Chapter VIII: Preface: To the Fourth Edition (6)

The reason that these tracks are essential to Pyrenean travel lies in that formation of the hills which I have already often mentioned, a formation which causes them to be broken everywhere with sharp descents of rock down which no man can trust himself, and many of which are overhanging precipices. It also lies in the peculiar complexity of the tangled ridges so that not even with a good map and a compass can you be certain of guessing your way from one high valley into another.

Now the interest of these paths is that they are not, as the mention of them suggests to one unacquainted with these mountains, definite and continuous. Even the most frequented of them have difficulties of two kinds. The first difficulty is the crossing and multiplicity of tracks as one approaches a pasture, the second is the loss of the way over certain kinds of soil.

Wherever people go to cut wood, or to lead their flocks on to enclosed fields known to them, a divergent path appears and it is often difficult to tell the main path from the branch one. Save over very well-known ports these paths are not made-ways; they are never mended or laid down, they are but the marks left by travel which is sometimes that of but one man on foot in a week, and that man shod in soft and yielding sandals that leave little impress. For many months in the year these faint traces are covered with snow, and in early summer they are soaked in the melting of it. No money is voted for them, and if here and there the crossing a rivulet or the getting past a difficult corner of rock has been artificially strengthened, this will only be upon the main ways and usually only near the villages. A Pyrenean path is the vaguest of things: it is a patch of trodden soil here and there, a few worn surfaces of rock, then perhaps a long stretch with no indication whatsoever. Yet upon this chain of faint indications with only occasional lengths marked, your life depends; and the finding and picking of it up has the same sort of interest and excitement as the following of a scent or a spoor.

There are three kinds of soil over which the path is almost invariably lost. The first is swampy land, the second is any broad stretch of clean grass, the third is scree.

Loss in swampy land is rare, for the simple reason that the path avoids such land; loss on scree is often made good towards the end of the summer by the passage of men and animals whose treading down of the loose stones can be noticed from place to place, but intervals of grass are most baffling. The native knows where to pick up the track again upon the further side; the foreigner has no chance but to guess, from the last direction it took, where he is likely to find it again. He will almost invariably be wrong, and then he must cast about in circles until he finds it upon the further side of the pasture, entering a wood or picking its way between gaps of rock. There is a lacuna of this sort on the perfectly easy way up the Peyréguet, and it cost me last year three valuable hours; for easy as the Peyréguet is—and it is little more than a plain walk—if you get too much to the right of it, there is a slope on the further side that a goat could not get down.

So much for the importance of _Paths_ in the Pyrenees. It is a point very difficult to make in print, but one which the reader, if he intend to walk there, will do well to take on faith. Make the 1/100,000 map your infallible authority, don’t expect to find on the black line it gives—especially if it is a dotted line—more than the merest string of indications, often separated by very wide gaps, and regard the discovery and continuity of these indications as vital to your safety.

I now turn to equipment.

The first question asked by an Englishman about to attempt fresh journeys will be what things he must take with him from England. My answer is. Two things only, his woollen clothing and a pannikin. With regard to this last, the best form is one which I myself get from the Army and Navy Stores, and which is of the following character. The handle is double-hinged, and curved, so that it fits to the outside curve of the pannikin. A spirit-lamp is sold which just fits into the interior, and with it, a curved metal receptacle for methylated spirit which also fits into the interior. The whole is bound together by a strap, passing through staples upon the sides, and through one upon the cover. The advantage of carrying this sort of pannikin lies entirely in its compactness. Weight counts. Every ounce counts when you are knocked out upon the third day; and the third day—the forty-eighth hour of losing your way and of missing human succour—may happen to you oftener than you think.

Weight counts even upon the first day, after the first few miles. Weight counts all the time. Now it so happens (why, I cannot tell) that when things are packed in a close compass they weary a man less than when they are loose and straggling, and there is the further recommendation that when they are closely packed, there is less chance of knocking them about and hurting them. So this is the kind of pannikin I recommend. Note, that the people who know most about these hills, the inhabitants of them, carry no provision for cooking. But there is a reason for this which does not apply to the traveller I have in view. The inhabitants of these valleys walk from a house to a house, with the chance of one night at most in the mountains; they carry with them, bread, cold meat and wine, and for the night they make a great fire for warmth but not for cooking. A person exploring at random, and liable to pass several nights in the open, must have the chance of getting a warm meal, and that opportunity will make all the difference if ever he finds himself, as he probably will very frequently, in a tight place. As to the woollen clothing, no one needs to hear the merit of that, and nowhere can it be got so good or so cheap as in England. Everything upon you should be of wool, except your boots. The differences of temperature are excessive, you are certain to be frequently wet, you will not have a change; good wool is, moreover, the substance that will wear least in the rough-and-tumble of your going.

In this connexion I must speak of socks. Those who know most about marching, wear none, and for marching along roads it is a sound rule (startling and unusual as that rule may sound) to have the skin of the human foot up against the animal skin of the boot, that boot being well soaked in oil and pliable. There is no form of foot covering within the boot that does not chafe and tear and therefore blister the skin, if one goes a long way at a time, and for many days of continual tramping on end. That is the general rule, and in the French service it is universally recognized in the infantry. Now, to the particular kind of going which these mountains involve that rule does not apply, because, as we will see in a moment, boots are not what one commonly wears. You must therefore take woollen socks—two pairs.

If woollen clothing and the pannikin I have described are to be purchased in England, where are you to get the rest of your kit, and of what kind will it be?

You must purchase it in any one of the towns of the foothills, and the nearer to the mountains you buy it, the better for you, since the further out you are upon the plains, the more they look upon you, with justice, as a fool who will buy bad or useless material at too dear a rate, and lose, waste, or destroy it in a very few days, a mere tourist to be fleeced. Buy at St. Jean Pied-de-Port, at Tardets (admirable town!), at Bédous, at Laruns (where the people are hard-hearted), at Argelès (where they are too used to tourists), or at Ax. Buy, if you can, _in the fairs_: to these the mountaineers come down to sell their wares and one can bargain, and as for bargaining, I will tell you the prices of things as I proceed. But of all things do not put off purchasing till you are _deep_ in the range. Do not buy south of Ax, for instance, nor north of Jaca. The materials grow scanty and bad.

The things you will need are four: first you will need a gourd, next sandals, next a sack, and lastly a blanket.

As to the gourd. The gourd is the universal vessel used throughout these mountains, and its use extends from an indefinite distance upon the Spanish side (where it is universal) to the towns of the plains upon the French side: to Oloron that is, Mauléon, Foix, St. Girons, and the rest. It is a leather bottle of an oval shape, made in all sizes from a quart to a gallon, and this picture represents the structure. It is in three parts: the oval leather case (_a_), which is made of goat’s skin with the hair inside; the top (_d_), which is made of goat’s horn, with a mouth from an inch to half an inch across, and the nozzle (_e_), which screws on to this top and is pierced by a tiny hole (_g_), through which one drinks, also made of goat’s horn. There is a fourth part if you will, the little stopper (_h_), which screws on to the nozzle, and is made of the same material and tied by a string to the mouth of the gourd for fear of losing it. On the inner edge of the leather bottle are two leather loops through which to pass the string, by which the whole thing is carried over the shoulder.

Remember that the name for this invaluable instrument (one has a right to call it invaluable, for it saves the lives of men) is _Gourde_ on the French side, and _Bota_ upon the Spanish. This detail is not unimportant, for in many French villages they have never heard of a _Bota_, and certainly in no Spanish villages have they ever heard of a _Gourde_. It is in this convenience that one carries one’s supply of wine. The horn nozzle on top (_g_) screws off, the wine is poured into the mouth (_d_) through a funnel, until the gourd is completely full; one then screws the top (_g_) on again, and the little stopper (_h_) into that. When one wants the wine to pour into one’s mouth or into one’s mug, one screws off no more than the little stopper which protects the hole in the nozzle. If you can learn the proper way of drinking out of the small hole pierced in the horn-work, do so. It saves an infinity of delays, and it is the universal method of drinking throughout the Pyrenees. Here is one of those practical things in the trade which you can never get by book learning, and which one can only learn by doing them, nevertheless I will describe it.

Unscrew the little stopper (_h_) and let it hang by its string; take the double horn top piece (_d_ and _g_) in the left hand, and grasp with your right the bottom of the leather bottle; tilt the whole up, squeeze slightly with your right hand, held high in the air, and let the thin straight stream of wine from the little hole (_g_) go straight into your open mouth; then (to paraphrase Talleyrand’s famous phrase to the Maker of Religions), “if you can possibly manage it,” let it go down without swallowing; if you swallow you are lost.

For Talleyrand well said to the Maker of Religions, after having described to him how, to found a religion, he should first suffer obloquy: how he should be ready to stand alone and the rest of it, then added, “If you can possibly manage it,” work a few miracles: and this kind of drinking also seems at first miraculous. But it can be accomplished; all it needs is faith, and that strength of will which overcomes the subconscious reactions of the body.

Do not swallow. When you think enough has poured down your throat, do three things all at the same time: relax the pressure of your right hand, tilt the gourd that you are holding upright, and put the forefinger of your left hand smartly down upon the hole in the nozzle. For the first few hundred times you will spill upon yourself a little wine, but in the long run you will learn, and you will drink as neatly and as cleanly as any Basque or Catalan.

If you do not learn to use this instrument thus, you will be compelled to carry a glass, which is not only difficult but dangerous; and if you compromise by using the gourd, but pouring the wine into a cup, it would either take you infinite time through the nozzle, or else you will have to unscrew the main top piece (_e_) of the gourd, and if you do that too often it will certainly leak.

These are the elements of the use of the gourd, but, like all things noble, the gourd has many subtleties besides. For instance, it is designed by Heaven to prevent any man abusing God’s great gift of wine; for the goat’s hair inside gives to wine so appalling a taste that a man will only take of it exactly what is necessary for his needs. This defect or virtue cannot be wholly avoided, but there is a trick for making it less violent, a trick advisable with an old gourd, when one is starting out on one’s journey, and absolutely essential with a new one. This trick consists of pouring into the gourd somewhat over half a pint of brandy and shaking it well up and down, and after that carrying it for a few hours, jolting about and irrigating all the hairy inwards of the bottle as one goes. But do not imagine that the brandy so used can be drunk; when you have thus used it for a few hours it must all be poured away, for it is wholly spoilt. By the way, if you can get an old gourd second-hand that does not leak, it is far preferable to a new one; all things really worth having are better old than new. As to the price of a gourd, you will not get a small one of a quart or two for less than 8 to 10 francs, nor a large one from a quarter to a half gallon or upwards at less than an extra 3 or 4 francs for every quart. Gourds are not things to haggle about. Satisfy yourself that it does not leak and be grateful to get a sound one. It will last you all your life. As to weight, a gallon is ten pounds: a quart is two pounds and a half.

Further, you will find very often that when your gourd is empty, especially if you have carried it empty upon a cold and misty morning, the inside sticks together, and when you try to blow it out through the mouth (as is advisable, before pouring in the wine), no effort of yours can swell it; the trick is to put it before a fire and warm it gently; after it has warmed about ten minutes, it will swell easily.

As to the sack, nothing is more difficult than to advise upon this matter. Some men to be happy must carry a block, and pencils, and colours, and brushes. Others cannot live without combs. Nothing is really necessary besides bread and meat. Each traveller must decide his own minimum, but I can give advice both as to the shape and the weight of the sack. The people of the hills, when they carry a sack, carry a light bag slung by a strap over the shoulder, and for a light weight, up, say, to seven or eight pounds, that is the most practical equipment: thus what we call in England a satchel, and what the French call a Havresac does very well. For anything heavier a knapsack is often advised; but there are disadvantages in the knapsack: it is complicated, one cannot get at it without taking it off, and it is hot to the back. If you will be at the pains of a knapsack, always have one that is watertight in material, with a large overhanging flap, and never burden yourself with a knapsack which has outside pockets. The value of a knapsack for heavy carriage is that the weight of it comes right down on to the build of the body. Weight is quite a different thing, when it sags, backward or sideways, from what it is when it presses right down upon the framework of a man’s bones. That is why all those used to carrying very heavy weights habitually carry them upon the head or the shoulders, the human body is built for taking a strain in this way down the length of the bones. Now if you carry the haversack by a strap over the shoulder, any appreciable weight, even one so small as ten kilos, becomes a grievous burden after a short distance. Light weights, under that amount, can be so borne, but directly _upon_ the shoulders weights up to forty pounds can be carried without destroying a man’s marching power, and indeed both French and English armies have often repeatedly climbed the mule tracks of these very hills carrying such weights in this fashion.

It must, however, be remarked in connexion with the knapsack that it will not save you fatigue unless the weight bears right down upon the crest of the shoulder blades, and in order to ensure this, make certain of three things. First, that the shoulder straps come well down the knapsack, so that a good part of the weight is above the point where they are sewn on; secondly, that your knapsack is so packed that the weight is at the top, that no heavy things sag towards the bottom; and thirdly, that you have strings or straps going from the shoulder straps in front to a belt round your middle, whereby you can brace up the knapsack whenever it begins to lean away backwards. Every soldier knows the difference between a knapsack fitting close to the back and coming well above the shoulder, and one that drags away backwards.

To have said so much about the knapsack may mislead some of my readers. I would not advise it; it is only necessary if for some reason or other you want to carry weight. If you are wise, and content to take only the necessary, a haversack slung at the side from the shoulder will do perfectly well, and it has the advantage of being get-at-able at any moment. You may balance the weight of it by carrying the gourd slung over the other shoulder.

As to sandals—Many an Englishman will understand the need of the gourd and the sack who will not understand the advantage of sandals. All the Pyrenean people, for the matter of that, most Spaniards, travel not in leather boots but in cloth slippers with a sole made of twisted cord, and to these the French give the name of sandals. But, as in the case of the gourd, the name suddenly changes on the Spanish side. In France you must ask for _Sandales_, in Spain for a pair of _Alpargatas_. The advantage of these is a thing of which you can never convince a man the first time he attempts these mountains, but he is sure enough of it at the end of his first day. For some reason or other, the loose stones and the pointed rocks of a mule path make travel upon foot intolerably painful and difficult if it is too long pursued in ordinary boots. With _Alpargatas_ on, you do not feel the fatigue of a track that would finish you in 5 miles if you tried to do it in leather. And conversely, oddly enough, a high road with a good surface soon becomes as intolerable in Alpargatas as is a mule track in boots. There is nothing for it but to leave your boots at the nearest town, if you propose to return to it, or if you do not, to carry them with you and change from one footgear to the other as you pass from the mountain to the road, and from the road to the mountains.

Remember that, in Alpargatas, you will _always_ end the day with wet feet. Let not that trouble you. They dry at once before the camp fire and they do not shrink. The reason you will always have wet feet is that in every few miles of hills you have to cross a marshy place or a stream. But though it is easy to dry Alpargatas in a few minutes, it is advisable to change socks at night, while those you have worn during the day dry before the fire.

As to the blanket—No more than any of the inhabitants can you go through these hills without a blanket. It is often of the greatest use in the changes of weather during the day, it is absolutely necessary at night. Were you to take it from England, you would certainly take one that would be too heavy, or if you took a light one, one that would be too cold. The people of the Pyrenees who have thought out these things slowly for thousands of years, have ended with the right formula. They have a thin, close, narrow blanket, which just protects a man and protects him as much by its double fold with the air between as by its texture. Get one of a neutral colour, a sort of dark slate grey is the commonest, and pay from 30 to 50 francs for it.

With these five things, a pannikin from England, a gourd, a sack, sandals, and a blanket, you are equipped. You cannot take less, you need not take more, and if you take more you will certainly repent it.

I have said nothing about tents. The tent like twenty other luxuries is taken for granted in England. I have heard of people roughing it in various mountains who took with them not only a tent, but an india-rubber bath, a Norwegian kitchen, and for all I know, collars as well. But many a man who will have had the sense to get rid of his luxuries when he begins scrambling, will be reluctant to give up the tent, for it seems necessary to be at least dry. Now the arguments against having a tent have always seemed to me final, so far at least as the Pyrenees were concerned.

You are dealing here with a great expanse of mountain in which weather is very variable, but in which you do not have snow or prolonged furious weather during the months you are likely to travel in. This argument is enforced by the peculiar structure of the mountains. Everywhere in the Pyrenees you can find either rock shelter—and you find this much more frequently than in any other part of the world I have ever seen—or dense forests, or, on the bare upland sweeps of grass, those stone cabins of the shepherds, upon the shelter of which the inhabitants largely depend. These, of course, are not very near one to another, but they are always marked on the 1/100,000 French map, under the title of _Cabanes_. The owners, when they have owners, never mind one’s using them, and the only drawback about them is that sometimes you make certain of using one particularly far from mankind, and discover it to be all in ruins. One way with another I have never known three nights upon the Pyrenees which could not be passed in succession without a tent, if the rules which I shall give for camping were properly observed; and that is the experience also of those who have spent their whole lives in these mountains.

Next, let it be remarked that a tent is a great hindrance, it is either very light—in which case it is always fairly useless—or it is heavy, in which case there is an end to your free going. As will be seen later, when I speak of the way of settling for the night, there need never be occasion for such a shelter, which, moreover, in high winds is more troublesome than an animal or a child.

If your equipment consist in no more than a gourd, pannikin, blanket, sack, and sandals, what is your provision to be?

You must never make your provision for less than forty-eight hours, and it is better to make it for sixty. However modest is your plan, always allow for two nights on the mountain and for the better part of the third day as well. Remember that you will start in the early morning from the shelter of a roof, that you will therefore have a whole day before you dependent upon your own resources, that if you are making anything of an effort you will certainly camp the first night, but if the weather goes wrong or you miss your way or come upon any accident, you may very well have to spend the second night out, and if you do this, the chances are in favour of a long tramp and scramble on the third day before you reach human beings again. All this will be clearer to the reader when I come to speak of the accidents of weather in these hills, but I may here mention as an example of the truth of what I say that two companions and myself were once held for exactly twenty-four hours in a space of not much more than a square mile, and almost within earshot of a high road and a village, and that yet it was merely a piece of good luck towards evening—a fog lifting just at the right place for a few moments—that saved us from spending a second night out of doors. In work of this kind the chief part of strategy is to secure your retreat, but you cannot make even one day’s excursion without your retreat involving at least another day and perhaps two. Therefore, inconvenient though it be, you must have ample provision.

The first element of this provision is bread, and you will do well to allow a pound and half per man per day. Those are the rations of the French army and they are wise ones. If each man of a party carries a four-pound loaf, you have just enough, but not too much for accidents. A man must have bread, he can do without meat, and at a pinch he can do without wine, but I know by experience that he cannot depend upon any form of concentrated food to take the place of the solid wheaten stuff of Europe. Half a pound of bread and a pint of wine is a meal that will carry one for miles, and nothing can take their place. For meat, you will carry what the French call Saucisson, and the Spaniards, Salpichon. You will soon hate it, even if you do not, as is most likely, hate it from the bottom of your heart on the first day, but there is nothing else so compact and useful. It is salt pig and garlic rolled into a tight hard sausage which you may cut into thin slices with a knife, and it is wonderfully sustaining. If you like to carry other meat do so, but you can live on salpichon and it means less weight than meat in any other form.

These two, bread and saucisson, are the essentials of provision, but other provision hardly less essential should be added to them, and the first of these extras is _Maggi_. Maggi is a sort of concentrated beef essence, sold both in France and in England, and to be got anywhere in the French towns, but you will do well to make quite certain by laying in a good stock of it in some large town, such as Bordeaux or Toulouse or Paris itself, on your way south: I have known the grocers of a Pyrenean town to be out of it. The essence is packed in little oblong capsules which you buy by the dozen, at about 2_d._ a capsule, and you will do well to start with three or four dozen a man. They keep indefinitely, they weigh next to nothing, and the great advantage of them will be seen in what follows. You can, with two capsules to a quart of water, make in a few moments a hot and comforting soup which quite doubles the nourishment of your bread; with three capsules to a quart of water you have a very strong soup, which will bring a man round a corner of extreme fatigue. It is a food which can be prepared in a moment under almost any conditions, and one which is invaluable when you find yourself lost, especially if you are cut off by thick weather, or in any other way exhausted. It may seem an insignificant detail to tell the reader how to prepare so simple a meal, nevertheless I will do so. It took me a little time to learn, and he may as well be saved the trouble. Each little cylinder of extract is contained in two gelatine caps which fit together, you pull these off, you drop the essence into a little water while it is warming, but it will not melt of itself, you must crush it and mix it thoroughly with the water, and then add more water, still stirring till you have full measure. It needs no salt in the proportions I have given.

Further, you will do well to fill the little curved receptacle in the pannikin with methylated spirit, and to carry an extra provision of this in your sack. A pint is enough for many days, and very often you have no occasion to use it at all, but you may be caught in some wet place, or in a rocky piece where there is no wood, or in one way or another have a difficulty in making a fire; and even where you have plenty of wood, a drop or two of the methylated spirit makes you certain of the fire catching even in wet weather; of that I shall speak when I come to camping. By the way, take plenty of English matches and of two kinds, fusees and others, and if you are carrying a sack and not a waterproof knapsack, wrap your matches in a little square of india-rubber cloth, for if there is one thing that imperils a man more than another, it is to be caught in the hills without the means of making a fire.

As for brandy, the people of the hills themselves discourage its use; it is, on the whole, best to have some with you, only you must not depend upon it; it is quite honestly, under the circumstances of climbing, what some foolish fanatics think it under all conditions, that is, a medicine. If you take it when you do not need it it will fatigue you, especially in high places. Such as you do take carry in a flask. The gourd, as I have said, spoils it utterly.

Here then you have the rules for equipment and for provision, and I will sum them up before continuing.

For equipment: Haversack or knapsack, a blanket, sandals, a gourd, a pannikin fitted with spirit lamp and spirit vessel, four pounds of bread for each man, a pound of sausage, a pint of methylated spirits, and matches; to which you may add, if you will, a length of candle, and one of those little mica lanterns which fold into the shape of a pocket-book, and three or four dozen capsules of Maggi. Fill your gourd with wine as full as it will hold, you will need it. So much for equipment and provision.

As for the packing of it I have already spoken of this in connexion with the knapsack. A few additional remarks may be of use. See that your bread is always covered from the air; to wrap it in paper is enough for this, and if it will fit into the sack so much the better. Work if possible a broad band of cloth into the straps where they catch the shoulder, keep the straps short so that the weight hangs high, carry the blanket loosely over either shoulder: it gives far less trouble thus carried than it does when it is rolled and tied over the chest. If you carry a knapsack, however, roll the blanket tight upon the top of it, it will then incommode you even less than when it is carried loosely. Wrap your matches as I have said in a waterproof cloth (if you have no knapsack), and wrap in the same the maps you need for each particular climb; forward the rest by post to the town for which you are making if it is in France; if it is in Spain, don’t, for they will not get there.

I had forgotten to mention that most useful thing, a pocket compass. Take a large cheap one, and allow for the variation when you put it on your map: but of using this and of several other little points I will speak later. I have dealt with what regards equipment: let me now speak of Camping.

Camping in the Pyrenees differs from camping under any other conditions that I know. The structure of the range, its climate, and even the political condition of the valleys, make it differ from camping in Ireland or in the Vosges, or in those few parts of England where the wealthy will allow plain men to indulge in this amusement. It is not the same as camping in the Alps, in Savoy, or in the Apennines, or in the Ardennes; and it is the particular conditions of camping in the Pyrenees which made me say just now that one can do without a tent.

Though geologists are careful to describe the very varied structure of the range, yet to the traveller one feature, peculiar to these among all mountains, perpetually appears common in every part of it, and that is the continual presence of overhanging rock. I can remember no considerable stretch in any main valley, not any in a crossing between two valleys, where you are not perpetually finding examples of this formation. It is this upon which one must first depend for shelter. Next to such overhanging rocks one must depend upon the great forests; lastly, upon the cabanes. But before speaking of their various advantages rules of time must be given, for upon the time of day chosen for the halt the success of a camp will depend.

I am speaking of course throughout these notes of the warm weather alone; that is, of the end of June, July, August, and the first part of September. Seasons vary, and there are years when the whole of September may be included. At the end of the season one may count, especially in the eastern part of the Pyrenees, upon a sufficient succession of fine nights to make camping possible; but if one comes upon a streak of bad weather it will last, especially in the western part, for three or four days, and it is better, if the people of the valley foresee such weather, to let it go over before taking the heights. Thunderstorms and very heavy rain may happen upon any night in these mountains. They are said (I do not know upon what authority) to be commoner upon the French than on the Spanish side. More dangerous than these, though less momentarily annoying, are the mists which gather quite suddenly in the higher parts of the range, and which as suddenly interfere with every form of travel.

It is absolutely necessary, unless one is quite certain of the finest weather, to cross the col or port, in the route one has traced out for the day, before that day is far advanced. The reason for this is twofold; first, that wood for a camp fire is not usually to be found upon the higher slopes, secondly that good water is not easily to be found there. It is further necessary to choose the place for one’s camp an hour or so before sunset, and it is wiser to make it even earlier. The disappointments which I remember within my own experience in this matter have nearly all proceeded from pushing on from a likely place discovered in the afternoon; one so pushes on in the hopes of finding a likelier spot before the end of the day. Such an extension of one’s journey is nearly always ended in a rough, unsuitable camp, sometimes without a fire, and under the most uncomfortable conditions. When therefore you have found in the course of the afternoon, the shelter of good rock, overhanging a dry place by the stream you are following, pitch upon it and do not regret the hours you appear to lose.

When you have chosen the place for your camp your first act must be to gather at once as much dry, _large_ wood as you can find. The local customs in this matter are very liberal. Even if you are quite close to a village, no one grudges you the use of wood, and your only possible disturbance will come from the frontier guards if you are so foolish as to choose their neighbourhood, which, by the way, can only be the case if you encamp near one of the few chief crossings of the range. These may ask you questions and make trouble, not for your gathering of wood, but for their suspicion that you are smuggling.

The temptation to gather only small wood is strong. It always seems as though the branch you have chosen will be large enough to last for some hours. But a little experience of these fires will show you that nothing small enough for you to drag will be too large for your purpose. The eight hours or more during which you must feed the fire consume a great deal of wood, and the keeping of the fire in depends upon having large logs for its foundation. You will not, of course, be able to cut these into the right length, you will have so to arrange them when the fire is once well started that they burn through their middles. You can then, later, shift into the centre of the flame the halves that fall aside. If there is any breeze pile a few stones to windward of your hearth, for you will have to sleep to leeward of the fire, and an arrangement of this kind will break the force of the wind and prevent the smoke and flame from coming too near you. If the wind is too strong, you must make your fire and your camp under the lee of some great rock, or it will both burn out in a very short time and make itself intolerable to those who depend upon it for warmth. For a wind that rises in the middle of the night, you have, of course, no remedy; short of heavy rain it is the worst accident that can befall you. If you have enough wood make your fire of a crescent shape with the hollow towards the wind. It is the warmest and the best way. You must so arrange that in sleeping you lie with your feet towards the fire, and your great provision of wood must be brought quite close to hand otherwise, most certainly, you will not have the energy to feed it in the few wakeful moments of the night. That wood should be somewhat green or wet matters little if you have a great fire well started, but if you let it get low while you sleep, it will be impossible to revive it, and when the fire fails, there is an end to sleep for every one. It is impossible to say what the effect of such a fire is by giving reasons for it; it does not perhaps warm one so much as do something to the air which makes sleep possible and easy without a shelter, and it is the universal aid and solace of all the Pyrenean mountaineers, whom you will often find in groups, woodcutters or shepherds, gathered round one of these great blazes for the night.

The conditions of a good rock shelter, of a neighbouring stream and plenty of wood, though common, are not universal, and if from the structure of the hills and from the nature of the map you fear you will not reach one, or if the greater part of the afternoon is passed without your finding such a place, your next choice must be a spot in one of the great woods that everywhere clothe the range. They are more common upon the French than upon the Spanish slope. Here there is always cover from the wind, for they are very dense, and even a partial cover from the rain, but it is important to make your fire in a clearing, and luckily there is nearly always a succession of open spaces between the forest and the stream. With such a fire and with such an arrangement to leeward of it the Pyrenean blanket with which you have provided yourself will be ample covering for the night.

As for using cabanes, I have already said that there is no grudge felt against you for doing so, but you must treat any man coming upon you in such a shelter as though he were the owner, for the local shepherds will certainly regard you as their guest, and will think they are doing you the favour of a host. Moreover, your fire, if you make one here, must be lit outside the building, though the local people who use the cabanes most constantly, will often make it inside. On the whole the night is more comfortably spent in the open than in one of these shelters, unless one is caught by rain.

The open sandy spaces such as are quite common by the side of the larger streams may be used with safety. There are no places where a spate will be so rapid as to endanger one, unless one choose, as a companion and I were once compelled to choose, a cave almost cut off by the water. The only places where it is essential that one should _not_ camp, are the higher flats where wood is rare, and where the cold of the night is exceptionally severe. It is a choice to which one is often compelled, if one pushes on too long, after having miscalculated the fatigues and duration of the climb; but it is an error which one always regrets.

A further recommendation is, _not to camp by the map_. The map may look like that on p. 131, and one may say that one will follow up the stream at one’s leisure. The reality may turn out a series of ascending precipices, quite unassailable.

But it is a great temptation. A man may have known the Pyrenees and experienced time and again the error of trusting to a map for a camping site, but there is something so convincing about the print and the colours that after years of experience one may commit the same folly again. It was but this year that, trusting to the 1/100,000 map, I planned to camp at the place where the Cacouette falls into the main stream below Sainte Engrace. I did not know the spot; it seemed to come at a convenient hour in the ascent of the mountains: I should be there about 5 o’clock. There was wood marked, good water; it was on the lee side of the wind that was then blowing from the south. When I came to it the place was a sharp ledge of limestone higher than Cheddar cliffs, dotted here and there with trees and affording between the wall of rock and the water not three feet of ground. It was not to be approached from above; it could not be reached from below. A more impossible place for camping never was. I had the same experience some years ago on the Aston, though that was before I knew the Pyrenees well. There a place was chosen by my companion and myself for its mixture of wood and meadow upon the map, there were cabanes and apparently plenty of good water; it was so plain on the map, that one did not hurry to reach it before darkness; but when we got there it was a marsh; no cabane appeared until daylight, and there was even that very rare thing in the Pyrenees, doubtful water. As for the wood that should have dotted the pasture, it turned out to be tough little live bushes, and all green, that would neither cut nor burn.

There is one last and very grave danger of which I would warn the reader in connexion with travel on foot in the Pyrenees, with a map and even with a map and a compass. Without map or compass it is more than a danger, it is a sort of necessary misfortune perpetually attending men, and the gravity of it is proved by the fact that the local people who use neither compass nor map when they go into a district with which they are unacquainted, carefully ask the marks of the path and get themselves accompanied, if they can, by someone who knows the country-side. This danger may be called “Getting into the wrong valley.”

As one sits at home, one thinks of the scheme of mountain valleys too simply. One thinks of the stream as coming down through a ravine with its head waters appearing below a definite saddle or notch in the watershed. This stream, let us say, is flowing north. One sees on the further side another stream rising just on the other side of the notch and flowing on through a simple valley, going to the south. The crossing of the port between these valleys seems to depend upon no more than physical endurance and fine weather. One goes up one stream to the saddle, crosses the saddle, follows the other stream downhill, and so makes one’s passage from France to Spain.

There are many passes of this simplicity, but there are many more that, both between the lateral valleys and over the main range, present the danger of which I speak, and which consists in a complexity at a summit such that it is difficult in the extreme to know—even when one is certain one has gone up the right part of the hither slope—what one should do on the thither.

This danger of “getting into the wrong valley” cannot be seized without illustration, and in the following rough sketches I give examples of this.

In the first example is a bit of country such as one very often gets in these mountains with summits round about the 2600 metre line and the last valleys under the ports somewhat above the 2000. I have marked with hatching the contours below 2200 and in black the summits above 2600. The main watershed I have indicated by a dotted line.

When one is crossing a port of this type one sees before one from the summit a confused and gentle slope leading apparently to one obvious valley on the far side like the obvious valley out of which one has just ascended. It seems indifferent whether one should come down on to this by M or by N, to the left or to the right, yet the two valley floors to which each leads are quite separate and may lead one round to different river basins. How deceptive such a place is, the rough sketch appended may help the reader to grasp. It shows the kind of thing one sees from the summit of such a pass and how indifferent the choice appears between the ways by which one may descend.

This type of confusion exists sometimes in a still more dangerous form, as in the contour lines of sketch on next page.

A man arrived at the port P climbing up from the valley Q, which is deep and well defined, sees before him another valley R exactly in line with the last, also deep and also well defined. On either side of him, as he gets to the saddle, run high ridges perpendicular to the line of the two valleys. It seems common sense to take the watershed as running along these ridges and across the port, and if Q is the French valley, R will be the Spanish one. As a matter of fact the watershed may not run in this simple way at all, but (as indicated upon the sketch map) take a sharp turn to the right. R may be a French valley after all, and the proper way down into Spain may be over the gradual grassy slopes indicated by the arrow line. A man standing just at the port, and having a rocky ridge A and the rocky ridge B to his left and right, sees before him the obvious trench of the valley R and takes for granted that it is the Spanish valley, whereas his true way is across the vague grassy land towards S, and the watershed which he thinks runs from B on to A really turns round from B and runs on to the distant mountains before him.

It must be remembered that on these summits all traces of a path as a rule disappear. What is worse, indications of a path may begin on the other side into the wrong valley and not into the right one.

A second type of this peril is that in which some feature upon the ridge which looks quite unimportant upon the one side turns out to be all-important upon the other. Thus a man coming from A in the map below, where the valleys are hatched and the highest summits are black, would have before him the plain ridge B-C. It is indifferent where he crosses it from that side, but on the far side he finds a confusion of falling valleys, and if he does not pick out the right one he may find himself in a few hours shut in by high walls which constrain him to a journey he never meant to make. He may have intended to follow valley (1), and so to reach food and shelter, he may find himself in valley (2) caught for the night far from men and with walls of 3000 feet between him and them.

Sometimes this confusion takes the form of one’s being led on to an obvious notch in the ridge before one: a notch lower than the general line of the ridge which (one thinks) cannot but be the port. When one has climbed to it, however, one finds that the valley one was seeking lies far to the right or to the left of such a notch, and that the gap which was so noticeable on the one side of the pass corresponded to nothing useful upon the further side.

There is a good example of this under the peak called Negras where an obvious notch which one thinks surely must be the way over to the Gallego, leads to nothing more useful than an enclosed Tarn under the precipices of the mountains.

A sketch of the aspect of this particular ridge will make the difficulty plain.

All the contours upon the Aragonese side invite one to the notch at N, yet the true way lies over the ridge between A and B, and the nearer to B the better is the descent upon the further side. Indeed at A it is perilous, at B it is a very gradual descent of easy grass.

The third type of mountain structure which may lead one into the wrong valley is what may be called “The Double Col.” It is damnably common and a good example of it will be found in the track I describe later on in this book when I speak of the short cut from the Ariège Valley into the Roussillon.

The accompanying sketch will explain the character of this sort of tangle, and it is most important that anyone unacquainted with these mountains and wishing to learn them should seize it thoroughly, for it is the worst of all the lures that get a man astray.