MIRRORS AND MOUNTAINS.
"All along the valley, stream that flashest white,
Deepening thy voice with the deepening of the night."
--TENNYSON'S _Cauterets_.
Cauterets confirms its first good impressions. The next day proves
cloudy and foggy, and we spend it lazily, re-reading and answering
letters, or wandering about the town, absorbing its streets and shops.
The season is fairly afloat, and all sail is set. At the angle of two
thoroughfares, a stretch of ground has been brushed together for a park
or promenade, and this, sprinkled with low, flat-topped trees and a
band-stand, naturally attracts us first. Booths and cafés and nicknack
stalls reach around its sides, and across from us stands a fine
official-looking structure of marble, which we learn is the Thermal
Establishment. We stroll toward this, through the groups of promenaders,
run the gauntlet of the booths, inspecting hopelessly their catchpenny
wares and games, and find ourselves before it. It is well placed, and
architecturally effective. To judge from the goodly patronage, it is
pathologically effective as well. Within, the large, tiled hall conducts
right and left to wings containing rows of white-tiled bath-apartments
and two full-sized swimming-rooms. An imposing marble stairway leads
upward to reading, billiard and gaming apartments, café and restaurant
and a theatre-hall. Evidently the Thermal Establishment is the pivot
of Cauterets. The serious use of these waters is carried to a science.
You can be steamed, suffused, sprayed, sponged, showered, submerged or
soaked. You can seek health from a teaspoon or a tub. Make choice, and
buy a season ticket. Rather, the attendant physicians make the choice,
for all is by rule here and no one moistens lip or finger without due
prescription.
[Illustration: "THE TOWN IS WAITING FOR THE DILIGENCE."]
These springs are celebrated among French doctors. The systems of
treatment are kept abreast of all modern theories. The waters are
sulphureous, very hot, and abundant. They serve in throat and stomach
troubles and for a wide range of ailments "where there is indicated a
powerfully alterative and stimulating treatment."
We ramble back across the esplanade and out into the streets. The
stores, always friendly in their hostile designs, conspire to be
especially attractive in Cauterets. We waste much time--from a masculine
standpoint--in an enticing lace store, where really fine Spanish
nettings are purchased at tempting prices. They sell too, in Cauterets,
the woolly stuffs called Barèges crape, marvelously delicate in texture,
woven in various tints for mufflers and capes and shoulder-wraps.
Farther up the street, we are allured during the forenoon into buying a
woollen berret or two, and scarlet sashes, the badge of the country, for
to-morrow's mountain excursion; and yield in the plaza to the
fascination of barley-sugar candy and toothsome cakes of Spanish
chocolate. But all entreaties to buy young Pyrenean dogs warranted bred
in the region, are manfully resisted.
We invest too in a strange variety of umbrella, which can be folded into
wondrously small compass and put into the pocket or the
traveling-bag,--invest in it after a long struggle of rates, wherein
each side gains the satisfaction of victory by a compromise. The
eagerness of the Frenchy vendor,--his dramatic acting-out of the
umbrella's workings,--his voluble deprecation of a possible lower price,
and his gradual sliding down from his end of the scale as we rise in it
from ours,--these accessories fully double the zest of the transaction
for both. One must be wary and alert to properly enjoy European
shopping; but if one is thus prepared, it can be made to furnish very
solid enjoyment indeed. "As a rule," as the genial author of _Sketches
in the South of France_ observes, "the British purchaser must offer one
half the price asked. Everybody does it, and it is in no way offensive,
because the sum has been pre-arranged accordingly. The British costume
springs the market at least ten per cent, bad French ten more, and an
apparent ignorance of both market and language cannot be let off at less
than thirty or forty. Expostulation is useless, even when convenient;
the torrent of '_impossible_', '_incroyable_,' '_que c'est gentil_,'
'_ravissant_,' '_beau_' would drown any opposition. The only chance is
to be deaf to argument, dumb to solicitations, to place the sum proposed
before the merchant, and if it be not accepted, retire in dignified
silence. Ten to one you will be followed and a fresh assault commenced;
be resolute, and the same odds you get your bargain."
Variety marks the stores not only, but the streets and saunterers. All
these Pyrenean resorts put on the motley. There is of course the
substratum of plainly-garbed humanity; but as at Eaux Bonnes, it is set
off with scarlet-coated guides, Spaniards in deep-colored mantles,
peasant women with red capulets or bright-hued shoulder-wear, and the
satin finish of fashion in its passing carriages. Hucksters are pleading
their varied wares in the plaza, and here and there a shovel-hatted
priest is given reverential right of way. We meet scarcely an English
face, however, and of our own travel-loving countrymen none at all. At
noon the band plays in the music pavilion, and by degrees the idle world
drifts in that direction. The round café-tables under the trees
gradually sort out their little coteries, and white-aproned gentry skate
about with liqueur-bottles, clinking glass beer-mugs, baskets of rolls,
and the inevitable long-handled tin coffee-pots. The outdoor scene
tempts us more than a hotel luncheon; we cast in our lot with an
alert-eyed waiter, and the syrups and chocolate he brings are doubly
sweetened with the strains of _Martha_.
II.
Here is an old letter concerning these waters, which brings the dead
back in flesh and blood. It leaves its writer before us in vivid
presence, a womanly reality. It is Marguerite of Angoulême[24] who
writes it,--the thoughtful, high-souled queen of Béarn-Navarre, whose
daughter was afterward mother of Henry IV. She is at Pau, and is sending
word about her husband's health to her brother, Francis I of France.
[24] Marguerite of Angoulême is often, even by historians, designated as
Marguerite of Valois. It is better to preserve the distinction in the
names. Marguerite of Angoulême was the wife of Henry II of Navarre; the
name Marguerite of Valois more properly designates the wife (known also
as Margot) of Henry IV, their grandson.
"Though this mild spring air," she tells him, "ought to benefit the King
of Navarre, he still feels the effects of the fall he met with. The
doctors have ordered him to spend the month of May at the Baths of
Caulderets, where wonderful things are happening every day.
"I am thinking of going with him," she adds,--how domestic and personal
these little royal plannings seem,--"after the quiet of Lent, so as to
keep him amused and look after him and help him with his affairs; for
when one is away for his health at the baths, he ought to live like a
child, without a care."[25]
[25] "_Encores que l'air chault de ce pays devoit ayder au roy de
Navarre, il ne laisse pas de se ressentir de la cheute qu'il prist; par
le conseil des médecins à ce moys de may s'en va mettre aux Baings de
Caulderets, où il se foit tous les jours des choses merveilleuses. Je me
deslibère, après m'estre repousée ce caresme, d'aller avecques luy, pour
le garder d'ennuy et foire pour luy ses affaires; car tant que l'on est
aux baings, il fault vivre comme ung enfant, sans nul soucy_."
Hither they came accordingly, and the court with them. How royalty put
up with the then primitive accommodations is not recorded; standards of
comfort, if not of lavishness, were lower then. Here, surrounded by her
maids of honor, Marguerite passed the pleasant days of the king's
convalescence and wrote many of her _Contes_ in the long summer
afternoons upon the hillsides.
Rabelais used to come to Cauterets, and one of the springs is said to be
named from a visit of Caesar's. Eaux Chaudes and Eaux Bonnes have had
eclipses of popularity, but Cauterets has always been in vogue. It was
not always luxurious, however. Invalids were brought here by rough
litters or on the backs of guides or horses. A monk and a physician
lived near the bath-enclosure, and narrow cabins or huts, roofed with
slate, were let out to the sick and their attendants. How greatly the
dignified Marguerite and her war-bred husband would marvel, if they
could walk with us to-day from the Thermal Establishment, across the
park and through the streets and squares,--to pause from their
astonishment in the polished and gilt-mirrored drawing-room of the Hotel
Continental!
III.
There are walks and promenades and mountain nooks in all directions from
the town, but the afternoon grows misty and we do not explore them. The
Gave running noisily on, hard by, has its stiller moments, up the
valley, and the trout-fishing is reputed rather remarkable. In fact, one
ardent angler who came here is said to have complained of two drawbacks:
first, that the fish were so provokingly numerous as to ensure a nibble
at every cast; and second, that they were so simple-minded and
untactical that every nibble proved a take.
Besides affording these milder joys, Cauterets is a centre for larger
excursions. There are three especially noted. The first and finest is
the trip to the _Lac de Gaube_, a high mountain tarn at the very foot of
the Vignemale. This we plan in prospect for to-morrow. It is four hours
away by a bridle-path, passing on the way several much-admired mountain
cataracts. The second excursion is by the foot-pass over a shoulder of
the Viscos to Luz, a counterpart of the path over the Gourzy from Eaux
Chaudes to Eaux Bonnes. As we purpose going to Luz by carriage, passing
down to Pierrefitte and so up the other side of the V, we strike the
Viscos from the list of necessaries. The third is the ascent of the
Monné, the mountain overhanging Cauterets and 9000 feet above the sea;
reported as long but not difficult and as giving a repaying view. But
there is a mountain near Luz, the _Bergonz_, from which the view is
held equally fine, and it is, we learn, simpler of ascent; there is even
a bridle-path to the summit. Since we are to go to Luz, we decide for
the Bergonz, and so cancel the Monné.
Cauterets might be likened to St. Moritz in the Engadine. It has no
lakes so close at hand, but in its springs and baths, in its fashion and
in its general location, a fair parallel is offered. Some of the
important peaks of the range, Mont Perdu and the Vignemale, for example,
are near us here though invisible from the town, as is the Bernina chain
from St. Moritz. The Monné will stand for the Piz Languard. In hotels,
Cauterets is hardly outgeneraled even by St. Moritz, though in
expensiveness they will yield gracefully to the Engadine. The Hotel
Continental, we find, has rather a pathetic story. It was built by a
widow who had been left rich,--built only a few years ago, as a hobby,
it would seem, and with little care for cost or judicious investment. It
represented nearly three hundred thousand dollars, was extravagantly
run, and lost money from the beginning. She also built a great café and
music-hall across the street from the hotel, and the losses of the two
together swelled in the end to an unbearable burden. Her fortune was
sponged up, to the last franc; the property was bought in by a
stock-company, and its unfortunate projector is now, we are told, in a
charitable institution at Bordeaux. One hardly wonders at the result, in
admiring the hotel. Its patronage may be large and rich, but no mere
summer season,--at least without the English and Americans,--could
recoup the interest on its costly outlay. The Gassion at Pau is
profitable if at all because its yearly season is three times longer
than this at Cauterets.
There is an evening conjuring performance at a café in the town, and
some of us desert the ladies and enter its chaos of mirrors and tobacco
smoke. The prestidigitator, a nervous, restive Frenchman with an
astonishing rapidity of tongue, stands near the centre of the room and
juggles and struggles with hats and rings and eggs and his own
overmastering fluency. Now he will dart across the floor to borrow a
listener's handkerchief; now he assaults our corner with the plea that
we verify a card; later the hat is passed for the harvest. It is an
interesting scene, European to the core; the men about the tables sip
and smoke, intent on the performance or on their dominoes, grave and
contemplative, finding uniformly in this contented café-life the needful
finis of the day.
[Illustration]
IV.
The son renews his acquaintance, the next morning, with Cauterets, as we
start for the Lac de Gaube. It is the Fourth of July; the hotel manager
has good-naturedly procured some fire-crackers for the small boy of the
party, and thus our national devotions are duly paid and we are shrived
for the day. Carriages can be taken for part of the way toward the Lac;
it is good policy, so saddle-horses for the ladies are sent on to wait
for us at the point where the road ends and the bridal-path begins.
The first mile in the road is perhaps the most frequented bit in the
Pyrenees; it is the route to a second large spring-house known as the
_Raillère_, which is even more sought than the one in the town. We find
the wayside everything but dull. Omnibuses meet us frequently, wealthier
drinkers pass in light carriages, while many, going or coming, are
enjoying the journey on foot. Each is armed with his or her individual
drinking-cup, worn by a strap over the shoulder like field-glasses. The
road is somewhat shadeless, and at noon will be hot; but this is an
early-morning route. These are sunrise waters. Such is the dictum or the
wont. The faithful even work up a mild daily rivalry in early waking.
This may aid to make them healthy; improbably, wealthy; but it does not
show them to be wise. Time is always quoted under par at a summer
resort; why should the idlers heedlessly load up with too much of the
stock? These people have come out here, many of them, at six and seven
o'clock, a few even earlier; they have sipped their modicum of sulphur
and scandal, have prolonged the event as fully as possible, and must now
ripple irregularly back toward the town, objectless entirely until the
noon music and the atoning siesta.
The building itself, a large, prominent structure, stands out on the
slope of a sterile mountain side, the road sweeping up to its level in a
long, elliptic curve. We find much people here congregated, and
omnibuses and footfarers are still arriving and departing. Among the
throng are three veritable Capuchin monks, thickly weighted with
enfolding hoods and brown woolen gowns, the latter heavy and long and
girdled at the waist,--a light, airy costume for a warm day. Our drivers
stop here while one of them repairs a broken strap, and we contentedly
watch and speculate upon the assemblage.
Three other smaller spring-establishments are passed in turn, farther
up the valley. Each has its specialty and its limited but believing
clientèle. Then the road becomes solitary, and ephemeral humanity is
left behind. Soon the slow, even strain of the horses tells of stiffer
work than along the easy, inclines nearer the Raillère. The Gave comes
jumping downward more and more hurriedly, and presently its restless
mutterings deepen into a dull growl, which grows louder. It rises by
degrees to a roar, the road makes a last energetic bend,--and we are
looking down upon the famed _Cerizet_ cascade. It is a broad rush of the
stream, thundering beneath the bridge; there is an unexpected body to
the fall; the massed water bounds down a double ledge, and swirls
angrily away down the gorge. The scene is strikingly set, with slippery
rocks and dark-green box bordering the torrent, and the cliffs rising
sharply around, naked and bony or furred with box and pine. This is the
favorite short drive from Cauterets. Pedestrians seek it, as well. The
Cerizet holds the charm of its wildness alike for the idler and the
lover of nature.
Here the road ends, in a confined level across the bridge. At the bend
above stand a rough shanty and a shed, and near by our waiting
saddle-horses are unobtrusively browsing. Drivers and carriages now
leave us and turn back, and the guide helps us to roll wraps and coats
into cylinder-form and straps them snugly behind the saddles. The shanty
is not too primitive to vend refreshing drinks, and the ancient
Frenchman in the doorway vainly lures us to lemonade and sour wine. The
guide hands out sticks for those of us who walk, swings the camera strap
over his shoulder, and we all wave a friendly hand to the old
mountain-taverner, who grins a forgiving _au revoir_.
We strike at once into the thicket. There is only the footway to pierce
it, crooked and steep and stony from the start.
"The winding vale now narrows on the view,"
and the crowding trees at times shut out all sight of the cliffs
opposite and above, though we always hear the noise of the torrent. The
sun can rarely find the path, which is damp and at places muddy. The
slant of the gorge has grown steeper, and when we come to breaks in the
forest, we see the water tearing down toward us along its broken trough
in increasing contortions, often in great flying leaps. No path could
hold this incline directly, and this one gracefully yields and adopts
the usual expedient, ricochetting upward in short, incessant lacings,
tracing up in the main the run of the Gave, but often diverted,
zigzagging, always mounting, quadrupling the distance while it quarters
the angle.
Two other cascades are passed. The horses, used to the work, strain
forward uncomplainingly, the guide leading the foremost; they toil
quietly along the easier spots, but tug themselves rapidly, almost
convulsively, up over the hard ones. The jolting, pitching motion is
severe and somewhat trying; and at intervals the ladies dismount and
join us in walking,--relieving the effort of rest with the rest of
effort.
An hour or less of this, and then another roar presages another
cataract, and soon we emerge upon the scene. This is the _Pont
d'Espagne_, a bridge of long logs stretching across the torrent at the
spot where two streams unite and throw themselves together into the
hollow, twenty-eight or thirty feet below. We pause on the rough bridge
and gaze down at the plunging water and foam and upward at our
surroundings. The entire picture, framed in by the sharp blackness of
the pines and the broken escarpments of cliff and mountain, has been
well compared to a scene in Norway.
At the other side of the bridge stand another shanty and another shed;
also another refreshment-vendor. A cool beverage has an attraction now
which it had not earned an hour ago, and we feel that a breathing-spell
will not be wasted.
Here paths unite as well as streams. We have been nearing the Spanish
frontier-line again, and the trail following the right-hand stream would
lead up toward its source and pass on over the crest of the mountain
down to the Spanish baths of Panticosa, as did the path from Gabas in
the Ossau valley. The top of the pass is three hours away, and the view,
it is said, is very extensive. These passes over the main chain are
known as _ports_, as those over its branches are called cols. They are
generally simple notches in the dividing ridges, massive but narrow, and
the winds blow through them at a gallop. In a storm or in winter the
danger is extreme. The Basques and Pyreneans have a saying that "he who
has not been on the sea or in the _port_ during a storm knows not the
power of God."
The path following the leftward stream leads to the Lac de Gaube, two
miles farther on, and is the one we now take. The way continues much the
same as before, but the trees become sparser and the outlook wider and
more desolate as we ascend.
Our guide is a sunburnt, athletic Frenchman of middle age, noticeable so
far chiefly for his huge grey mustachios and for his silence. He has
been willing but laconic,--taciturn, in fact. But I have felt sure he
has a "glib" side. Can I find it? The stillest of men are fluent on
their loved topics; there is some key to unlock every one's reserve. Can
I hit upon the key to his? Which of possible interests in common will
bring us into talk?
I am ahead with him now, in front of the horses, stepping up the
crooking staircase of stones, sounding him on the weather and the way.
Unexpectedly the key is hit upon. A chance comparison I make of a view
in the Alps lights up the old fellow's face, and when I happen to
mention an exploit of Whymper, his tongue is loosed. It is not merely a
name to him,--this of Edward Whymper, scaler of mountains, the first to
stand on the summit of the Matterhorn, one of the three who descended it
alive out of that fated party of seven. This man knows him, he tells me
joyously; he has been his guide here in the Pyrenees. It was many years
back; he does not recall the year. It is evidently his proudest
recollection, and he is more than willing to talk of it. In fact, I am
as interested as he; for the pages of my copy of Whymper's _Scrambles
among the Alps_ have been very often turned.
Whymper came here, it seems, with his usual desire to conquer, and the
guide tells me of some of the peaks they stormed together. The more
familiar giants, the Vignemale, Mont Perdu and others, were climbed as a
matter of course. Their ardor was greatest, however, in assaulting some
uncaptured summit; and several such fell before their conquering attack.
Monsieur Wheempair, the guide goes on, was "_très intrépide_"; not
stout, but firmly compacted, lithe and very active, and he never asked a
hand. "He told me," adds my companion, "that some time we would go to
the Alps together;" and the man turns to me as we work onward, and
questions me about those mountains. That is his ambition now,--to visit
Switzerland and the rivals of his Mont Perdu and Maladetta.
I tell him, too, something of the greater peaks his hero has
subsequently rendered subject among the Andes,--Chimborazo, Antisana and
others; of his passing twenty-six consecutive hours encamped with his
guides on the summit of Cotopaxi; of the difficulties of route and
dangers of weather he everywhere experienced. The guide had heard that
Whymper had been in the Andes, but knew no details of his doings nor of
the heights and nature of the mountains. He greedily adds these new
facts to his collection of Whymperiana.
These guides make little. To be sure, they spend little. Probably they
want for little, as well. Living is low, and the Frenchman is thrifty.
Yet a guide's occupation is particularly uncertain; there are long gaps
of enforced idleness even in the season, and wages of seven or eight
francs a day when he is employed are not only little enough at best,
considering the toil and occasional danger, but must be averaged down to
cover the unoccupied days besides. For ascents among the greater peaks
the pay is better, but they are much less frequent. My friend of the
mustachios lives in Cauterets, he tells me, during the season; he has a
family; in winter he can work at logging and wood-hauling, in summer he
earns most as a guide. Many persons too come to hunt, not to climb, and
sportsmen are always liberal; but the hunting is growing poor; the
bouquetin is extinct, the bear is almost gone, the wolf is a coward; of
large game, only the izard remains.
V.
Meanwhile, we have all been clambering up the pathway, calling out at
points of view, expecting at each rise to see the lake in the level
above. At length, a short hour from the Pont d'Espagne, we press up the
last curve, come out suddenly upon a plateau, and the lonely basin of
the Lac de Gaube is before us.
Just ahead is the low-roofed house built at the side of the lake for the
purposes of a restaurant; and we enter, to unroll the wraps and make
some important stipulations regarding trout and a soufflet. Though the
lake is not even with the snow-level, the cool air makes a light
overcoat most acceptable after the warm morning climb. Then we hurry out
to see our surroundings.
The great Vignemale, the central feature in the picture, at first
disappoints us. This, the fourth in height of Pyrenees mountains,
confronts one squarely from across the lake, effectively framed between
two barren slopes,--the highest of its triple peaks somewhat hidden by
the hill on the right. But the giant does not seem to tower in the
least, and appears from this spot little else than a huge but disjointed
mass of rock and glaciers, in the latter of which the Vignemale abounds.
The view improves, a few yards on around the lake. But it requires an
effort to believe that of those
"three mountain tops,
Three silent pinnacles of aged snow,"
the loftiest is ten thousand, eight hundred and twenty feet above the
sea; it is still harder to grant that its knobby tips are a full mile in
perpendicular height above us at the Lac de Gaube. It is only by degrees
that the distant form seems to grow and mount, as we come to realize its
true dimensions.
This mountain was never ascended until 1834, when two guides from a
neighboring valley, Cantouz and Guilhembert by name, finally mastered
it. The ascent was marked by a signal exhibition of pluck. The men had
attained, after perilous work, the large glacier of Ossoue. They were
traversing it, toilsomely and carefully, when an ice-bridge gave way
beneath them and plunged them both into the depths of a crevasse. They
were made insensible by the fall. Cantouz at last came to himself,
stiffened and bruised; to his joy Guilhembert also was after some effort
brought back to consciousness. For hours these men picked their icy way
along the bottom of the crevasse and its branches, through the water and
melted snow, seeking some opening, some way of escape to the upper
surface of the glacier. Effort after effort failed. The day was waning.
At length a narrow "chimney" was found, more promising than the rest;
and by painful and dangerous degrees, wearied, sore and half-frozen as
they were, the two slowly worked a zigzag way upward to the light.
Did they turn thankfully homeward and leave the grim Vignemale to its
isolation? They did not. They grimly went on with the attack. Before
darkness had fallen, they stood upon the summit,--the first human beings
to accomplish the feat. They had to spend the night upon the mountain,
but it was as their subject realm.
The lake itself is perhaps a mile across, and is exceedingly deep. The
mountains crowd close to its edge, here wooded, there running off in
long sweeps of rubbly waste, again starting sharply upward from the
water. Close by the path, a tongue of rock runs out into the lake, and
on this still stands the little shaft, enclosed with iron palisades,
"A broken chancel with a broken cross,
That stood on a dark strait of barren land,"--
a monument to a young Englishman and his wife, who were drowned here
more than fifty years ago. They were on their wedding trip, and had come
to the Lac de Gaube; they took a small boat for a row, and by a
never-explained accident lost their lives together. The pathetic
inscription reads:
"This tablet is dedicated to the memory of William Henry Pattisson,
of Lincoln's Inn, London, Esq., barrister at law; and of Susan
Frances, his wife; who, in the 31st and 26th years of their age,
and within one month of their marriage, to the inexpressible grief
of their surviving relations and friends, were accidentally drowned
together in this lake, on the 20th day of September, 1832. Their
remains were conveyed to England, and interred there at Witham, in
the County of Essex."
A party of jolly, black-garbed priests have been journeying up the path
behind us from the Pont d'Espagne. They now come out from the inn upon
the scene of action. Their cordial faces attract us at once; they
approach our little summer-house, and conversation opens on both
sides,--with nation, tongue and creed soon in genial comity. Two of
these men are young; their features, refined and thoughtful, are those
of students; all are as fun-loving as boys out of school. They
investigate the camera with great interest, and ask about our plans and
travels, and tell us about their own. They invite us to join in a row on
the lake, but we are mindful of the soufflet in near readiness; so they
finally push out from the shore, charmed to oblige by forming the
foreground for a photograph.
[Illustration: THE LAC DE GAUBE AND THE VIGNEMALE.]
Other arrivals, two or three, are now at the inn, for the Lac de Gaube
is a "required course" for all visitors to Cauterets. We are
guilefully glad we preempted the trout. It is a very substantial little
meal they serve, in this wilderness of rock and fir, where every supply
except fish must be carried up, as it were, piecemeal. The proprietor
does well in the catering line, but less well, he mourns to us, on his
boats. It is that monument. The pale shaft is a constant _memento mori_.
It suggests tragic possibilities. It always chills the tourist's
enthusiasm for a row, and generally freezes it altogether. With good
reason, it seems, may mine host complain bitterly of its flattening
effects on the boat-trade; and there is a dark whisper in Cauterets
that, were the shaft not so closely enveloped both in religious sanctity
and in municipal protection, it would some night mysteriously disappear.
VI.
The sun still blazes down upon the motionless lake, as we walk out once
more for a long gaze toward the snows of the Vignemale. We try to trace
out the route to its perilous summits, and conjecture the direction
taken by Cantouz and Guilhembert when they made that grim first ascent;
and our guide, approaching now with the horses, points out the direction
afterward taken by Whymper and himself. We settle our account for the
repast,--an account by no means exorbitant; wraps are re-cylindered and
re-strapped, and we are soon on the return path downward through the
woods. The saddles pitch like skiffs at sea. These Pyrenean horses are
far more pronounced in their motions than the lowly Swiss mule. One by
one the ladies dismount, and for the steep portions at least the horses
go riderless, and no doubt secretly exult in their own shortcomings.
We pass the Pont d'Espagne, the roar of whose cataract is cheering the
waiting hours of its solitary refreshment-seller. We plunge into the
thicker leafage below, striding fast, or staying to lend hands from
stone to stone or around the patches of wet ground. The woods echo with
the noise of the brook, and now and then with the crack of a distant
rifle; and finally we are down again to the first hut and taverner and
the Cerizet fall. Now the ladies can spring comfortably up to their
saddles once more, and the carriage-road is a welcome change from the
lumpy bridle-path which we are leaving behind.
We keep on in the mid-afternoon along the road, the horses led by the
guide and ambling placidly along, the rest of us briskly afoot. The
spring-houses are reached in due succession, and finally we are at the
Raillère once more, where we have planned to take the omnibus which runs
half-hourly to Cauterets. And so we buy our tickets, pay the
guide,--with a double douceur for his mountaineering reminiscences,--and
are soon rattling down the hill toward the town, and studying another
priest, a fat, stubby friar on the opposite seat, who is conning his
breviary, murmuring his orisons, and glancing wickedly about with his
beady little eyes. There is also a gorgeously attired French dowager
aboard, and a sprightly soldier; and in the interest of watching them
all and the joy of repose against the padded leather cushions, we lose
the idea of time until we draw up in the little plaza of Cauterets
again, 'at half-past four by the meet'n'-house clock.'
[Illustration]