THE PYRENEES

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

• PARIS
• MARIE ANTOINETTE
• EMMANUEL BURDEN, MERCHANT
• A CHANGE IN THE CABINET
• HILLS AND THE SEA
• ON NOTHING AND KINDRED SUBJECTS
• ON EVERYTHING
• ON SOMETHING
• FIRST AND LAST
• THIS AND THAT AND THE OTHER
• ON
• A PICKED COMPANY

THE GATE OF THE ROUSILLON

H. Belloc, del.

THE PYRENEES

BY
H. BELLOC

WITH NUMEROUS SKETCHES
BY THE AUTHOR
AND TWENTY-TWO MAPS

FOURTH EDITION
WITH A NEW PREFACE

METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

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 PEÑA 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 difficulties 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 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.

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

This third edition of my book on the Pyrenees necessarily suffers somewhat from the fact that it is published after the interval of the Great War.

The book in its original form was written in the course of 1908-09, and contained a number of particular details on prices, etc., which the war has completely changed. These I have had to revise only approximately, for the value of the franc still fluctuates violently. But the present conditions of currency in Europe are not permanent. In other matters the book is as applicable to the present condition of the Pyrenees as it was to that thirteen or fourteen years ago. The road system is the same, and though one or two of the inns may have changed hands, the account of these I give holds in the main. There have been no new maps issued, either, since the date on which the book was written. I have not added anything on the present system of passports, because that also presumably will be out of date in a short time; but I may mention that at the moment of writing these lines (September, 1922), it is advisable to have one’s passport viséd to Spain before visiting the mountains. Even if the reader has no intention of crossing the frontier he may be compelled to do so under stress of weather, or he may easily do so by error in the confusion of the higher valleys, and in the first Spanish town he comes to his passport is sure to be demanded.

The train service differs little now from what it was before the war. The night and day services and the average number of hours required for approaching the mountains from Paris or London, are again much what they were fourteen years ago.

PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION

I write this Preface to the Fourth Edition after five years.

My last note upon this book was written, as the reader will see, for the Third Edition, in September, 1922. These lines are written in November, 1927.

When I wrote my Preface to the Third Edition, Europe, its currencies, and the rest, were still under the heavy disturbances of the Great War. But things are now more settled, notably currencies. Also a few more years of peace have given both French and Spaniards the opportunity for building new roads, and for extending the railway system.

In the notes I am about to add here I ought to make it clear that I am writing principally by information rather than by direct personal experience, and anyone who finds that some point ought to be corrected or something added, and who will communicate with the publishers, or with myself care of the publishers, will be doing the future readers of this book a great service. I am sure to be making some mistakes, and the less there are in any future edition the better.

I humbly beg the reader to remember that the book was written in the old days of peace, “before ever the sons of Achaia came to the land.” It was also written when I was a young man and could go over any number of miles on foot in any weather and over pretty well anything—even the worst steeps of the Canal Roya, though I have no claim to climbing. To-day I can do none of these things, and have to go by hearsay. I propose to divide what I have to say into (1) general remarks, (2) additions to the road system, (3) the (comparatively slight) changes in the railroad system (including the change in the value of money and present prices of tickets), (4) changes in inns (here I shall have to be very tentative, for I have to go mainly by reports), and (5) maps.

(1) General

The political situation has so developed that it is no longer advisable, as I formerly said, but necessary to have one’s passport viséd for Spain before starting for the Pyrenees, even if one has no intention of crossing the frontier. For, as I said when the book was written, there are occasions when the traveller on foot in the mountains may cross the frontier unwittingly, and have to deal with the authorities on the farther side. To this must be added the consideration that a stricter central government in Spain, coupled with occasional plots against it, has made the frontier authorities particularly vigilant. They may take from a traveller anything which looks like an offensive weapon—an acquaintance of mine was deprived, for instance, of a very large stick, and he might have fared worse with a very large knife. It is well to remember that when you enter Spain by this frontier you are coming in by its most remote, least peopled, and most difficult area, and that one must have nothing to explain if one can help it. I mean, of course, when you enter over the main range; for the two main roads and railways at either end of the chain by the sea-coasts of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean are common international highways.

Another point to remember, which is a small one but now and then, though very rarely, important to the traveller, is that the variation in the compass has changed since this book was written. It was written twenty years ago, and was published nearly nineteen years ago, and since then the variation of the compass has lessened (for this part of the world) by something like three degrees. The traveller must further remember that (though it is not very strictly enforced) there is a new law in France both for travellers proposing to reside a certain time in the country and (this is strictly enforced) a daily tax for travellers using foreign motor-cars in the country; while all the Spanish corresponding regulations have been tightened up. The wise thing to do, therefore, if you mean to spend more than a fortnight in these hills on either side of the border, is to inform yourself thoroughly upon arrival of what is required of you. You can do it in France easily enough; but as on the Spanish side the main towns are a long way from the range, you will do well, if you intend to spend any number of days to the south of the frontier, to find out at the Spanish Consulate in London or at your nearest large town what formalities may be needed.

On the effect of the change in prices I deal elsewhere. But there are two things to be remembered here, with one of which most people are familiar, but the other of which most people have not as yet appreciated. The first is that on the French as on the Spanish side, but much more on the French side than on the Spanish, the old unit of currency does not mean, in gold, what it meant when this book was written.

In France it means in gold only one-fifth at the present apparently stabilized rate of what it meant when I first put these pages together. We are on a gold basis in England. A franc used, before the war, to be nearly 10d. It is to-day almost exactly 2d. On the Spanish side the peseta fluctuates somewhat, but at the moment of writing it is well below thirty (twenty-eight odd), which means that the peseta, once nominally equal to the franc, is between 8d. and 9d., or rather more than four times the present value of the franc.

But the second point, which is much less generally appreciated, is even more important to retain. Prices in gold have changed. There are all sorts of views as to the real amount of the change; but I think we are not very far wrong in basing any calculation of expense upon a basis of doubling. At any rate, if you do that you will not be disappointed. The gold franc or gold peseta buys in 1927 more than half as much, but not much more than half as much, as it did before the war. In other words, the franc to-day is not in practice half of a fifth, that is, one-tenth, of what it was before the war, nor is the peseta in practice as little as fourpence halfpenny compared with prices before the war. You get more for your money than such a rough rule of thumb would warrant. But remember that you are getting things cheaper than the strict gold basis would allow. For instance, I know of one particular inn on the French side of the frontier, high up in the valleys (it is a very good one and a typical one), where they charge for food, including wine, and lodging, fifty to sixty francs a day. You would not have got the same thing for five or six francs in 1914; but you would have got it for seven or eight. My object in emphasizing this is to prevent the traveller from thinking that under modern conditions he is being bled. It is rather the other way. He is getting things somewhat cheaper still in these mountains than world prices would warrant. He must expect to pay on the very different scale I have indicated.

Lastly, let me add in connexion with prices that, for a variety of reasons which it would take too long to go into, he must expect a very distinct rise in general expenses as measured in English exchange when he passes from French into Spanish territory. He must allow for something like an increase of a third, and perhaps in the larger towns of a half of what he pays on the French side.

Further, when he is looking for anything like luxury, even in the humblest sense of that term, he must be prepared to pay (e.g. for foreign wines, or for well-appointed travel by car) nearly double on the Spanish side what he would have to pay on the French.

The traveller should remember that there has been a very great expansion of good roads on the Spanish side compared with what there was when this book was written, and with that has gone an almost universal system of motor-buses, which have quite changed travel on the southern side of the range. He will do well always to ask before trying to go by the slow and few trains what the motor-bus services are. Thus, in the old days when this book was written, a man had either to go on foot or by slow horse vehicles across Roncesvalles to Pamplona. To-day there is a first-rate service of rapid motor-buses, and he will find that to be the case pretty well everywhere between the Mediterranean end and the Atlantic.

(2) Roads

In the matter of new roads a great deal has been done since this book was written. First and most important, one can go by a good road now over the Bonaigua. I regret it, but so it is. The road does not, indeed, follow the old track of adventure from the Noguera to the Upper Garonne. It goes somewhat to the north of it. But it constitutes, what did not before exist, a proper crossing supplementary to the two roads of Sallent and Jaca. It leads down through the hitherto impassable centre of the range to Lerida, and makes of the Val d’Aran, which used to be a most secluded pocket, a thoroughfare.

Next, there is now a road which a motor car can follow from Seo de Urgel to Andorra the Old. In my time no wheeled vehicle had entered Andorra. They used to boast also that no man had ever been put to death there by process of law. I hope that progress has not changed that.

Next note that there is a road for motors now through Bourg Madame, through Puigcerdá to Seo, and so down into Spain, and further a first-class road from Puigcerdá to Barcelona over the Pass by Ripoll, which I think did not exist when I was a younger man. The main road from Burguete to Pamplona, cutting off the great corner at Aoiz and passing through Erro and Larrasoaña, has long been completed; it is now served by a good service of motor-buses.

Of secondary roads that up the valley of Salazar reaches as far north as Izalzu; that up the valley of Roncal as far as Uztarroz. So if you are crossing the Basque ridge anywhere between St. Jean Pied de Port and Tardets you will find the beginning of a road on the southern side at either of these points.

On the French side there are few important changes. I am afraid that the very difficult road overhanging the precipices between Argelès and Larunz has not been made less difficult. It is well called Mount Ugly. If you care for the experience, it is exciting enough. Nothing, I fear, could make this road easy without a high parapet at its worst stretch; and that might be a danger of a new kind, by giving the driver too much confidence.

There is some secondary extension of the road beyond Gavarnie up to the frontier. I see it marked: I have not myself tried it. You can get up from Tardets nowadays by a road both to Ste. Engrace and Larrau, and there is something of a road up the Arette from Aramitz. For the rest, I believe there is on the French side no change, but developments were proposed some little time ago, and if there have been any quite recent changes which any of my readers can acquaint me with they will oblige me by mentioning them for a further edition.

(3) Railroads

The railroad system is, for the practical purposes of travel, what it was when I wrote the book so many years ago. But we are on the eve of very important changes. One cannot yet travel by train under the Pass of the Somport and so directly to Saragossa from Toulouse or Bordeaux. But the tunnel has long been completed, the rails are being laid—indeed, perhaps at the moment of writing they may be already in position. I cannot find out from the authorities when they think the first train will go through. Perhaps they do not know themselves. It is amusing to hear that the tunnel is now continually used by foot-passengers, who are escorted in a gang and who (so I am assured) have their passports examined in the bowels of the earth, some thousands of feet below the summit of the main ridge.

The railway from Ax over the Hospitalet is in a more backward state—hardly more than surveyed—and I know not when it is designed to open. On the other hand, the through railway by the Cerdagne is now virtually completed; there are only a few hundred yards to be finished; one still has to go in a vehicle or walk from Puigcerdá station to Bourg Madame, a matter of a mile or so; but whenever the authorities choose one can have through traffic through this very fine piece of scenery round from Perpignan to Ripoll and Barcelona.

I append what may be of use, though of course it is a changeable thing, a note on the main trains for approaching the Pyrenees as the time-table now stands, with the prices under the new currency and their equivalents in English money; this time-table changes of course, and inquiry must always be made, but the main trains (e.g. the Sud Express) are much the same year after year.

The three main lines of approach to the Pyrenees remain what they were when this book was written, the western one by Bordeaux, the central one by Toulouse, the eastern one by Lyons, Nîmes, and Perpignan. Of these the first is the most rapid; and of the two routes to Bordeaux—the State Line and the Orleans Line—the latter is the quicker. The day train leaves at 8.8 in the morning from the Quai d’Orsay, and gets you to Pau, which is the jumping-off place for the Western Pyrenees, at 10.45 at night. The distance is a little over five hundred miles; the cost, with the franc apparently stabilized at 124 at the time of writing, is just over 250 francs second class, just over 370 francs first class, and not quite 165 third class, that is, about £1 7s. 6d. to £1 8s. English third class from Paris, about £2 2s. second class, and about £3 2s. first class. If you are making a very short stay in the Pyrenees it may pay you to take a return ticket, the duration of which varies on the French lines with the length of your journey. In this case it would give you about ten days, counting the day on which you leave Paris. There are all sorts of arrangements on the French lines for round trip tickets, family tickets, etc., at reduced prices, but on these one must get information specially from an agency or the French tourist office in London or the main stations in Paris.

Going first class and paying a supplementary price of about £1 4s. to £1 5s. and changing at Dax, into an ordinary first class, one can go from Paris by the Sud Express leaving the Quai d’Orsay at 10 a.m. and get to Pau at 8.30 in the evening.

If you are making for the extreme west of the range at St. Jean Pied de Port, the same trains get you, the one to Bayonne, where you must sleep, at 9.45 at night, and the other, the Sud Express, without changing, at 7.45 p.m.

Next morning there is a train on at 8, and another at 11.30, for St. Jean, the first getting in at 9.45, the other at 1.15. The distance from Bayonne to Paris is about 485 miles, and the cost therefore, rather less to Pau, being 350 francs (about) first class, 235 or 236 second class, and 154 third class.

The night trains by this line are the 7.10 (which has no third class), which gets you to Pau at 7.20 the next morning; there is a luxury train with supplementary payments for sleeping berth which gets you there no earlier, but has the advantage of giving you time to dine in Paris. It does not start till 8.40; however, it costs nearly £2 more than the first class fare to Pau. Another night train with third classes in it starts at 9.50, gets you to Bordeaux at 7 in the morning (where you have nearly half an hour for coffee) and to Pau for lunch just after noon.

The Central Line leading to Toulouse is a very slow one because it has to go over the central mountains of France. You start from the Quai d’Orsay also at 10.20 in the morning, and you do not get to Toulouse till just on 10.30 at night. The fares are 142 francs third class, 218 second class, and 324 first class.

The two night trains are, one at 7.50, the other at 9.15—the latter with sleepers if required; the first gets into Toulouse at 8.30 the next morning, the other at 9.15.

From Toulouse you have a choice of three ways: to the Central Pyrenees, to the Valley of the Ariège and Ax, which is to the west, and to Narbonne and so to Perpignan on the Mediterranean at the extreme east of the range.

The first is a distance of about 100 miles to Tarbes, or another 12 miles on to Lourdes.

The second, about 75 miles, but with only one fast train a day, a morning one, at 9, getting you to Ax at 11.40, in time for lunch; while the third one is the main through line with plenty of trains, but a distance of 125 miles. On the other hand, it has the fastest trains. For instance, you can leave Toulouse at 9.30 and be in Perpignan by 1.30.

As for the line by Lyons, it is a long way round and not to be taken unless you want to see anything on the way. On the other hand, it has the best service of fast trains. The best morning train is the 9 o’clock from P.L.M. station in Paris, which gets you to Avignon at 7.45 in the evening, and there you must sleep, going on next morning to Perpignan. You usually have to change at Tarascon. It is the better part of two days, for save in the case of one train, there is another change at Narbonne. There is no need to dwell on this line, as no one would take it for the Pyrenees unless they were visiting other places on the way, such as Nîmes or Narbonne. The cost also is about thirty per cent greater than by the more direct line.

(4) Inns

The little I have to say on the changes in the inns since the first edition of this book was published must be very tentative, as I have to depend upon reports of others, save for a certain amount of recent travel at the two ends of the range. Most of the old recommendations still stand. Gabas is what it always was, and the Golden Lion of Perpignan as admirable as it has been for these thirty years and more. The inn at Burguete and that of Val Carlos have been somewhat modernized since the new motor-bus service began, but they are still excellent. An inn I did not mention in the first edition on the Spanish side of the range, in Catalonia, is that of Ribas Prattes, standing over the torrent, and one where I, at least, have always been very comfortable. Since the opening of the new road and railway over the Sierra del Cadi it has become unfortunately rather famous, and it is not cheap; but the people treat you charmingly, and that is a great thing.

At Bourg Madame I have quite recently found myself very comfortable at Salvat. I am told that the principal inn at Andorra is rather more sophisticated since the motor road has been built to the town, but is still as good as it was in the old days. Of course the cooking and everything else is Catalan; and I am talking from hearsay, as I have not been to Andorra for many years.

As you stop at Bayonne on your way you will find good meals at the Grand Brasserie facing the end of the bridge, while the hotel for sleeping is the Capagorry; at least that is my favourite, though there is also the rather more expensive Grand Hotel.

Nearly all the places on which I have made inquiries seem to have maintained the old service intact. You still have the Mur in Jaca, and the more primitive but hospitable inn of Canfranc; and the little inn at Urdos, where I stopped some years ago, is passable enough, though I still recommend as a base the Hotel de la Poste lower down the valley at Bédous. By the way, if you do stop at Urdos, beware of the drinking water which for some reason is not very safe—or was not.

Before leaving these very brief notes I should like to emphasize again for travellers the change in prices. On the whole, they are lower, reckoning the real purchasing value of money, than they were in the old days.

Thus, the place I know best, and where I have stopped most often, is charging now as a regular pension per day in francs including wine, and counting in francs, six times what it charged before the war. Now the nominal value of the franc in gold is only a fifth of what it was before the war, and the purchasing power of gold is very nearly half, so a multiple of six means that you are getting your board and lodging really cheaper than you did in 1913; but I know it is difficult to persuade people of this, just as it is difficult to persuade people in England that railway fares and postage at home are really less than they were before the war. At any rate, those who may have had experience of the Pyrenees before the war may roughly multiply by six for the present price, at least in modest places; and in some cases by less. Of course in the very large hotels in places like Bagnères you may be charged anything. But they are places which I never go to and on which I therefore can give no advice.

It remains, by the way, as true as ever that on the French side of the range you must always ask the price of your room before taking it, and on the Spanish side be quite clear as to whether the price quoted is for the room and all the day’s meals including wine (as is the national custom) or for only a part. On both sides of the frontier service is usually included in the bill nowadays at 10 per cent on the total, and it is foolish to pay anything more.

(5) Maps

The war interfered with map-making in France so much that recovery is only beginning, and the revision of the main surveys is still in arrears. What I have said, however, in this book still stands for the most part.

I append a list of the maps recommended, with their prices, to be obtained from Messrs Sifton, Praed & Co., The Map House, 67, St. James’s Street, S.W. 1.

With regard to this list I would make the following comment:

(1) This is the standard French ordnance map, the one most necessary for the pedestrian, especially if he is dealing only with a limited area.

(2) This is the map for motoring and road work.

(3) This is the map for climbers, but unfortunately the first three sheets have been allowed to go out of print. I hear that there is some hope of a reprint being made, and on my next visit to the publishers I will urge them to advance it. The map was made years ago for Messrs. Barrere, and is very useful on account of its numerous contours.

(4) is to be reckoned with (3).

(5) This is the general map for a conspectus of the whole range.

(6) I have not seen this map, but it can be obtained from the firm mentioned above. It is I believe detailed and exceedingly useful, but as yet only applies to this small section of the mountain.

(7) The Michelin map is a motoring map, but contains a great deal of useful information, and is very accurate as to motoring roads.

(8) The Taride is a much rougher map, with general indications; not so accurate as the Michelin, but useful for long tours.

With this said I append the list.

(1) 1/100,000 France, covering the Pyrenees in 27 sheets. Price 1s. per sheet unmounted; mounted on cloth to fold for the pocket, 2s. 6d. per sheet.

(2) 1/200,000 France. 7 sheets. Price, 2s. each unmounted; mounted on cloth to fold, 4s. 6d. each. Sheet 69 mounted on cloth to fold, 4s.

(3) Schrader’s map of the Pyrenees Centrales par F. Schrader. Sheets 4, 5, 6 only available. The three northern sheets 1, 2, 3 are out of print.

(4) Schrader’s map “Massif de Gavarnie et du Mont Perdu,” Scale 1/2000. Paper, folded in cover. Price, 2s. 6d.

(5) Touring Club de France. Scale 1/400,000. Two sheets cover the whole of the Pyrenees. Mounted on cloth to fold for the pocket, 5s. each.

(6) Mapa Militar de Espana. Sheet 86 and part of 62. Seo de Urgel. This is the only sheet published so far of the Pyrenees. Price, 2s. 6d. unmounted; mounted on cloth to fold, 4s. 6d.

(7) Carte Routière Michelin. Scale 1/200,000. Two sheets cover the whole of the Pyrenees on the French side. Mounted to fold, 4s. each.

(8) Taride Road Maps. Scale 4 miles to 1 inch. Two sheets cover the whole of the Pyrenees. Paper, folded in cover, 2s. each. Mounted on cloth to fold, 5s. each.

CONTENTS

LIST OF MAPS

GENERAL SKETCH MAP OF THE PYRENEES

THE PYRENEES

I
THE PHYSICAL NATURE OF THE PYRENEES

To use for travel or for pleasure a great mountain system, the first thing necessary is to understand its structure and its plan; to this understanding must next be added an understanding of its appearance, climate, soil, and, as it were, habits, all of which lend it a character peculiar to itself.

These two approaches to the comprehension of a mountain system may be called the approaches to its physical nature; and when one has the elements of that nature clearly seized, one is the better able to comprehend the human incidents attached to it.

From an appreciation of this physical basis one must next proceed to a general view of the history of the district—if it has a history—and of the modern political character resulting from it. At the root of this will be found the original groups or communities which have remained unchanged in Western Europe throughout all recorded time. These groups are sometimes distinguishable by language, more often by character. Changes of philosophy profoundly affect them; changes of economic circumstance, though affecting them far less, do something to render the problem of their continuity complex: but upon an acquaintance with the living men concerned, it is always possible to distinguish where the boundaries of a country-side are set; and the permanence of such limits in European life is the chief lesson a deep knowledge of any district conveys.

The recorded history of the inhabitants lends to these hills their only full meaning for the human being that visits them to-day; nor does anyone know, nor half know, any country-side of Europe unless he possesses not only its physical appearance and its present habitation, but the elements of its past.

These things established, one can turn to the details of travel and explain the communications, the difficulties, and the opportunities attaching to various lines of travel. In the case of a mountain range, the greater part of this last will, of course, for modern Englishmen, consist in some account of wilder travel upon foot, and the sense of exploration and of discovery which the district affords.

Such are the lines to be followed in this book, and, first, I will begin by laying down the plan and contours of the Pyrenees.

The first impression reached by modern and educated men when they consider a mountain system is one over-simple. This over-simplicity is the necessary result of our present forms of elementary education, and has been well put by some financial vulgarian or other (with the intention of praise) when he called it “Thinking in Maps,” or, “Thinking Imperially”; for the maps in a man’s head when he first approaches a new range are the maps of the schoolroom.

Thus one sees the Sierra Nevada in California as one line, the Cascade Range as another parallel to it. The Alps and the Himalayas alike arrange themselves into simple curves, arcs of a circle with a great river for the cord. The Atlas is a straight line cutting off the northern projection of Africa, the Apennines are a straight line running down the centre of Italy. Such are the first geographic elements present in the mind.

The next impression, however, the impression gathered in actual travel, or in a detailed study, is one of mere confusion, a confusion the more hopeless on account of the false simplicity of the original premise. Deductions from that premise are perpetually at variance with the observed facts of travel or of study, the exceptions become so numerous as to swamp the rule, and an original misconception upon the main character of the chain prevents a new and more accurate synthesis of its general aspect. Thus, the conception of the Cascade Range upon the Pacific Coast of the United States as parallel and separate from the Sierras, confuses one’s view of all the district round Shasta, and of all the watersheds south of the Mohave where the two systems merge; or again, one who has only thought of the Alps as a mere arc of a circle misconceives, and is bewildered by the nature, the appearance, and the whole history of the great re-entrant angles of the Val d’Aosta with its Gallic influences; the anomaly of the Adige Valley will not permit him to explain its political fortunes, and the outlying arms which have preserved the independence of Swiss institutions upon the southern slope will not fall into his view of the mountains.

This confusion, I say, is not due so much to the multitude of detail as to the permanent effect of an original strong and over-simple conception remaining in the mind as it continues to accumulate increasing but sporadic knowledge of a particular district; and it is a confusion in which those who have formed such an erroneous conception commonly remain.

In order to avoid such confusion and to allow one’s increasing knowledge a frame wherein to fit, it is essential to grasp in one scheme the few elementary lines which underlie a mountain system, and such a scheme will be a trifle more complex than the too simple scheme usually presented, but once one has it one can appreciate the place of every irregularity in the structure of the whole chain of hills.

In the case of the Pyrenees the common error of too great simplicity may be easily stated. These mountains are regarded as a wall separating France from Spain, and running direct from sea to sea. Such an aspect of the range will more and more confuse the traveller and reader the more he studies the actual shape of the valleys. Another picture should occupy the mind, and it will presently be seen that with this picture permanently fixed as a framework for the whole system, an increased knowledge of its details does but expand the sense of unity originally conveyed. The Pyrenees must not be regarded as a sharp heaped ridge forming a single watershed between the plains of Gaul and those of Northern Spain, and running east and west from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. They form a system, the watershed of which does not exactly stretch from one sea to the other. The axis of it does not consist of one line; the general direction is not due east. The axis of the Pyrenean chain is built up of two main lines, of approximately equal length: the one running south of east from a point at some distance from the Atlantic, the other north of west from a point right on the shores of the Mediterranean. These two lines do not meet. They miss by over eight miles, and the gap between them is joined by a low saddle.

Plan A.

The first of these lines starts from a point (Mount Urtioga) 25 miles south of the corner made by the Bay of Biscay at Irun, and some 15 miles west of its meridian; it runs about 9° 15′ south of east to the peak called Sabouredo, the last of the Maladetta group, the direct distance from which to Mount Urtioga is precisely 200 kilometres, or 124 miles. The second runs from Cape Cerberus on the Mediterranean to a peak called the Pic-de-l’homme, which stands a trifle over 12 kilometres, or 7¾ miles, north of the Sabouredo; its direction is 9° 25′ north of west, and the total length of this second line is just over 190 kilometres, or 117 miles.

Plan B.

The simplest scheme, then, in which we can regard the Pyrenees, is as a system of not quite parallel lines of equal length, running one towards the other, but missing by not quite 8 miles; the gap or “fault” joined by a zigzag saddle on the watershed. The westernmost of these lines splits into several branches before it reaches the Atlantic, so that the true western end of the chain lies well to the south and east of that ocean (at Mount Urtioga); the other starts from, and forms a projection in, the Mediterranean. The full distance as the crow flies from Mount Urtioga to Cape Cerberus upon the Mediterranean is 390 kilometres, that is 241 miles. And there is but 10 kilometres, or 6½ miles, difference in length between the two halves of the chain.

If U be the point called Mount Urtioga, S the Sabouredo, L the Pic-de-l’homme, and C Cape Cerberus, these two lines and the gap between them will lie precisely as in this plan.

With this main guide by which to judge the structure of the chain, all details will be found to fit in, and the two first variations which we must superimpose upon so general a view, are to be found in the “step” or “corner” formed by the watershed round the Pic d’Anie. The southward turn of the range is here not gradual but sharp, and the Somport, the pass at the head of the Val d’Aspe, lies almost a day’s going below the Port St. Engrace, which is the Pass near the Pic d’Anie. Next, one should note the two re-entrant angles, one to the north of the chain, one to the south, which distinguish the Spanish valley of the Gallego and the French valley of the Gave de Pau respectively. These features modify the simplicity of the first or western branch of the chain; one exceptional feature only modifies the second or Eastern branch, and this is the deep re-entrant wedge of the Ariège valley upon the French side. We may therefore regard the elements of the watershed somewhat according to the sketch plan B on the preceding page.

Plan C.

The details of the watershed when they are given in full are of course indefinitely more numerous and complicated, and it may be of advantage for those who would understand the structure of the Pyrenees to glance also at the plan opposite where the dotted line represents the exact trace of the watershed, the dark lines the simple structure described above.

Plan D.

The watershed then should be regarded as the chief feature in the range, and as the backbone of the whole system. Geologically, it is not the foundation of the range. Geologically, the range was piled up by the junction of a number of short separate ranges, each of which ran with a sharper south-eastern dip (about 30°) than does the present long line of saddles which has joined them and forms the existing watershed, and probably the process of the formation of the Pyrenees was upon the model sketched in the following diagram.

But for the purpose of understanding the Pyrenees as they now are, it is the existing watershed which we must consider, and that runs as I have said.

Next, the rule should be laid down that the Pyrenees must be separately considered on their northern and upon their southern slopes. It will be seen later that the physical and historical contrast between the two sides of the mountains is sometimes acute and sometimes slight, but the contrast between the general contour upon either side is such as to make it impossible to unite both in one similar system.

The Northern slope of the Pyrenees is narrow and precipitous. The plains are for the greater part of its length clearly separated from the mountains; the easy country in some places (at St. Girons, for instance, and in the Flats between Lourdes and Tarbes) is not 20 miles as the crow flies from the highest peaks.

On the Spanish side, on the contrary, the mountainous district will run from two to three times that distance. Its extreme width between the open country at the foot of the Sierra Monsech and the Salau Pass is over 60 miles, and it is nowhere less than two days’ good journey on foot from the summits to the plains.

This differentiation between the northern and the southern slopes is not merely one of width, it is due to profound differences in the contours which make the Spanish side of the system a different type of mountain group from the French. For, on the French side the Pyrenees consist in a series of great ribs or buttresses running up from the plains perpendicularly to the main heights of the range, and it is between these ribs or buttresses that the separate and highly distinct valleys which are the characteristic habitations of the French Basques and Béarnais lie. On the Spanish side the main structure is in folds parallel to the watershed; the lateral valleys descending from the watershed run southward for but a very short distance, they come, within a few miles, upon high east-and-west ridges which sometimes rival the main range itself in height and which succeed each other like waves down to the plains of the Ebro. The contrast in structure north and south of the watershed may be expressed in the formula of this plan. A man looking at the Pyrenees from the French towns at their base sees in one complete view a belt of steep rising slopes, and a long fairly even line of summits against the sky. A man looking at the range from the Spanish plains can only in a few rare places so much as catch sight of the main range. In far the greater number of such views he will have before him a high ridge which masques the country beyond. If, then, the reader or the traveller regards the French slope as being essentially a series of profound valleys parallel to each other and running north and south, he will have grasped the main aspect of this side of the range. If he will regard the Spanish slope as a series of parallel outliers which begin quite close to the watershed, and which, though falling at last into the plains of the Ebro, are, even the most southern of them, of considerable height, he will have grasped the structure of the Pyrenees upon the side which looks towards the sun.

Plan E.

To these two main aspects the reader must again admit considerable modifications, the first of which concerns the French side.

Plan F.

This Northern slope and its valleys, of which the sketch map over page indicates the general arrangement, may be divided into two sections: the first a western section, the second an eastern one, and these two are separated at A-B by a division roughly corresponding to the “fault” between the two axes, which, as we have seen, determine the lie of the range.

From the first, or western axis, descend with a regular parallelism, eight valleys. Each valley bifurcates in its higher part into two main ravines, and a whole system of minor streams, spread over an indefinite number of tortuous dales and gullies, attach to each valley.

There is a mark or limit for each of these western French valleys, which is the spot where it debouches upon the open country. Thus the Gave d’Ossau falls into the Gave d’Aspe at Oloron; nevertheless the two valleys must be regarded as separate, because the meeting of the two streams takes place in the open plain. On the other hand the valley of Baigorry, and the neighbouring valley of St. Jean, though containing two large separate streams, must be treated as one system, because these streams meet at Eyharee near Ossés, and the open plain is not reached before a point some miles further down beyond Canbo.

The test, though it may sound arbitrary upon paper, is quite easily appreciated in the landscape, and the separate valleys are more clearly marked, perhaps, than those of any other European mountain chain.

These eight valleys ([see plan G over page]), going from west to east, are first that of the Nive (the bifurcations of which give St. Jean and the Baigorry), next that of the Gave-de-Mauléon (Larrau and Ste. Engrace), and both of these are Basque; next comes the valley of the Gave d’Aspe (with the bifurcation of Lourdios and Urdos), up which went the main Roman road into Spain and which is the first of the Béarnese valleys; next is the Val d’Ossau (with the bifurcation of Gabas and the lac d’Arrius), next the valley of the Gave de Pau (with the bifurcations of Cauterets and Gavarnie), next the valley of Bigorre, a short valley bifurcating in two minor streams at its head. Next, or seventh, comes the Val d’Aure, with Vielle upon its western bifurcation and Bordères upon its eastern; and lastly the bifurcated valley of the Garonne, whose level and deep floor comes nearest of all to the main chain, and holds on the west Luchon, on a branch called the Pique, on the east Viella in the Val d’Aran.

Plan G.

Plan H.

Once past this point, the structure of the hills along the eastern run of the broken Pyrenean axis changes. The mountains here are penetrated by 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 Ariège) 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 subdividing lateral ridges, and the only thing giving 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 Ariège, but those of the Ariège and Oriège 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 Ariège 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 Ariège, 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 Ariège 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 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.

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 innumerable 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 (as in plan I below).

Plan I.

These gorges are very rarely of any length, a point in which the Pyrenees differ from the Alps. Here and there, especially in the limestone formations, you do get long and difficult passages. One, the Cacouette in the Western Pyrenees, in the upper waters of the Gave-de-Mauléon, is not only very profound but absolutely impassable, like the Black Cañon 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.

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. Mauléon, 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 Argelès, etc.

Further, these towns at the mouths of the valleys have invariably chosen for their site, whether they be prehistoric or mediæval, some rock on which to build a citadel; and in every case a castle is still to be found holding that rock. Lourdes, Foix, Mauléon 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 Argelès lies above Lourdes, Bédous 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 Argelès, and above it Luz; in the valley of Soule we have Tardets above Mauléon, 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 communications. For much the greater part of the year 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 mountaineering 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 Jasses, and the same arrangement 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 road is rare. 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 Sallent 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 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 Bédous 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 find 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 Peña, the ridge of rock which takes its name from the “Peña-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 different 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 essentially 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 Sallent and Panticosa, and the long ridge to the south of Vielsa and El Plan. Indeed the characteristics of Sobrarbe, as this country-side 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 Peña for two days’ 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 mountain 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 mountain land. From the high ridge, which is your standpoint, 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 10.

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 compared 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 mountains. Saragossa is half as much again. The Spanish Pyrenees push out civilization, 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 30. The difficulty and expense with which the civilization 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, without 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 Peña, 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 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 Cerdagne and Andorra as the Eastern Catalonian land.

Plan J.

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 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 civilization, 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 dependent 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 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 are “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 Béarn 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 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 considerable valleys, comparable to those of the Tet and the Ariège 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 abruptness. 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 connected summits above him than in any other European range.

The absence of snow is a further sharp characteristic 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 requiring 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 country-side. Now in the Pyrenees almost all 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 overhanging 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 determined 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 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 Genèvre 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.

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 everywhere 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’Anéu 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’Anéu 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 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.

Of all the accidents that strike one in connexion 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 exceptionally 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 Somport, the Pourtalet, and the Cerdagne. Of these the Pourtalet has been but recently opened, and was just before the war 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 high road across the watershed is that which crosses it at Porté from the valley of the Ariège 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 accidental divergence of this to the south, in the upper valley of the Ariège.

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 high roads, 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 Ariège 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 perfectly 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 Biella, 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. 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 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 surrounding 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 mountain 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 traversable 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 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 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 themselves 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 throughout 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.

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 eastward, the forests remain as dense, the rivers as full, but the days are certainly finer and mist less frequent. 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 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 September 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, give 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 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

The 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 impose—which therefore fall under similar local customs, which have a common jealousy of the civilized power on the plains below them, and which support each other in a tacit way against the stranger, yet which, from the beginning, have different governments and (especially in the high central part) deal with different corporate traditions—to the north the Béarnese, to the south Aragon. The easier passes to the west and the east of the chain permit a more or less homogeneous community 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 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 subdivide 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 Béarn, 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 boundaries. 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 everywhere east of the Carlitte mountains; in the Ariège 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 Béarnais 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 Ribagorzana. 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 Béarnais Gabas, in the Val d’Ossau, to Béarnais Urdos, in the Val d’Aspe.

An explanation of the unity which rules over each group, Basque, Central and Catalan, can only 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 Béarnais valleys I have mentioned. Urgel binds Catalan Andorra to Catalan Esterri. Why, however, 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 eastward 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 impossible 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 proportion 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, 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 of Western Europe of one people ousting another, and the process is manifestly physically impossible, save among nomads. Jews or Arabs could propagate 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 differentiation between Basque, Béarnais, 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 Béarn, 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 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 necessarily served as a political boundary whenever a high civilization 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 organized 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 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 organized 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 connexion 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 Sallent—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 progress 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 accustomed 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 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 off 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 civilization was similar to, always as old as, and sometimes older than, her own. It was a municipal civilization 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 Nemosus (Nîmes), now narrowing to the rocky ledge of the Portus Veneris (Port Vendres), concerns the first evidence of Pyrenean history; for it was from a corner of this belt—between Tarragona and Narbonne—that the advance of civilization inland and along the Chain proceeded.

A century before the four imperial centuries which made our Christian world, a century before Augustus Cæsar, 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 Roussillon 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 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 civilization long before Rome inherited it.

With the much longer stretch that runs from the upper Ariège to the Atlantic it was very different. This was of what Rome made, not of what Rome inherited. Before the coming of Roman government 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 civilization to the east of them began to record their existence: these three were first the Convenæ, 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 meagreness and eccentricity of the information upon a barbarous race and custom which affords such opportunities to our dons for those forms of speculation which they love to put forward as dogma, the most absurd example of which, perhaps, is the interpretation and enlargement of Tacitus’ “Germania.” 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 Convenæ are early noted to have attached to them upon their right and upon their left, to east and to west, the Consevanni and the Bigerriones. The first of these were (to follow the high authority of Duchesne) organized 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 held both the foot hills and the mountains of the west; their capital was at Dax. They also split into, or are later recognized 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 Benarnensium, whence we get the name Béarn, and the Civitas Elloronensium, with its capital at Iloro, which has become Oloron, concern us. The capital and soon the bishopric of the Civitas Benarnensium was at Lescar, as far as we can make out, and Lescar bore the chief sanctity in Béarn until that country was swept by the Reformation. The sovereigns of Béarn were buried there, even the Protestant sovereigns, and it remained a bishopric, whose bishop was the President of the Parliament of Béarn, until the Revolution; but it was the Reformation which destroyed its original character of a capital.

We have, therefore with the earliest ages of our civilization, five peoples holding the northern Pyrenees, the Consevanni, the Convenæ, the people of Bigorre, the Béarnese, 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 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. Pamplona, 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 Consevanni survives locally. The country round St. Girons is still all one country-side and called the “Conserans.” Of the Convenæ 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 Béarnese 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 civilized and half civilized 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 civilization 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 absorption of the Celt-Iberian 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 commanders. 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 illumination 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 administration of the whole territory south of the Pyrenees must have been as exact and as bureaucratic 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 establishment of a municipal civilization.

Upon all this land to the north and to the south of the mountains came, after five hundred years of a high civilization, 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 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 civilization 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 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 lordships, 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 Mohammedan, counselled with and was perhaps suffragan to Eauze. Urgel sat in the provincial 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 metropolitan, 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 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 went Béarn, and these were independent of the French crown. 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 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 conquered; in Spain and France the debate was decided in favour of the former.

Such centralized 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 administration of Rome, a fixed political boundary; and, save certain exceptions that will be mentioned later, everything north of the chain has been administered from Paris, and has slowly accepted, side by side with the local tongue, the tongue of Northern France and the habit of a centralized French government.

South of the chain the process by which Christendom recrystallized 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 unconquerable 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 Reconquest, 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 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 kingdom 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, 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 civilization, 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 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 organized Christian country lay wholly to the west of the range. In the Pyrenees themselves the Mohammedan flood had washed every valley. 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, fighting 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 VII’s reform of the Papacy, of the establishment in England and in 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 proceeded, took little more part in the wars; but the Basque strip 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 (1119) 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 civilization.

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 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 reconquered. For just 500 years Spain, a quarter of all that makes up our civilization, 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 destruction of Islam upon the south (the two successes were contemporaneous), the Pyrenees ceased for ever to be a march between two civilizations, 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.

Plan K.

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 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 composed 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 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 someone 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 Bonaigo 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 watershed 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, along the crest of the Port d’Embalire to the Pic Nègre, 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 conventional line which left Bourg-Madame French and Puigcerdá Spanish; an exception in this is a small strip beyond the Pic de la Cabanette, on the left bank of the Ariège, 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 Cerdagne by Mazarin are clear enough when one remembers that the Roussillon (which is geographically French) passed to France by the same treaty. There is no way from the valley of the Ariège 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 in 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, Barbastro, 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.

III
MAPS