Pyrenees. Such a round — about 500 miles altogether — gives one from far and from near the whole of the French Pyrenees : from the first one sees the chain as a whole before one : by the second one mixes with its deepest valleys. The first day's run from Bayonne had best end at Tarbes ; it is a town central with regard to the chain, and it is also a very pleasant place to stop at under any conditions ; not cosmopolitan like Pau, and not in a hole and corner like Foix. The lower road from Bayonne to Tarbes runs through Orthez, Puyoo, and Pau, and if one starts early, Pau is a good halting-place for the middle of the day. This part of the road is, during the whole of its length or nearly the whole of it, a rolling road of the plains with no striking points of view save in where it tops a slight rise. It first follows but runs above and north of the valley of the Adour below it, next descends after the first 20 miles or so to cross the Adour, and so comes to Peyrehorade, the first town (and railway station) upon its course. During all this first part of the run one has sight after sight of the range which stretches out eastward before one to the south rising higher as it goes ; and one sees at first before one upon the horizon, later abreast of one and due south, the pyramid of the Pic d'Anie, which is the first of the high peaks. n6 THE PYRENEES From Peyrehorade to Pau, between 40 and 50 miles, the road goes through Orthez along the valley of the Gave de Pau, for the most part following the river bank and allowing but few sights of the range ; but at Pau itself it rises on to the high plateau of the town whence the most famous general view of the Pyrenees is spread before one. From Pau there are two roads to Tarbes ; for curiosity and for general travel it is the road round by Lourdes which is generally taken, and that is during the whole of its length a lowland road though it runs among the foothills ; but the better road on such a drive as I am describing is the direct northern road, which, after it has climbed on -to the plateau of Vignan, goes up and down steep small ravines until it comes down again upon the main valley of the Adour and the plain of Tarbes. There are on this road two points, one just after one leaves the railway line, not quite half-way to Tarbes on the climb up to Vignan, the other just before the loop and descent above I bos which afford fine views of the range to the south, and one begins to gather one's general impression of these moun tains, which, more than any other range, present an appearance of simplicity and the united effect of a barrier. Tarbes, less than 30 miles from Pau, may seem a short run for one day from Bayonne, but it breaks the journey exactly and conveniently. After Tarbes (where the hotel for you is the Hotel Des Ambassadeurs) the road goes through much broken country, passing by Tournay up on the high plateau of Lannemezan to Montrejeau. It ROAD SYSTEM OF THE PYRENEES 117 is a road full of short hills, but it is necessary to take this section in order to go eastward from Montrejeau and to proceed through St Gaudens, taking an elbow by St Martary and so down to St Girons. After St Girons one follows the new and excellent road which runs along the valley side by side with the new railway to Foix. From Foix to Nalzen your way is to go along the main road from Foix up the Ariege Valley for some 4 miles and then turn to the left, leaving the railway and making due east. From Nalzen continue to Lavenalet; there take the right hand road to Belesta and Belcaire ; thence, when you have crossed the plateau, a very winding road takes you down, hundreds of feet, on to Quillan. After Quillan you have a few miles through the very little known and wonderful gorges of Pierre Lys to St Martin, through which gorges the railway accompanies you. Do not follow it round by Axat, but cut across by the road which goes eastward to La Pradelle. This road takes you across a low pass to the watershed of the Mediterranean. From La Pradelle to Perpignan the road is a perfectly clear one through St Paul and Estagel. It is a straight, good road, following the valley all the way, save the last stretch, which runs across the plains between the river Agly and the Tet. This second day will of course be far longer than the first; it is nearer 200 miles than 120. If you would break it, however, break it rather after the short run to St Girons, than at Foix, for though Foix be nearly the half-way house, yet the accommoda tion is better at St Girons, and so is the cooking. 118 THE PYRENEES A two days' run of, this kind from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, following such a route, gives you the whole distant range in one general appear ance, and gives it you better than you will have along any other line with which I am acquainted. The way back by the upper road from east to west through the Pyrenees is a piece of travel quite peculiar to these mountains ; nowhere else in Europe is there a lateral road driven right across the buttresses or supports of a main range. The Pyrenees possess such a road in their highest part. What the French have done here is as though the Italians had driven a road from the sources of the Dora Baltea right under Monte Rosa, and the Matter- horn to Lake Maggiore, or as though the Swiss had driven one from Faido and Fusia right over into the valley of Domo d'Ossola. From Tarascon in the valley of the Ariege to Laruns in the Val d'Ossau — that is, over all the central part of the chain and for just over half its length — a mountain road goes right up against the main heights (only once coming near the lowlands at St Girons), crossing the high, perilous passes which lie between the upper valleys. By taking advantage of this new piece of engineering you can return from Perpignan to Bayonne through the midst of those hills which the road just described from Bayonne to Perpignan showed you in a distant general view : when you have so returned you will have seen the heart, the French Pyrenees. I will now describe such a return journey by the upper road. From Perpignan you will do well to run ROAD SYSTEM OF THE PYRENEES 1 19 the first day to Ax. The road is the great road from the Rousillon into France. You go up the valley of the Tet (which is the main River of the Rousillon) through Prades with the Canigou first right in front of you, and at last rising steeply to your left. You continue through Prades up the gorges and tortuous zigzags of the Upper River until you come to the head of the pass at Mont Louis : there the broad and easy valley of the Cerdagne opens to the south, sloping gently before you. The road runs down, almost as in a plain, to Bourg Madame, where you must turn to the right up the Val Carol to Porte. The pass above Port6, (called the " Puymorens") though long, is of an easy gradient, and once over it you run down all the 18 miles to Ax, following the valley of the Ariege. Ax is, of course, an early stopping place. The whole distance from Perpignan is under 140 miles, but Ax is so much more comfortable than Tarascon that it is better to make one's halt there. Next day go down the valley as far as Tarascon and there take the mountain road off to the left, it is not a national 1 road but it has a perfectly good surface in spite of a considerable climb. One little col comes almost immediately at Bedeillac, after that you climb steadily up the valley to the Col-du- Port (which is about 4000 feet high) then down the mountain side to Massat, which lies on the western side of the pass and about 2000 feet below it. 1 The French metalled roads are of three main kinds, supported by the State, the County and the Parish respectively. Of these the first and most important are called " National Roads." :2o THE PYRENEES Thence it is an ordinary valley road until you come to St Girons again. From St Girons you continue this progress parallel to the watershed and right among the high peaks, by taking the cross road from St Girons to the valley of the Garonne. Just before the railway station at St Girons turn sharp to your left, taking the road which goes up the left bank of the Lez. At this starting point you are not more than 1300 or 1400 feet above the sea; At Audressein (300 feet up) turn to the right, cross the river, and begin to climb the upper valley until you reach the col of Portet- d'Aspet at about 3400 feet, that is, some 2000 feet above St Girons, and between 15 and 20 miles from that town. From this, col the road descends rapidly down the valley of the river Ger, falling in 5 miles 1500 or 1600 feet. At the end of the 5 miles you take a road that goes sharp off to the left before reaching the village of Sengouagnet, this road going off to the left crosses a low watershed, makes, at the end of another 5 miles, a great loop round the forest of Moncaup (the church of which village you leave to the left just before making the turn), and comes down into the great open plain into which the valley of the Garonne here enlarges. It is one of the finest enclosed plains in the Pyrenees, and to come down upon it by this road is perhaps the best way to approach it. The first village in this plain is Antichan, thence several long windings take one down to Frontignan below, and thence it is a straight road through Fronsac to Chaum where there is a bridge over the ROAD SYSTEM OF THE PYRENEES 1 2 1 river, and where the plain of which I have spoken terminates in a narrow gateway through the hills. You cross the river by this bridge, fall at once into the great national road upon the further or left bank, and a straight run of not more than 12 miles in which one only rises 300 or 400 feet up the tributary valley brings one to Bagneres-de- Luchon. Though at the end of an even shorter day than was Ax from Perpignan, Bagneres will make a convenient stopping-place after a good deal of hill climbing and roads the surface of which, especially in the early summer, is occasionally doubt ful. Bagneres has, of course, everything that people motoring can want, it is the capital of the touring Pyrenees, and even if this cross journey has not proved enough for one day, the character of Bagneres make it the right place to stop at on the second day. Though Bagneres is right in the middle of the mountains, but a mile or two from the frontier of Spain, not 6 miles, as the crow flies, from the watershed and within ten of the highest peaks of the Pyrenees, yet the importance of the town has caused good communications to spring up around it, and there is an excellent road crossing straight over from the high valley of Bagneres into the next high valley, the Val d'Aure. It starts at the market place just opposite the new church, crosses the col called " Port-de-Peyredsourde," and comes down into the main road of the Val d'Aure at Avajan, which follows down the stream at an even gradient to Arreau, 7 miles further on. 122 THE PYRENEES Arreau is the capital of the Val d'Aure, and when you have reached it you will have come about 20 miles from Bagneres. The next parallel valley to the Val d'Aure is that of the Gave-de- Pau : the valley which has at its mouth the town of Lourdes, and at its head, right \mder the Spanish Frontier, the famous village and cliff of Gavarnie. There is, indeed, a small sub sidiary valley in between where the Adour takes its rise, and of which Bagneres-de- Bigorre is the capital, but it is shorter and stands lower than the two main valleys upon either side. The section I am about to describe, the great new road from the Val d'Aure to the Valley of Lourdes, just touches this upper valley of the Adour but does not pursue it. The cross road from Arreau in the Val d'Aure to Luz in the valley of Lourdes is the steepest and the most diverse in gradient, as it is also by far the finest in scenery, of all the new sections which have recently been pierced through the highest parts of the range and between them build up what I have called " The Upper Road." The, distance as the crow flies from Arreau to Luz is not 20 miles, but the long windings of the road which take it over two passes, and the northern diversion necessary to turn the great mountain mass of the Port Bieil, lengthen it to nearly double that distance. There is no mistaking this road. It branches off at Arreau, leaving the valley road not half a mile beyond the bridge and going to the left up a little side stream, the name of which I do not know. ROAD SYSTEM OF THE PYRENEES 123 Within 2 miles it crosses this stream and begins to take the long complicated and graded turns up the mountain. One must be careful, by the way, at the point where the road crosses the stream to turn sharp to the right and not go straight on towards Aspin, for though one can get to the main road again from Aspin, it is by roads too steep for a motor. If one so turns to the right, the road goes up to the col in great zig-zags and climbs in some 6 or 7 miles the 2000 feet between Arreau and the summit, thence it falls rapidly for 3 or 4 miles to a point where the new road cuts off the corner the old road used to make. It is important to recognise this point, not only because it saves one at least 6 or 7 miles of travelling, but also because it saves one going right down into the valley of the Adour and climbing up again. I will therefore attempt to fix for the traveller the exact place where he must turn off to the left, though the description is difficult on account of the absence of any landmark. As you come down from the Col d' Aspin, you run through a wood along the mountain side for perhaps 2 miles. The road sweeps round the curve of a gulley on emerging from this wood, crosses the rivulet of that gulley, and comes down close to the stream at the foot of the valley which is the source of the Adour. Just at this point a road will be seen coming in from the left, descending the slope of the valley beyond the stream and crossing it by a bridge. This is not the road you are to take. You must continue on the same road you have been i24 THE PYRENEES following down from the pass, until, in about half a mile, it crosses the stream to the left bank, and approaches on that bank a wood that lies above one on the hill. Immediately after this bridge there is a bifurcation; one branch goes straight on, the other goes off to the left ; this last is the one you must follow. The branch going straight on is the old road which leads down the valley of the Adour, and from which one used to have to double back some miles on at an acute angle to reach Luz. The new road, which you must thus take to the left, cuts off that angle. There are no difficulties from this point onward. The road winds a good deal round the hillside, and almost exactly 5 miles from the point where you turned into it you come again upon the main road to Luz over a bridge that crosses a stream. Just where you join that main road it begins its long climb up to the pass called Col du Tourmalet. This pass is the highest and steepest on the secondary or lateral passes, over which the new roads have recently been driven. It is just under 7000 feet in height, is everywhere practicable, and once it is surmounted there is a clear run down of some 10 miles and more (following the valley called locally that of the Bastan) to Vielle and to Luz in the main valley. Of all the crossings between the high valleys of the Pyrenees this is the one best worth taking. The height of the pass, the great mass of the Port Bieil dominating one side of the road, and of the Pic-du-Midi dominating the other, give it an aspect ROAD SYSTEM OF THE PYRENEES 125 different from any other of the secondary roads, and comparable only to the two main passes of the Somport and the Val d'Ossau. From Luz a great national road takes one down the valley to Argeles and the railway, a distance of about 1 8 miles, and the end of about as fine a piece of engineering as there is in Europe. From Argeles, which is just above Lourdes and whence Lourdes can be reached at once by road or by rail, the cross road which I am describing goes on over another high pass into the Val d'Ossau. The motorist must decide whether to make Argeles his stopping place or not. In distance from Bagneres he will have gone no more than somewhat over 70 miles, and that is a short day ; but it is a day that will have included a great deal of climbing and of sharp descents, and that will have had at the end of it one of the highest passes in the Pyrenees. If he does not choose to stop at Argeles, he will find in Eaux Bonnes above the Val d'Ossau, rather more than 20 miles on (but over a high pass), a very wealthy little modern town, like Bagneres on a lesser scale, with everything that he or his machine can want ; and only an hour or an hour and a half beyond Eaux Bonnes, by one of the great national roads and along the lowlands, is Pau. This cross road from Argeles and the valley of Lourdes, into the Val d'Ossau runs as follows. You take at Argeles the road for Aucun, a village about 5 miles off, up a lateral valley, during which 5 miles you climb over 1200 feet. From Aucun, still climbing, the road passes 126 THE PYRENEES Marsous, winds up the hillside away from the stream, and reaches the first pass, the Col de Soulor, thence it makes round the head waters of the Ouzan valley and round the flank of a bare hill called in that countryside " Mount Ugly," until it reaches the point called the Col de Casteix. Here the foot passenger would naturally cross, as he might have crossed still lower down by the Col de Cortes, but for the sake of a gradient the road goes right round to the north and over the Col d'Aubisque, falling from thence in very long curves down to Eaux Bonnes. The town is not 2 J miles from the top of the col in a straight line. It is more than 5 by the long zigzags of the road. From Eaux Bonnes a road of less than 3 miles takes one down the Pyrenees to Laruns in the valley, and here the great lateral road of the high Pyrenees may be said to end. One may go to Pau the same night, but, sleeping at Eaux Bonnes, it is a most interesting journey to continue down the valley of the Gave d'Ossau to Arudy and to Oloron, thence by the road through Aramits, and Tardets to Mauleon, thence by Musculdy, Larceveau, and Lacarre to St Jean Pied-de-Port, but all that run is through the foot hills, and though one has fine views of the range from every little pass and hilltop, these last 80 or 100 miles are not of the same nature as the track I have just been describing, the chief feature of which is the presence of a good carriageway running through the very core of high and abrupt mountains. Still, anyone who has taken the lower road, as I have ROAD SYSTEM OF THE PYRENEES 127 advised, from Bayonne to Perpignan and wishes to go back all the way to Bayonne by a higher road nearer the mountains, cannot do better than go on from Eaux Bonnes to Laruns, to Oloron, Mauleon, St Jean Pied-de-Port, and thence down the lovely valley of the Nive to Bayonne. So far I have described the main circular journey, west to east, and from east back again to west, which one can take in a motor car in the French Pyrenees. To describe or to advise as to a similar journey from north to south is not so easy, because the Spanish roads are uncertain. Moreover, there is no Spanish road crossing the lateral ranges as the French one does, so that, unless one abandons the Pyrenees altogether and goes right down into the plains, a circular journey from north to south and back north again is confined to the very narrow choice between Roncesvalles, the Somport, and the new Salient road. The road over the Somport is the best Inter national road between France and Spain. Unlike the new Salient road it is completely finished, and yet it is sufficiently modern to present every advantage for travel. On the French side it has been complete since the time of Napoleon III. ; on the Spanish side its highest stretches have been finished only in recent years. It is perfectly possible to take the whole road from Oloron to Jaca, and so back by Salient and Laruns to Oloron again in one day, but it would be a foolish thing to do, and if the ascents try the machine, it might mean going through some of the best scenery of the Val d'Ossau 128 THE PYRENEES in the dark. It is best therefore, to break the journey at Jaca, and no number of hours spent in that delightful town are wasted. The first part of the road — the first 16 miles or so — are nearly level. It is interesting to see the straight line which the Roman track makes for the gate of the hills at Asasp. The pass seems to invite the road : it is the most obvious gap in the whole Chain. The rise, as I have said, is slight. The river, which is rather less than 800 feet above the sea at Oloron, is not 1400 above it at Bedous ; in the whole 20 miles or so, you rise but 600 feet. There are occasional hills, but they are insignificant, and the general impression is that of following the floor of the valley. When, however, one has passed through the great enclosed plain of Bedous, and left behind him its chief town, Accous, one passes through a narrow gorge which rises continually to Urdos about 12 miles on. The rise is gradual, however, and never steep. It was at Urdos that the old valley road used to stop, until Napoleon III. continued it to the summit of the pass, and for 7 miles above Urdos there are continual and steep rises. The pass, however, is low (it is but slightly over 5000 feet) and the last 2 miles before the summit are fairly flat. From the summit the road runs down on the Spanish side a little steeply, but with no really difficult gradient, and after about 2 miles of this, where the Canal Roya falls in and forms the river Aragon, the road takes on quite an easy slope.; Indeed, the escarpment is so much steeper upon the French side that Jaca, though it is 25 miles away, ROAD SYSTEM OF THE PYRENEES 129 stands no lower than Urdos close by just over the ridge. Rather less than half way between the summit and Jaca is the little town of Canfranc. It would be a pity to stop there, the food is doubtful, and so is the wine, and if one wants to breakfast on the journey, it is better to make an early breakfast at Urdos. After Canfranc the mountains open out and you are fairly in the lowlands ; 1 7 miles on, through a wide valley, you come to Jaca. Your Hotel at Jaca will be the hotel Mur, as good and comfortable a one as you will find in northern Spain. From Jaca you may go on to Pamplona westward, or down further south into Spain by Saragossa. As you enter the northern gate of Jaca, you will have gone exactly 57 miles from Oloron ; a short distance I know, but I repeat, it is foolish to go to Jaca and not to spend your time in so charming a place. Moreover, the run back has no opportunities for repose. The return journey is first eastward by the Guasa road, which has (or had, when I went along it last), a most indifferent surface in parts, and you follow this, with a railway never far from the road, some 10 or 12 miles, until at Sabinanigo the railway turns down south and in much the same neighbour hood (but north of the line) the road turns up north and reaches Biescas (a smaller town than Jaca), in about another 8 miles. After that it begins to climb. At Saldinies the road bifurcates. That on the right goes up to Panticosa ; crossing the river by the stone bridge of Escar, your road goes straight 9 i3o THE PYRENEES on up the valley and climbs up to Salient for 3 or 4 miles. I confess I have never been over this bit, but I am assured that it is practicable for a motor; and I have indeed seen a motor which had come round from Panticosa. There is nothing at Salient that you can call habitable, though as motors live there it is to be presumed that there are ways of looking after them. You will do well to volunteer at the guard room (which is on the left of the road as you leave the town) information as to your whereabouts. It has happened to me not to be allowed to leave a Spanish town without all manner of formalities, while on other occasions it has happened to me to walk through one and over into France without a question being asked. From Salient the new road goes up with rather steep gradients at first, zigzagirig up the side of the Pena Forata. The old road, a mere track, may be seen cutting off the great bends as one climbs the mountain. About a mile from the frontier, where the steepness of the road grows level, is a post of police where they may or may not bother you ; they bothered me on one occasion, and on another they let me alone. From the summit, which is some 12 kilometres and more — say 8 miles by road — from the town of Salient one goes down first gently, then steeply, with the Pic-du-Midi d'Ossau, a vast isolated rock, right in front of one, and one is accompanied by a torrent upon one's left — which is the Gave d'Ossau. The road follows the right bank of this for some 7 miles, crosses over to the left ROAD SYSTEM OF THE PYRENEES 131 bank, and 3 miles after this bridge reaches Gabas, a tiny hamlet, where is one of the most delightful hotels in the Pyrenees. Gabas is the highest inhabited point in this valley, and is just the same distance from the summit that Salient is upon the other side, that is, between 8 and 9 miles. From Gabas down to Laruns the road continues all the way down hill, a matter of another 7 or 8 miles, and from Laruns back to Oloron, through Buzy, is a lowland road with a flat surface. The whole round from Oloron back to Oloron again is somewhere between 125 and 150 miles. There is but one other circular journey for which I can vouch that it can be made in a motor car ; it is the journey from Bayonne to Pamplona, by way of the low passes on the Atlantic side of the range, and back again through Roncesvalles. You find yourself at Bayonne as a starting place. The main road into Spain and towards Madrid goes along the sea, much as the railway does, and bears westward, but there is another road through the tangle of Basque mountains, or rather those hills which between them make up French and Spanish Navarre, and this road is the direct road to Pamplona. It is a short day's journey of some 60 miles at the most when all the windings are taken into account, and there are no really high passes or steep gradients throughout. You leave Bayonne by the main straight road which leads out south west towards Biarritz, but, immediately outside the fortifications, you turn to the left along the high land above the valley of the Nive. A mile and a 132 . THE PYRENEES half out you cross over the main line and immedi ately afterwards take the road to the left which leads you to Arcangues. There are many branch roads on this little bit, which is well under 4 miles, but the chief road is plain. At Arcangues, just after you have left the church on the right, you turn to the left, still following the high road, and in some 2 miles you strike the forest of Ustaritz, the confines of which were for so many centuries the sacred centre of the Basque people. Through this forest there is no doubt of the way. The road leading to the town of Ustaritz, which goes off on the left in the midst of the forest, comes in at so sharp an angle that one would not be tempted to take it, and the high road goes on, without any bifurcations, to St Pee. You have, by this time, crossed the low watershed between the basin of the Adour and that of the Nivelle, upon which river St Pee stands at some 13 or 14 miles from Bayonne. You turn to the left in St Pee by the road that leaves that village due south, and take the left-hand road again at the first bifurcation, which is immedi ately outside the village ; then follow steadily up the valley of the river. There is but one doubtful place, not 3 miles out of St Pee, where you choose the left of two roads, but even that is not really doubtful, for your road obviously, follows the stream, which it there crosses by a bridge, while the right-hand road goes over into the hills. About 3 miles more from this bifurcation you cross the frontier, and thence onwards there is no doubt of ROAD SYSTEM OF THE PYRENEES 133 your way. The high road goes over the Pass of Ostondo, or Maya, quite low, and brings you into the Basque valley of Baztan. Come on down through Elizondo, a most delightful town of this people, and climb up continually thence (taking the left-hand road at Irurita, one and a half miles from Elizondo) until you come to yet another pass, called the " Port La Betal " or " Vetale " in French, some 2000 feet or more in height. After crossing this col you are in the basin of the Ebro, and the road thence in to Pamplona is a straight stretch all the way to the plain, which appears sud denly spread out as you round a corner, a fine sight. The old road back from Pamplona into France over Roncesvalles, the road which the armies of Charlemagne took, and which the Romans built, went first east and west, and was the first portion of the great road to Saragossa. It met the road over the mountains and branched north towards Roncesvalles. There is a modern road which cuts off this corner, and joins the Roncesvalles road quite close to the hills. It crosses three low lateral ranges by very easy gradients, and has an excellent surface. It takes one through Larrasoafia, Erro, and finally, without any doubtful cross roads or turnings, falls into the old Roman road, just below Burguete. Here you must make ready for one of the greatest sights in Europe. You are on a very high upland plain, something like the glacis of a fortification, The last crest of the Pyrenees stands like a long wall of white cliffs, which seems low and familiar, because you are so very high up on this sloping 134 THE PYRENEES plain. You go through a fine northern-looking wood which might be in England, with great spacious clumps of beeches and broad glades. You pass the monastery, and then go up through the hamlet of Roncesvalles, quite an insignificant few hundred feet of road ; you see a ruined chapel upon your right (ruined quite recently by fire, and yet no one has taken the trouble to rebuild it !), then suddenly you are at the summit, and a profound trench opens sheer below you and points straight to the French plains, miles and miles away. It is here that Roland died. From this summit the road runs down directly on the northern side of the watershed, but still politically in Spain, till you come to the last Spanish town, Val Carlos, where you will do well to ask for papers permitting you to leave the country. These papers are obtained from the Corregidor. Two miles on you cross the river into France, and four miles further you are in St Jean Pied-de-Port, where there is good food and promptitude and news and all that is necessary to man. From St Jean Pied-de-Port the main valley road takes you, without any doubtful turnings, down the river and the railway, now on one side, now on the other, all the way to Bayonne. There is but one place where the traveller might be a little confused, and that is some 12 miles or more from St Jean Pied-de-Port, where the road, which has been running right along the railway and the river for miles, turns sharp over to the right to reach a village called Louhossoa; but this village (which is but a mile from ROAD SYSTEM OF THE PYRENEES 135 the river) once reached, everything is plain again. Turn to the left at the church, where the road goes straight back to the river (a matter of 2 miles), crosses it, and goes along the heights on the left bank, all the way back to Bayonne. The whole of this circle is about equivalent in distance to that which I have described round from Oloron to Jaca, and back again round by Salient ; and, as in the former case, you will do well to break the journey in Spanish territory and at Pamplona, for though this makes two short days in a motor, they are days in which you ought to see what you can see. For my part also, I would stop at Elizondo, to eat and to watch the place ; but I would not eat at the hotel in the main street, where the people are cruel and grasping, but rather at the cheap and genial place kept by one Jaregui. Besides these two circular journeys upon good roads, which a man can take across the main range, there is the variation of them that can be made by taking the valley road from Pamplona to Jaca, a journey of at least 70 miles or more. I know that it can be done, for I have seen motors that had done it, and for all that I know the road may even be excellent : or it may be very bad — I am not acquainted with it. Such as it is, it takes you all along Aragon and the parallel outer ranges of the Spanish Pyrenees. I have mentioned another extension to the roads described, the run down to Saragossa from Jaca. This of course takes you right out of the Pyrenean country, but the first half of it at least is in the hills, 136 THE PYRENEES and no journey shows you better the nature of the outlier mountains on the Spanish slope of the main range. Off the direct road one may make a long elbow eastward to reach Huesca, which was St Laurence's town. The surface is good, and there are few steep gradients, though there is a long climb out of Jaca itself. From Jaca to Saragossa, by way of Huesca, along this road, is just about ioo miles, and, as far as Huesca at least, it provides a complete knowledge of the mountain types upon the Spanish side of the watershed. Nor is this typical scenery anywhere finer than in the splendid gorges and chimney rocks of Riglos, nor is any one of the parallel ranges more characteristic than the high Sierra de Guara, which stands up above the burnt plain of Huesca, 30 miles out from the main ridge, quite separate from the general range, and yet reaching a summit of nearly 6000 feet. All the roads suitable for motoring, especially in such a district as this, are suitable for bicycling also. I say " especially in such a district as this," because the identity between motoring and bicycling roads is more striking in the Pyrenees than in most parts of France, since the expense and difficulty of making the great highways here has been such that it ,was not worth while building a carriage road on these hills unless the engineering was to be of the most perfect kind, and the surface of the best, and the gradients as easy as nature would allow. The consequence is that there are in the Pyrenees no roads (which he will find in the plains) where a man on a bicycle can go with difficulty, and a motor ROAD SYSTEM OF THE PYRENEES 137 cannot go at all. Stretches of this kind, due to bad surface or to steepness, are familiar to every one, but I can remember none of the sort, not even of a few miles, between St Jean Pied-de-Port and Puigcerda, nor between the French plains and the Spanish. The question will, however, be asked by any one who proposes to bicycle in this district for the first time, whether the long gradients are not such as to destroy the advantage of using the greater part of the roads. To this objection a general rule applies, one which will seem a little unusual when it is first read, but which I have found from ex perience to be true. It is this, that the few cross ings of the hills from north to south make easier journeys for the bicyclist than do the lateral roads across the ribs or buttresses of the main chain. Any one going for instance on a bicycle from Laruns to Lourdes, will have some very fine scenery for his pains, and, if the day is fine, he will not regret his experience, but he should be warned that on this lateral road most of his energy will be taken up in slowly climbing the great pass over the Mont Laid ; for though it is but a few miles as the crow flies, it is a big and toilsome business along the highway. Nor would that be the only pass. It is characteristic of these lateral roads that they usually contain more than one big ascent. He will be troubled again at the Col-de-Soulor and to get from Laruns to Lourdes, though the two towns are in contiguous valley's and no further apart than London and Windsor, would be a day's work for most men. 138 THE PYRENEES Another example of the same sort could be given from the other lateral roads of the Pyrenees, as, for instance, the low cross road between St Jean Pied-de-Port and the valley of Mauleon. Here the pass is much less high, but a mile or two from St Jean, when you have gone through St Jean-le- Vieux, you begin to climb, and all the long way of the valley of the Bidouze, and out again, over the next range, that overlooks the Saison, is a succession of long wheelings up hill. For the purpose of seeing some particular place in the next valley, it may be worth while to follow one of these lateral roads, but a general tour of that sort is not worth while. If, on the contrary, a bicyclist chooses the main north and south roads, he will find many advantages in the choice, and I would recommend in particular, as the best that he can undertake in these mountains, the round from Oloron to Jaca and back, which I have already de scribed. Such a journey is a task taking three full days, four or five easy days, and it gives such an opportunity of contrasting two civilisations, and of learning the barrier which separates them, as does not offer itself in so short a space anywhere else, I think, in western Europe. I will not detain the reader in this particular with what I have, to say upon this road in general, for that will rather concern the description I will make of it when I speak of travel on foot, but I will point out in what way it can be dealt with by the bicyclist. , All the long road from Oloron to Bedous, though it leads to the very heart of the mountains, needs .