Chapter IV: Preface: To the Fourth Edition (2)

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.