A COLOSSEUM OF THE GODS.
_"Pyrene celsa nimbosi verticis arce,
Divisos Celtis late prospectat Hiberos
Atque æterna tenet magnis divortia terris."_
--SILIUS ITALICUS.
"Parting is such sweet sorrow." Thus it is at Cauterets. The hotel
manager evinces it as well as we. But the hour has come to leave him,
and the tinseled supernumerary enters, left centre, with, "Milord, the
carriages wait." The hotel bill here comes naturally to the front, and
we find the charges very much on the average of all Continental resorts.
So it has been at Biarritz, so at San Sebastian, Pau and Eaux Bonnes.
Pyrenean hotel-keepers are not, as we had formerly mistrusted, an
organization for plunder. The expense question is always timely, and
experience works out the conclusion that, in the main and speaking
generally, one pays at about the same scale of prices for the same
accommodation, throughout Europe. In both, of course, there is
customarily a wide range of choice. It must be said that charges for
travelers are out of all proportion with the cost of living to the
peasants; and the morning hotel-service of coffee and rolls is fixed at
a price at which a thrifty native would support his family for a day or
more. The _National Review_ recently stated that the average expenditure
of the peasant freeholder in the south of France upon his food has been
accurately computed and that it amounted to the astonishingly small sum
of only four sous daily,--this sum having reference to a family, say, of
four or five, and where the children are under the age of seventeen or
eighteen years. This statement presumably refers to rural freeholders
only,--where cattle and farm-land supply the staples without purchase;
but even so, one finds difficulty in crediting it in full. The
housewives are minutely frugal; they will claim a rebate on a lacking
pennyweight in the pound; but it is scarcely to be admitted that any
economy could lower the expense of necessary outside provisioning to
such a sum. Still, quintupling it even, the hotel, at the spa a mile
away, will charge you the same twenty sous for a cup of coffee, and
considerably more for the lightest meal. The disproportion is thus seen
to be enormous.
Yet at its highest it is not burdensome to a comer from richer
countries. The hotel prices themselves halt at a certain mark, and
marbled buildings and aristocratic prestige cannot force them higher.
Wealthy idleness, Continental idleness in particular, knows to a nicety
the sums it is willing to pay for its pleasures. It pays that
cheerfully. A centime beyond, it would denounce as imposition.
Extortion is rare; we have not met one instance in these mountains.
Oftener we find items to be added to a charge than erased. In this
respect, the Pyrenees will prove less expensive than Switzerland, for
they are so little touched by the money-reckless Anglo-Saxon. That
ubiquitous tourist has not yet come, to brush with o'er rude hand the
silvery dust from their butterfly wings. Nor--to complete the
statement--have they yet learned to brush with o'er rude hand the
golden dust from _his_ butterfly wings. The latter fact is perhaps as
important as the former.
II.
The road to Luz, whither we are now bound, will take us back along the
shadow of the Viscos to Pierrefitte, and then up the left side of the
angle under the other haunch of that dividing mountain. We start in the
cool of the afternoon, preferring that time to mid-day for the drive.
The ride down to Pierrefitte is quick and exhilarating. The six miles
seem as furlongs. One enjoys more than doubly the double traversing of
fine scenery, and this review of the splendors of the Cauterets gorge
many degrees intensifies its effect. At Pierrefitte, the same innkeeper
shows the same gladness to find that the same travelers are still
thirsty, but there is nothing else to detain us in the little railway
terminus. Here we take up again the thread of the Route Thermale,
dropped for the visit to Cauterets; and trend again up into a mountain
valley, the Viscos now on the right. The valley soon becomes a gorge in
its turn, but the sides gape more widely and the incline of the road is
slighter than of the one we have left. At times the horses can trot
without interruption. It is an aggressive, inquiring road, is the Route
Thermale, and thinks nothing of heights and depths nor of stepping
across the Gave to better its condition. We cross that stream several
times on the way to Luz. Each time, the passage is so narrow as to be
spanned by a single arch, the keystone three hundred feet or higher
above the water.
It is fourteen miles around from Cauterets to Luz, eight from
Pierrefitte. In all, less than three hours have passed when we come out
from between the cliffs into a wide, level hollow, carpeted with green
and yellow, patterned with fields and orchards and thatched roofs,
seamed with rills, and altogether happy and alive. Maize and millet rim
all the foot-hills, and forests the higher mountains around. We trot
across the level meadows through a poplar-marked road toward the foot of
the Pic de Bergonz, and run up into the little town of Luz.
This Luz valley, once part of a miniature republic like the Valley of
Ossau, is in the form of a triangle. We have just entered by the
northern corner. From the angle on the right runs the defile leading
southward to the far-famed Gavarnie, our to-morrow's excursion. On the
left, through the opening of the remaining angle, the Thermal Route
passes on eastward to Barèges and Bigorre, and that we are to resume on
returning from Gavarnie.
The Widow Puyotte, at the Hotel de l'Univers, proves almost as winsome
and quite as cordial as good Madame Baudot. The hotel has a châlet-like
appearance which is unconventional and pleasing. Here too, as at Eaux
Chaudes, our rooms overlook the Gave, but this stream is running
sedately through the town itself instead of rollicking down a mountain
gorge.
III.
We find Luz as lovable as its location. It is not fashionable and it has
no springs. There are few objects of interest to clamor for recognition.
Yet its appearance is so tidy, its bent streets so multifariously
irrigated, its people so open-faced and respectful, that the town has an
immediate charm. We are impressed everywhere in these mountains with the
geniality of the people. Human nature, considering its discouragements,
is wonderfully good at bottom. Kindliness seems a universal trait in the
Pyrenees. It shines out in every nature. One has only to meet it half
way. Innkeeper, guide, shopkeeper or peasant, all are unaffectedly
good-tempered and well-disposed. A discourteous return would puzzle
them; a harsh complaint would wound deeply. The sunshine comes from a
nearer sun than in the north. A polite nation, the French are reputed to
be; but always underlying this good repute has been the suspicion that
the politeness serves mainly to cover self-interest; that it is simply
an integument, a rind. In the cities there is a certain truth in this;
but the provinces are not thus tainted. In these southern mountains the
core is sound and sweet. The response to our advances is so hearty and
direct, the interest taken so friendly, that its sincerity is
unquestionable. Beggars abound; but your evidently self-respecting
husbandman talking willingly with you in the millet-field is not of that
class; he is not expecting a coin at parting. In some parts of Europe,
he would be disappointed not to get two. On the Route Thermale, a small
brace under one of the carriages gave way; it was near a village; we
were promptly surrounded by six or eight pleasant-faced villagers, who
turned their hands at once to help: one held the horses, three joined to
lift the carriage, one or two crept under to assist the driver in
repairs, and the others, while we talked with them, looked anxiously on,
as relieved as all of us when the difficulty was finally adjusted. There
was a raising of berrets, there were bows and good wishes, there was a
hearty "_Bon jour, mesdames et messieurs_" as we started, and the men
moved back down the road without a thought that their aid should have
been sold for a price.
The wealthy French and Spanish, who are the chief visitors to these
resorts, are judicious travelers; they injure neither the dispositions
nor the independence of the natives. The Anglo-Saxon will come in time;
he will regard these natives, as everywhere, as a lesser humanity; he
will throw them centimes and sous; he will find imperious fault; he will
cut off this ready communicativeness, miss all touch with these friendly
lives, and knock their confiding "feelers" back into the shell. But the
advance-guard at least of our countrymen will find here a human nature
poor and narrowed but right-minded, true, unwarped either by feudal
lordliness or modern superciliousness. Reciprocity of treatment, let us
hope, will endeavor to keep it so for years yet coming.
IV.
There is a famous old church of the Templars at Luz, which we go to see.
It stands at the top of a hilly street, shut off behind a stout
fortified wall and between two square flanking towers. We pass through
the gateway, and the old sacristan lets us into the church. There is a
curious gate, a turret rough in traced carving, and inside, in the dim
light, we are chiefly impressed with the rude-gilded altar and the
grotesque frescoes on the walls. Yet there is a certain solemnity about
the darkness and stillness, after coming from the warm daylight outside.
It preaches silently of devotion, of the mystery of religion, of the
power and the poetry of worship. "It is a superstition of the place that
at a certain time the dead warrior-priests rise from their graves and
sit in ghostly assembly, remembering the time when they had raised these
rafters and piled these stones together and worshiped therein and died
and were buried beneath them.
"The old church lies in the shadow of the Pic de Bergonz and within
ear-shot of a mountain's torrent; and the moonlight plays all sorts of
fantastic tricks, throwing strange shadows, until it is not difficult to
fancy that unearthly forms are near.... At the hour of vespers, there
are as many as two hundred women in the church, [their heads always
covered with their brown or scarlet capulets,] and its ancient, sombre
interior appears filled with hooded figures, such as have often troubled
our childish dreams, kneeling and crouching in the uncertain twilight to
the sound of the Miserere."[26]
No one knows the age of this church. Some accounts give the year 1060,
but as the Templars' order was not founded until 1117 or 1118, this is
improbable. They were warlike in their religion, these Templars, quite
as able to fight as to pray, pledged "never to fly before three infidels
even when alone," and with a stirring touch of romance about all their
history. They were planted here, as is stated, to guard the frontier in
those troublous times, keeping vigilant watch against both Saracens and
Spaniards; and few will say that the Christian valley of Luz could have
been more efficiently defended.
[26] From _Roadside Sketches_, by Three Wayfarers.
After we have looked over the interior, the sacristan conducts us out
into the mouldy little burying-ground at one side, and crossing the
grass, proudly points out in the surrounding wall the chief historic
ear-mark of the place,--a scar among the stones, where was once a narrow
opening through the wall. This was the despised entrance set apart for
that singular race, the Cagots. The Cagots were a once-distinct tribe
dwelling in corners of all these Pyrenean valleys, similar to the Cacous
or Caqueux of Brittany and Auvergne, and for some reason held as
outcasts and in universal detestation. The popular abhorrence of them
was phenomenal. Their origin is not known: of Goths, Alans, Moors, Jews,
Egyptians, each theory has had its propounder. Even the taint of descent
from lepers has been ascribed to them. But whoever their ancestors, the
people would none of them. They were pariahs, proscribed and held
infamous. They lived in separate hamlets, shunned and insulted, their
lives desolate and joyous, without hope, without spirit, without
ambition. Laws were passed against them, one at Bordeaux as late as
1596,--many earlier; by these they were even denied the rights of
citizens; they could not bear arms, nor engage in any trade save
wood-working or menial occupations, nor marry out of their race; they
were obliged to wear a scarlet badge on the shoulder, in the shape of a
goose's foot; they were not to go barefoot in towns lest they
contaminate the streets, and the penalty was branding with a red-hot
iron; they were not to touch the provisions in the market-place nor the
holy water in the font; they must creep into the church corners through
contemptuous side-doors, as at Larroque and Lannemezan and here at Luz.
The priests would hardly admit them to confession; the tribunals
required the testimony of seven to equal that of a citizen; and hatred
pursued them even to the grave and compelled their dead to be buried in
lonely plots of ground, separate and remote from the Acre of God.
Did a burgher sicken and die, witchcraft was charged to the Cagot; did a
reckless mob seek to vent its spite, it fell upon the Cagot. Despite
popular report, most of them had the appearance of ordinary humanity,
though rarely its spirit; a few even held their own intellectually; but
very many, bred in by constant intermarriage of kin, seem to have
become as the Swiss cretins,--deformed, idiotic, repulsive.
The Cagots were cursed "on four separate heads and on four separate and
opposing propositions: for being lepers, for being Jews, for being
Egyptians, and for being Moors or Saracens;" and they were persecuted
"as though the objectionable points of all four races were centred in
them." As lepers, they were reputed to be descendants of the cursed
Gehazi; as Egyptians, they were ascribed the _jettatura_ or evil eye; as
Saracens, they were held unclean and descended from infidels; and as
Jews, their enforced pursuit of the carpenter's trade was considered as
proving that their ancestors were the builders of the Cross!
Few of the race are to be found in these happier days; the old laws were
softened during the first quarter of the eighteenth century, and the
Revolution did away with them altogether. The Cagots as a separate tribe
have gradually disappeared or been absorbed. Yet the antipathy to the
name and the tribe even to-day in some of these regions, though now
chiefly a tradition, is still alive and implacable. M. Ramond, the
Saussure of the Pyrenees, carefully studied these outcasts over
seventy-five years ago, and made this touching statement concerning
them:
"I have seen," he wrote, "some families of these unfortunate creatures.
They are gradually approaching the villages from which prejudice has
banished them. The side-doors by which they were formerly obliged to
enter the churches are useless, and some degree of pity mingles at
length with the contempt and aversion which they formerly inspired; yet
I have been in some of their retreats where they still fear the insults
of prejudice and await the visits of the compassionate. I have found
among them the poorest beings perhaps that exist upon the face of the
earth. I have met with brothers who loved each other with that
tenderness which is the most pressing want of isolated men. I have seen
among them women whose affection had a somewhat in it of that submission
and devotion which are inspired by feebleness and misfortune. And never,
in this half-annihilation of those beings of my species, could I
recognize without shuddering the extent of the power which we may
exercise over the existence of our fellow,--the narrow circle of
knowledge and of enjoyment within which we may confine him,--the
smallness of the sphere to which we may reduce his usefulness.".
V.
Coming out again upon the street, we stray down into one of the
shops,--a shop local and naïve, a veritable French country-store. We
have noticed the hemp-soled sandals worn by many of the mountaineers,
and incline to test them for the approaching excursion to Gavarnie. The
dark-eyed little proprietor and his wife spring to greet us; foreign
customers, especially English or American, are with them a rare
sight,--St. Sauveur, a mile away, being a more usual stopping-place for
travelers than Luz; and soon the floor is littered with canvas-topped
footwear, solicitously searched over for the needed sizes. A running
fire of conversation accompanies the fitting. They show the usual French
interest in ourselves and our country; we enlarge their views
considerably on the latter score, though heroically refraining from
romancing. They make a fair livelihood from their store, they inform
us; many farmers and peasants outside of the village come to buy at Luz.
In fact, the small shopkeepers such as these are generally the
prosperous class in a place like Luz, though the standard of prosperity
might not coincide with that of the cities. But as compared with that of
their customers among the peasantry of the district, it seems to include
not only necessity but comfort.
For notwithstanding the luxuriance of these valleys, little of their
luxury, even to-day, goes to the tillers of their soil. The Pyrenean
farmer or mountaineer has to support his family now, as in past ages, in
poverty. Little beyond the most meagre of diet can he commonly provide
them, and it is the joint anxiety of ensuring even this, that wears and
disfeatures him and them, as much doubtless as its meagreness. Bread, of
barley or wheat or rye, is the great staple, supplemented by what milk
can be spared from the town's demands. Eggs and butter go oftener to the
market. Vegetables, such as lentils and beans, are also important, a few
potatoes, occasional fruits and berries, and above all the powerful and
omnipresent onion or garlic stew, signaling its brewing for rods around.
In the summer, if he moves with his family to the higher pasture-lands
to better pasture the herds, his daily menu expands in some directions
and contracts in others. Fête-days and Sundays and trips to the town are
usually the occasions of some indulgence, and a thin wine and perhaps
macaroni or a pullet or a cut of beef or pork make the event memorable.
But the chief fact is that he is fairly contented under all. His life
has work and poverty and care, but it has its freedom in addition; he
accepts it as it is, fully and without envy; it is not his class who are
first to swell the numbers of the _sans-culottes_. When Henry IV
pressed his old peasant playfellows to ask some gift or favor at his
hands, their modest ambition stopped at a simple permission to "pay
their tithe in grain without the straw."
Often there is even a little fund put by, or anxiously invested; France
is noted for the number of abstemious husbandmen who add their mite of
savings to her financial enterprises, and the distress and
discouragement caused when one of these fails is easily conceivable. On
the whole, the French small proprietor or peasant is thrifty and
uncomplaining to a rather surprising degree, considering the national
trait of restiveness. The revolutions of France are bred in her great
cities, not in the provinces.
"But pastoral occupations form only a small part of the business of the
Pyrenees," observes a recent writer in _Blackwood's_, in a summary so
compact and accurate as to merit quoting. "There are large, various and
constantly increasing industries, all special to the country. As water
power is to be found everywhere, there are flour-mills and saw-mills in
many of the villages. In certain valleys,--round Luz, for
instance,--almost every peasant has rough little grinding stones and
converts his own barley, buckwheat and maize into flour. Handlooms are
numerous, and coarse woollen stuffs for the peasants' clothes are
largely made. At Nay, near Pau, are factories where blue berrets for the
Pyrenees and red fezzes for Constantinople are woven side by side. The
scarlet sashes that the men wear round their waists are produced at
Oloron. The manufacture of rough shoes in jute or hemp (_espadrillas_)
is a growing element of local trade. Marble and slate works are
plentiful, mainly concentrated round Lourdes and at Bagnères de
Bigorre.... Persons who are insensible to marble can turn to the knitted
woollen fabrics of which such quantities are made at Bagnères; many of
them are as fine as the best Shetland work, with the additional merit of
being as soft as eider-down. The barley-sugar which everybody eats at
Cauterets must also be counted; for it rises there to a position which
it possesses nowhere else in the world,--it is regarded as a necessity
of life; the commerce in it attains such proportions that 10,000 sticks
are sold each day during the season. The little objects in boxwood which
are hawked about by peddlers must be included too; and the list of
special Pyrenean industries may be closed by bird-catching, which is
carried on in the autumn months, especially round St. Pé and Bagnères de
Bigorre.
"There remains one trade more, however,--the greatest of all,--the
traffic in hot water. Numerous as are the natural beauties of the
district,--varied as are its attractions and its products,--it owes its
success, its prosperity and its wealth to its mineral springs. Some two
millions of gallons are supplied each day by them. Fifty-three towns and
villages exist already round the sources, and others are being invented
each year. The inhabitants of the valleys are making money out of them
in every form; for though the harvest is limited to the warm months, it
is so various, so widespread, and so productive while it lasts, that
everybody has a share in it, from the land-owner who sees his grass
converted into building ground, to the half naked boy who cries the
Paris newspapers when the post comes in.
"That hot water should become a civilizer and should mount in that way
to the level of religion, education, monogamy, wealth and the fine arts,
is a new view of hot water; but it is a true one in this case, for
nothing else could have evolved the Pyrenees so widely or so fast.
Neither commerce nor conquest has ever changed a region as hot water has
transformed these valleys."
VI.
"There are corners here and there," remarks the same writer in another
connection, describing this valley of Luz, "which have about them such
an atmosphere of purity and innocence that people have been known in
their enthusiasm to proclaim that they felt inclined to repent of all
their favorite sins and to exist thenceforth in total virtue. They
produce on nearly every one a softening effect; indeed they almost
_make_ you better. The vale of Luz is certainly the most winning of
these retreats. Its soothing calm, its welcoming tenderness, its look of
friendship and of wise counsel, wind themselves around you; and the
beauty of its grassy shades, of its leafy brakes and color-changing
hills, delights and wins you. Its babbling, laughing streams fill the
whole air with life and melody; every chink of the old dry walls is
choked with maiden-hair; from the damp rocks amid the dripping streams
hang strange, fantastic mosses,--orange, grey and russet,--and with them
grow wild flowers, white and purple, and emerald ferns with brilliant
deep-notched leaves that glisten in the wet; and mixed with all stretch
out the tangled rootlets of the beeches, bathing their bright red,
yellow-tipped fibres in the splashing drops. The meadows are so intense
in color, they are so supremely, so saturatedly, so bottomlessly green,
that you recognize you never knew green until you saw it there; and
while you gaze, you feel instinctively that you have reached a promised
land."
VII.
The most noted excursion in the Pyrenees,--its _coup de théatre_,--is
now before us. It is to _Gavarnie_, whose giant semicircle of precipices
has been called "the end of the world." Luz and St. Sauveur constitute
the most available headquarters for this trip, which is taken by every
traveler to these mountains. "In the popular [French] imagination,"
writes a lively essayist, "the Pyrenees are composed of
carriages-and-four, of capulets and berrets, of mineral waters, rocky
gorges, Luchon, admirable roads, bright green valleys, two hundred and
thirty hotels, and the Cirque of Gavarnie."
The cliffs of Gavarnie form the Spanish frontier. A village of the same
name lies near their feet on this French side, thirteen miles up the
defile leading south from the valley of Luz. There is now a
carriage-road for almost the entire distance, and if fame is true, never
did a destination better merit a road. We count on a memorable day, as
the landau and the victoria carry us away from Luz,--where voluntary
promise of a super-excellent table-d'hôte on our return has just been
given by Madame Puyotte and thus every care removed.
The road crosses the valley, under the sentinel poplars, leaves on the
right the road by which we came in from Pierrefitte, and shortly comes
to the opening of the defile to Gavarnie. At the immediate entrance
across the ravine stands the white street of hotels and lodging-houses
which constitutes the Baths of St. Sauveur. We shall cross to it on our
return, and now scan it only from the distance as we pass. It joins
itself to our highway by a superb bridge, over two hundred feet above
the chasm,--a single astonishing arch, one of the longest in existence,
its span being 153 feet across, and its total length 218. It is of
marble, a gift of Louis Napoleon and Eugénie to commemorate their stay
at St. Sauveur; its cost was upward of sixty thousand dollars.
From this on, the scenery becomes again increasingly wild. The gorge now
opens and now narrows, the mountains above us here approach over the
road, there draw back in a long, sweeping glacis of wood or pasture. The
ledge of the road is at times four hundred feet above the frothy
watercourse, which in some spots disappears entirely from sight in the
chasm. Tiny mills are seen standing tremulously near its fierce supply,
and there is room for a hamlet here and there, sheltered in a clump of
ash or sycamore, on the mountain or at a widening of the valley. When
the road nears the cliffs of Gavarnie, it will expire, from the simple
impossibility of proceeding farther; so it is scarcely a thoroughfare,
and we meet only infrequent bucolics or a few wood-carts coming down
toward Luz. One fair-sized rustic village is passed through; and, two
hours after the start, a second one, Gèdre, our more-than-half-way
house, is finally seen ahead.
The mountain wall we are approaching begins now to show its battlements,
far ahead. The snowy _Tours de Marboré_ overtop it, and at their right
can be plainly seen two small, rectangular nicks, embrasures in this
mammoth parapet. Small they seem, as we sight them from this distance,
but these notches are 9000 feet above the sea, and the greater of the
two is a colossal gateway into Spain, no less than 300 feet in width and
350 feet deep. This is the famous _Brèche de Roland_, familiar to all
lovers of Gavarnie. When Charlemagne made his invasion into Spain,--the
invasion from which he was afterward to withdraw by Roncesvalles,--he
sought to enter it, tradition says, by this defile to Gavarnie. Finding
all progress blocked by the walls of the Cirque, he ordered Roland to
open a way; and that lusty paladin with one blow of his good sword
Durandal opened this breach for the passage of the army. There is
another version of the making, which links it with the throes of
Roland's defeat and death at Roncesvalles, at the end instead of at the
beginning of the invasion; but even under unbounded poetic license, the
mind refuses to admit that the wounded hero, bleeding and gasping for
breath, could have made his way a hundred miles over the mountains from
Roncesvalles, to shiver his sword against the cliffs of the Cirque and
end his death-struggles at Gavarnie.
At Gèdre the horses pause for a rest and a drink, and travelers can do
likewise. From this village, the main defile cuts on to Gavarnie, and
another opens off to the left toward another cirque,--the Cirque of
_Troumouse_. Thus each branch ends in a similar formation, peculiar to
the Pyrenees, a semicircle of cliffs, sudden and blank and impassable.
The Cirque of Troumouse is larger around than that of Gavarnie, but its
walls are not so high and its effect is reported to be less imposing. To
reach it from Gèdre requires perhaps three hours, the drivers tell us,
by a good bridle-path. We feel tempted to revisit this point from Luz,
another day, and explore the route toward Troumouse.
To-day, however, this is not to be; Gavarnie beckons, and we gird us
anew and press from Gèdre on. The carriages twist their way up an
unusual incline, and it is ten of the clock as we stop to face a long
cascade which is jumping down from a cut across the chasm and not too
busy with its own affairs to give us an answering halloo. The great
Cirque is now coming more and more distinctly into view, though still
some miles ahead. The two breaches are no longer seen, but snow-walls
are becoming visible on all sides, and the distant precipices are
constantly crowding into line and assuming shape and form. Even Louis
the Magnificent's haughty proclamation, "_il n'y a plus de Pyrénées_,"
could not erase this impassable barrier. It was made for a wall of
nations.
Already our destination sends out to welcome us. We have hardly left
Gèdre, with several miles still to drive, before we are assaulted by
peasants on horseback, advance-agents from Gavarnie. The carriage-road
will end at the village, and the Cirque itself is three miles beyond; it
is reached on foot or on horseback, and these peasants lie in wait along
the road for visitors, to forestall their rivals in the letting of
saddle-horses, and each to offer his or her particular animal for the
way. In vain we assure them that we shall make no choice until we come
to the inn at Gavarnie. They turn and ride by the side of the carriages,
urging their claims in incessant clamor, pressing about us, intercepting
the views, good-tempered enough but decidedly an annoyance. We speak
them fair, and request, then direct, them to abandon the chase. It has
no effect whatever. They continue their pestering tactics, now falling
behind, then ranging again alongside, hindering conversation,
interrupting constantly with their jargon. Plainly it is a time for firm
measures. We call a halt, and, standing up in the carriage, I tell them
once for all and finally that we will have nothing to do with them
either now or hereafter, either here or at the village; and order them
shortly and decisively to "get out." Even when translated into French,
there is a peculiar tang to this emphatic American expression that is
impolite but unmistakable; it takes effect even here in the Gèdre
solitudes, and we ride on without escort.
[Illustration: THE CIRQUE OF GAVARNIE FROM THE CHAOS.]
The road now passes into a remarkable region,--a famed part of this
famed route. This is the _Chaos_, so-called and justly. The side of the
mountain overhead appears to have broken off bodily and fallen into the
valley, and its ruins almost choke the bottom. Huge masses of granite
and gneiss are scattered everywhere in savage confusion, and the road
barely twines a painful way through the labyrinth. Scarcely a blade of
grass, a tint of green, is to be seen about us; the tract is given over
to utter desolation.
"Confounded Chaos roar'd
And felt ten-fold confusion in their fall
Through his wild anarchy; so huge a rout
Incumbered him with ruin."
Some of these fragments, it is said, contain a hundred thousand cubic
feet, and the blocks lie in all directions, uncounted tons of them,
grotesque and menacing, piled often one upon two, bulging out over the
diminished carriages or entirely disconcerting the hurrying torrent.
"That block bigger than the church of Luz," points out Johnson, writing
of this spot, "has been split in twain by the other monster that has
followed in its track and cracked it as a schoolboy might do his
playfellow's marble. We cease to estimate them by their weight in tons,
as is the manner of hand-books, but liken, them to great castles encased
in solid stonework; or calculate that half-a-dozen or so would have made
up St. Paul's; or speculate upon the length of ladder we would want to
reach the purple auricula that is flowering in the crevice half way
up."
Beyond this, as we draw near the end of our course, there is an opening
in the mountains on the right. A peak and a long bed of ice and snow are
seen high beyond, and the drivers tell us that we are looking at a side
glacier of the Vignemale, whose face we saw from the Lac de Gaube when
we climbed up the parallel defile from Cauterets.
But here is the village of Gavarnie. We are in the courtyard before the
inn, bristling with an abatis of mules and horses in waiting row.
VIII.
Negotiations for transport now begin. The black walls of the Cirque rise
beyond the village, closing the valley, seemingly just before us; but it
is a full league from the inn to the stalls of that august proscenium.
The ladies recall their unrestful saddle-ride to the lake, and decide
this time for sedan-chairs. The entire village is put in commotion by
the order; for three men, one as relief, are required for each chair,
(four on steeper routes,) and it takes but a very few times three to
foot up a quick and difficult total, where the call is sudden and the
supply small. The chairs themselves are promptly produced; they have
short legs, a dangling foot-rest, and long poles for the bearers, as in
Switzerland, but are ornamented besides with a hood or cover which shuts
back like a miniature buggy-top. Soon the additional men are brought in,
called from different vocations for the emergency; all of them
broad-shouldered and sturdy and with a willing twinkle in their eyes.
The ladies seat themselves, the first relays take their places before
and behind the chairs, pass the straps from the poles up over the
shoulders, bend their knees, grasp the handles, and with a simultaneous
"_huh_!" lift the litters and their fair freight from the ground. This
automatic performance is always interesting and always executed with
military precision. They pass down the village road with rhythmic,
measured tread, the substitutes carrying the wraps; the _petit garçon_
of the party journeys forth on a donkey; and the rest of us, duly
disencumbered and shod with hemp, resist the importunities of the youth
at the inn to order a lunch for the return, and follow after on foot.
The sole interest of the walk is this stupendous curve of cliffs ahead,
roofed with snow and glistening with rime and moisture. It fascinates,
yet we try not to look, reserving a climax for our halting-place. The
pathway is well marked though somewhat stony and irregular; the
valley-bottom is wider here and we are close by the side of the Gave.
The hemp sandals prove surprisingly useful. Their half-inch soles of
rope utterly deaden the inequalities of the ground, and the pebbly,
hummocky path is as a carpet beneath the feet. The bearers tramp
steadily onward, the chairs sinking and rising in easy vertical motion,
much more grateful than the horizontal "joggle" of the Pyrenean
saddle-horse. We are an hour in approaching the Cirque, which looms
higher at every step. The halting-place is reached at last. It is a
small plateau almost in the heart of the arena, and here there is a
restaurant,--the last house in France,--and the inevitable group of
idlers to ruin the effect of solitude.
IX.
They cannot ruin the effect of sublimity, however. That term, not freely
perhaps to be used in all terrestrial scenes, is beyond question
applicable here.
The Amphitheatre of Gavarnie, in which we stand, surpasses easy
description. It is a blank, continuous wall of precipices, bending
around us in the form of a horseshoe, a mile in diameter, and starting
abruptly from the floor of the valley,--perhaps the most magnificent
face of naked rock to be seen in Europe. Its cliffs rise first a sheer
fourteen hundred feet without a break; there is a narrow shelf of snow,
and above this ledge they rise to another, and then climb in stages
upward still, perpendicular and black, in a waste of escarpments and
buttresses, terraced with widening snow-fields tier on tier, until their
brows and cornices are nodding overhead almost a mile above the arena.
Higher yet, the separate summits stand like towers in the white glaciers
on the top; the Cylindre, at 10,900 feet above the sea, is partly hidden
at the left by its own projecting flanges, and nearer the centre of the
arc the Marboré, with its Casque and Turret, is but as an outwork
concealing the greater Mont Perdu, the highest mountain in the French
Pyrenees and next to the Maladetta the highest of the range.
A dozen slender waterfalls, unnoticed Staubbachs, are showering from the
heights; over a ledge under the Mont Perdu streams the loftiest, known
too as the loftiest fall on the Continent. It comes over slowly, "like a
dropping cloud, or the unfolding of a muslin veil," falling steadily and
with scarcely an interruption a quarter of a mile in vertical height,
before it is finally whirled into spray against the rocks at the base.
And the Gave which these cascades unite to form, and which we have been
following thus toward its source this morning, is no other than the Gave
de Pau, which will hurry on and down through the valleys till it is
flowing below the old château of the kings of Navarre, and later
joining the Adour will pass on through Bayonne to the sea.
It is a silencing scene. The effect it gives of simple largeness,--a
largeness uncomprehended before,--may be fairly called overpowering.
There is something almost of the terrific in it, something even
oppressive. We are as a fact at the end of the world. The eye does not
seem to be deceived here, as it often is in great magnitudes; it
belittles nothing; it realizes to the full this strange impression of
simple, hopeless bulk, immovable and pitiless as the reign of law.
The floor of the Cirque, far from being level, is blocked with snow and
the débris of falling rock. Our halting-place is near the left curve of
the arc; and a half hour's toilsome scramble across its chord to the
opposite side would take us to the foot of a darker streak in the wall
which seems from here like a possible groove or gully and in fact is
such. Unscalable as it seems, that is the magic stairway which leads up
out of this rocky Inferno to the higher ledges and finally over
glacier-fields to the Brèche de Roland, (which is invisible from the
Cirque itself,) and through this gateway on into Spain. Mountaineers and
smugglers make the trip with unconcern, and it is entirely practicable
for tourists, though needing a sure foot and a stout pulmonary
apparatus. The Mont Perdu is also ascended from this direction; first
climbed in 1802 by the intrepid Ramond, who seems to have been as true a
mountaineer as a savant, it has been occasionally ascended since; its
ledges are notably treacherous and difficult, and the trip demands
proper implements and practiced guides. It is a striking fact that its
upper rocks have been found to be marine calcareous beds. That proud
eminence has not stood thus in the clouds for all time; it was once
buried fathoms deep under the Tertiary ocean.
An interesting anecdote attaches to this mountain. It was assaulted some
years ago by a French lady, a Mme. L., who vowed that she should be the
first woman to stand upon the summit. She was accompanied by four
guides, pledged to carry her body to the top alive or dead. No carrying
was needed, however; the lady climbed with the coolness and hardihood of
a born mountaineer; they camped for the night on the way, 7500 feet
above the sea, at the base of the main peak, and in the morning she
triumphantly gained the top. But now the fair climber undid all the
glory of the exploit: a bottle had long been left in a niche of rock at
the top, opened by each rare new-comer in turn to add his name and a
sentiment or some expression of his admiration; our heroine opened this,
scattered the precious contents to the winds, and inserted her card in
their place, declaring that there should be but one name found on the
crest of the Mont Perdu, and that her own.
Great was the indignation in the valley when this ungenerous act became
known. A young stranger was staying at St. Sauveur at the time; no
sooner had he heard of the occurrence than he started up the mountain
himself. It was but a few days after Mme. L.'s ascent; the despoiled
bottle was there, with its single slip of pasteboard; and a day or two
later, the lady, then in Paris, received a polite note enclosing the
card that she had left on the summit of the Mont Perdu, 10,999 feet
above the sea!
X.
The restaurant, no less than the idlers, ruins the effect of solitude,
but we find that we bear this with more equanimity. We are glad we
resisted the village inn's importunities and can remain here for lunch
instead. While we are at the table, our jovial porters, grouped near the
path outside, while away the time in stentorian songs. We walk out
afterward some space farther toward the base of the cliffs; but the foot
of the fall is still two furlongs away, along the left wall,--a distance
equal to its height; and over the broken boulders of the bottom it seems
useless toil to clamber. So we sit and gaze again at the scene, seeking
to crowd this sensation of immensity even more deeply into the mind. We
cast about for some comparison to the scene. The sweep of the Gemmi
precipices rising around the village of Leukerbad in Switzerland is like
it in kind; but almost another Gemmi, mortared with ice and glacier,
would need to be reared upon the first, to overtop the snows of the
Gavarnie Cirque.
We turn back to the porters at last, and the cavalcade of chairs forms
again. The men are earning three francs each by this noon holiday, and
they are in good spirits. They do not think the sum too little and we
certainly do not deem it too much. When we regain the inn at the
village, they wait about unobtrusively for their pay, and after arming
ourselves with coin for the division we come out among them. At once we
become the centre of a large and respectful assemblage, all other
loungers drawing near to witness the coming ceremony. Our informal words
of appreciation become rather a speech when delivered before so many.
The leader now approaches, and we publicly entrust him with the
division of the fund, adding, as we state aloud, our good-will and a
_pourboire_ for each. Instantly, and with, almost startling
simultaneousness, every, cap in view comes off in unison; the movement
is so general, so, immediate, and so gravely uniform, as to be somewhat
astonishing; and a satisfied and metronomic chorus of "_Merci, Monsieur,
merci bien_!" rises like a measured pæan around us.
This little performance over, the carriages come to the fore, and we
retrace the road in the pleasant afternoon, under the Pimené, through
the Chaos, by Gèdre and the opening of the Troumouse gorge, and on down
the ravine out to the Bridge of Napoleon which leads us over to St.
Sauveur.
The long, trim street of St. Sauveur backed against the mountain is a
resort much in favor. It is not large enough to be noisily stylish, but
in a quiet way it is select and severe. It is patronized by ladies more
than by the sterner sex. Its springs are mild, helpful for cases of
hysteria and atonic dyspepsia; and the nervous, middle-aged females who
frequent it find a grateful sedative in the air and surroundings as well
as in the springs. The hotels have the garb of prosperity, and the
location, commanding both the Gavarnie gorge and the valley of
Luz,-could not have been better chosen; in fact, headquarters for the
trip to the Cirque might be and usually are fixed here quite as
comfortably as at Luz.
We spend a half hour about the hotels and shops as the twilight comes
on, while the carriages wait, down the road. In an unpretending shop an
old lady has just trimmed and lighted her lamp; she peers up through her
glasses as we enter, and readily shuffles across the room for her
asked-for stock of Pyrenean pressed-flowers. The dim little store proves
a treasury of these articles, and part of our half hour and part of our
hoard of francs are spent over the albums spread open by her fumbling
fingers. Then we drive off again into the dusk, join the main road, and
run restfully across the valley to end the day's ride before the lighted
windows of our chalet-hotel at Luz.
* * * * *
The trip to Gavarnie can thus be readily made during a day, and it is
indisputably one of the finest mountain sights in Europe. As Lord Bute,
(quoted in the _Tour Through the Pyrenees_,) cried when there, many
years ago, in old-time hyperbole, "If I were now at the extremity of
India, and suspected the existence of what I see at this moment, I
should immediately leave, in order to enjoy and admire it." Perhaps this
sentiment should merit consideration from, other seekers of noble
scenery; it was founded upon a justly sincere enthusiasm.
To-morrow, the Pic de Bergonz shall be our goal.