THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW.
"Ich weiß nicht was soll es bedeuten
Daß ich so traurig bin"
--_The Lorelei_
But the Pic de Bergonz does not so elect.
During the night the weather has another revulsion of feeling. In the
morning it is hysterical, laughing and crying by turns. We come
down-stairs booted and spurred for the ascent, and make directly for the
barometer in the doorway. Alas, it tells but a quavering and uncertain
tale, itself evidently undecided, and holding out to others neither
discouragement nor hope. An hour brings no change. The guide looks
sagely toward the clouds, as who should know all weather lore, and
candidly admits the doubtful state of the case,--which is frank, since
for him a lost excursion is lost riches. The sun streaks down fitfully
upon the road, and then after a minute the mist sifts over the spot; the
mountain-tops appear and disappear among low-lying clouds. We haunt
alternately the roadway and the writing-room, restless and inquisitive;
but as the morning wears on, it becomes slowly certain that the Pic de
Bergonz has taken the veil irrevocably.
The Monné at Cauterets was within our grasp; we sacrificed its certainty
to the uncertainty of the more accessible peak. In the mountains, as we
are thus again shown, _carpe diem_ is a wise blazon. Still, choosing
the Monné would have postponed Gavarnie until to-day and thus have
forfeited the clear skies of yesterday's memorable trip to the Cirque.
It is always feasible to count your consolations rather than your
regrets.
It does not rain, so we ramble off about the streets again. There is an
eminence near the village on which stand the remains of the old castle
of Ste. Marie, and which we are told gives a wide survey over the
valley; but we are out with all eminences and refuse to patronize it. We
drift again into our little shop of the hempen shoes, with soap for a
pretext; the proprietor and his wife are affable and unclouded as ever;
and we while off a half hour in another talk with them and some trifling
purchases. One learns many lessons in civility in Continental shopping;
more usually it is a woman alone who presides, some genuinely winsome
old lady often, with white cap and grandmotherly smile. The lifting of
the hat as we enter ensures invariably the politest of treatment, and
when we depart, it is with the feeling that we have gained another
friend for life.
The village stretches itself lengthily about, as many Continental towns
do; its limbs, like Satan's,
"Extended long and large,
Lay floating many a rood,"
and two of us later signalize a stroll by becoming _lost_,--lost in Luz.
We look helplessly down along the lanes and neat streets for the
familiar little porch over the Gave and the open space in front and the
overhanging eaves of our hotel. Gone the church, gone the store of the
shoes and soap, gone the carriage-shed, the Hotel de l'Univers,--all
landmarks gone. It is not until we are driven to the humiliation of
actually asking our way, that the alleys are unraveled and show us
safely home, into the scoffs and contumely of the unregenerate.
After lunch, the weather is still gloomy, but there is no rain, and we
leave Luz for Barèges toward the last of the afternoon, if not in
sunshine, at least over a dry road. Some of us are on foot, so but one
carriage is needed for the others, and the Widow Puyotte stands smiling
at the door as we move away, wishing us fine weather for the morrow's
ride on from Barèges over the Col du Tourmalet,--since any further
wishes for to-day's weather would be manifestly inoperative.
The Baths of Barèges are on the continuing girdle of the Route Thermale
as it extends its way onward from Luz toward Bigorre; they lie about
four miles up a short, desolate, east-and-west valley which opens from
the hollow of Luz and closes beyond them in a col over which goes the
road. These baths are much higher than Luz, and the way is a steady
incline throughout. The valley soon shows itself in marked change from
the fertile basin we have quitted; it grows bleak and less cultivated;
rubbly slopes of shale and slate cover the hills; the vegetation becomes
scanter. We are nearing now the Pic du Midi de Bigorre, the summit seen
so plainly from Pau, far eastward of the Pic du Midi d'Ossau. It is not
as yet in sight from this valley, however, though we are approaching it
nearly and though it closely overtops the col which rises beyond
Barèges. The road continues desolate, and the dull grey-green pastures
hardly serve to relieve its deserted and forlorn squalor. The clouds
brood on the hills, the air grows chilly as we ascend, and more than
once we sigh half dubiously for the bright parlor left behind at Luz.
We move leisurely, almost reluctantly, on, not in haste to reach the
climax of this unhospitable avenue; but the four miles shorten
themselves unexpectedly, and it seems but a short walk before we are in
sight of the Baths of Barèges.
Murray and Madame the Widow had each spoken dishearteningly of Barèges.
With their verdict concurred also the few other accounts we had heard of
it. Murray stigmatizes it as "cheerless and forbidding," "a perfect
hospital," and remarks that "nothing but the hope of recovering health
would render it endurable beyond an hour or two." Another marks it
curtly as "a desolate village tucked into the mountain side, with
avalanches above and torrents below; in summer the refuge of cripples;
in winter the residence of bears." No one at Luz was found to say a good
word for Barèges, except as to the undoubted cures its waters effect;
and on the whole the outlook summed itself up as very far from
promising.
In view of this abuse we have been predisposing our minds to extenuate
the shortcomings of the place and to extol rather than dispraise it. One
does not like to maltreat even a resort when it is down. But as we draw
up the hill and see the black surroundings and enter the frowsy, dismal
street, the desire to extol vanishes and even the possibility of
extenuating becomes doubtful. The carriage pauses, while two of us who
have hurried ahead examine the two hotels reputed best; each is equally
uninspiring, and the one we finally choose we thereupon immediately
regret choosing and regretfully choose the other. Meanwhile the carriage
is being circummured by an increasing hedge of idlers and invalids,
staring with great and open-minded interest at the arrival of visitors
who seemed actually healthy and were coming here uncompelled; and the
visitors themselves are glad to vanish from the public wonder into the
stone passageway of the hotel.
Within is a large, cobble-paved court around which the hotel is built,
and out upon the upstairs veranda overlooking this we are led and
assigned to rooms. The rooms are clean, but unadorned and bare, and so
seems the hotel throughout. It is not the lack of adornment, however,
that dispirits us; Madame Baudot's at Eaux Chaudes was unadorned
likewise, and yet was an ideal of inviting comfort. Here, there seems to
be something more,--an inexplicable taint of depression over the hotel,
which strangely affects us. We struggle hysterically against it, trying
to laugh it off, speculating vainly over the dreary, disconsolate weight
which each has felt from the moment of entering the village; and at
length conclude to investigate the mystery by a survey out-of-doors.
II.
It takes little time to convince us that Barèges deserves all the abuse
it has received. We came unprejudiced and in a sympathetic mood, willing
to defend the much-reviled; but we admit to each other that the revilers
have only erred on the side of timidity. The pall of the place is
unmistakable and wraps us in completely; even a genial party and
determined high spirits are slowly forced to succumb. There seems
something gruesome about it; the curious burden is not to be shaken off,
try as we may.
The village is sorrowfully set, to begin with; the valley here is high
and more gloomy even than below; the narrowing hills, grey-black or a
sickly green, stand and mourn over their own sterility. Though it is
daylight still, the sun has long passed behind them, and the air is
chilled and mouldy. The village is merely one long, shaky street
crouching in along the side of the mountain; it is lamentably near the
torrent, for the rough Gave de Bastan just below is one of the scourges
of the Pyrenees, and each spring it tears by and even through the
street, and scours down the valley, swollen and resentful, causing
discouraging damage along its track. Many of the houses are taken down
each fall and re-erected in the summer; and as we walk on through the
street, these quavering shanties of pine combine with the jail-like
appearance of the heavier stone buildings and the harsh hills and clouds
around, all in a strange effect of utter repellence.
But it is the people we meet who intensify the impression. No one visits
Barèges for pleasure; its extraordinary springs are the sole reason of
its existence, and only those who must, come to seek health in them.
Sad-faced invalids, who have tried other baths in vain and have been
ordered hither as a last resort; wounded or broken-down soldiers;
cripples, who stump their crutches past us down the earthen road,--these
are the ones who haunt Barèges, anxious and self-centred and unhopeful.
Style and fashion are things apart; there is not a landau to be had in
the place, and scarcely a smaller vehicle. In cold or storm, the sick
hurry from boarding-house or hotel to the bath-establishment in
close-shut sedan-chairs; on fairer days, they limp their own way
thither. Talk turns on diseases; there is no fresh news, Barèges is a
long ride from the news bearing railway; the discussions begin with this
or that spring or symptom and end in a disconsolate game at écarté.
Truly disease is a hideous visitant to the fairness of life,--a hard
interruption to its store of joys.
Beyond all this, however, there is a something further about
Barèges,--this incubus of depressingness, seemingly the very soul of the
spot. Sickness and dreary location will account for it in part; but many
have felt that certain subtle spirit pervading a region or even a single
house, which in part defies analysis; it is in the air; it overhangs; it
may be light and joyous and animating, or forbidding. And Barèges is a
striking instance; morbid, abhorrent, funereal, there seems here some
influence at work which is not entirely to be accounted for, yet to
which it is impossible not to yield.
At the upper end of the street is the long, grim bath-establishment, and
we enter its stone corridors and are led about by a noiseless and
mournful attendant. Here are rows of waiting sedan-chairs; an office for
presentation of tickets; long lines of stone cells, each with its tub or
douche or vapor-box; and underground, public tanks of larger size. "I
inconsiderately tasted the spring," records a traveler of years ago,
"and, if you are anxious to know what it is like, you may be satisfied
without going to Barèges, by tasting a mixture of rotten eggs and the
rinsings of a foul gun-barrel." Our spirits fall lower and lower in this
damp impluvium; never before have we felt so grateful over our limitless
good health; we dodge out with relief into the darkening air, and, under
the beginnings of a rain-storm, thankfully slip back to the refuge of
the hotel.
Certain it seems that if cheerful surroundings are essential to a cure,
the waters of Barèges must fail of their full mission.
They accomplish remarkable things, notwithstanding; they are among the
strongest of the Pyrenean baths, and are particularly noted for their
power in scrofulas and grave skin-disorders, wounds, ulcers and serious
rheumatic affections. So healing for wounds are they, that the
government sustains here a military hospital for maimed and disabled
soldiers. In winter the scene is desolation. The cold is rigorous.
Avalanches pour down from the mountains on both sides and often leave
little for the spring freshets to do. Modern engineering grapples even
with avalanches; wide platforms have been cut in the rocks above the
town, on the slopes most exposed, and immense bars of iron set in them
and attached with chains. These outworks have proved themselves
surprisingly effective in breaking the force of the snowslides; but the
scent of danger is always in the air; the ledge of the town is for
months deep in drifts; the frailer houses are taken up, the rest closed
and stoutly barred; the inhabitants are gone, leaving behind a few old
care-takers to hold their lonely revels in the solitudes.
III.
We sit about in the evening in the dim little parlor, and agree once
more that Barèges has not been exaggerated. We are united in will to
leave this detestable spot to its ghosts of ruin and disease, and to
leave it as quickly as we can. Our Luz driver, whom we have judiciously
retained to remain with his landau over night, appears respectfully at
the door, and is instantly instructed to be ready early in the morning
for farther progress; he looks dubious, and warns us of continuing rain;
it is nothing; we leave to-morrow in any weather.
"Have you found us a second carriage?" I ask him.
"Monsieur, there is but a _petite voiture_, a small wagonette, up the
street, which one could hire; it is small; if monsieur will have the
goodness to come out with me to see it?"
So two of us sally forth into the drizzle with the driver, and a few
rods up the street turn off into an alley-way, where the wagonette is
found under a shed. It _is_ small,--deplorably small; the seat will
ungraciously hold two persons, and a stool can be crowded in in front
for a driver. There is no top nor hood of any sort, and the hotel
barometer is still falling steadily.
But we are resolved to leave Barèges.
"Is this the best that one can obtain?" I ask ruefully.
"There is one other, monsieur, close by; but it is yet smaller."
This clinches the matter, and we conclude a bargain with the proprietor
for an early departure and hurry back to the dim joys of the hotel
reception-room.
IV.
The clouds themselves descend with the drizzle during the night, and we
are greeted when we wake by a white opacity of mist and fog filling the
hotel courtyard and leaking moisture at every pore. We think shiveringly
of the wagonette, but more shiveringly still of Barèges; and resolutely
array ourselves for a long and watery day among the clouds.
Our route will continue by the Thermal Road on to Bagnères de Bigorre.
There is again a col in the way which we must cross,--the Col du
Tourmalet, a shoulder of the Pic du Midi de Bigorre, separating this
Valley of Bastan from the greater lateral Valley of Campan. It is a long
ride with the ascent and descent,--twenty-five miles at the least; but
it can be easily made in the day, and there is a midway halting-place
beyond the col for lunch.
Our Luz landau appears promptly on the scene, comfortably enclosed and
inviting; and the ridiculous wagonette creeps up behind it, in
apologetic and shamefaced comparison. The driver of the wagonette,
however, a tough, grizzled old guide, is not shamefaced in the least,
but grins broadly and contentedly as he sits there wrapped in his
tarpaulin, wet and shiny under the steady rain. The landau soon
hospitably receives the favored majority, and disappears into the mist
up the street; and the remaining two of us turn to the wagonette,--and
turning, involuntarily catch the infection of the old guide's grin.
After all, there is a certain zest in discomfort; we clamber in and draw
the rough robe around us, unfurl our complicated Cauterets umbrella, and
agree that the truest policy is to make little of discomfort and much of
its zest.
Old Membielle gathers the tarpaulin about his stool before us, chirrups
toward the damp steam which symbolizes a horse, and we move off
up the long, soppy street, past its houses and jails and grey
bathing-penitentiary,--and out at last from Barèges. Out from Barèges,
though into the vast unknown; and our spirits rise higher as the baleful
spell of the spot is lifted and left behind.
V.
Barèges is the most convenient point for the ascent of the Pic du Midi
de Bigorre. The baths lie almost at the foot of this mountain, and one
can make the ascent in about four hours, and descending by another side
rejoin the road to Bigorre at the village of Grip, beyond the col before
us. We resign the ascent, of course, under stress of barometer; but this
climb is assuredly one of the best worth making in the Pyrenees. The
Pic is prominently seen from distant points everywhere through the
region: it is visible from Pau, from the Maladetta, from the plain of
Toulouse. Consequently these points must lie within its own ken. Its
huge, shapely dome rises 9400 feet into the air, and standing as it does
solitary and apart at the edge of the plain and not buried among rival
summits, the view from the top has been solely criticised as too vast
for detail and too high for exactness, and commands, it is said, a fifth
of all France. The ascent is easy, there being little snow upon the path
in the summer; there is a bridle-trail throughout, a small inn higher
than half way, and an observatory now erected upon the summit.
We are only intellectually cognizant of this Pic du Midi, however, as we
jog on up toward the pass; for the driving fog curtains all the peaks,
at times lifting so far as to show the nearer slopes and perhaps the
hills ahead, but for the most part enfolding even the road and ourselves
in its maudlin affection. We pull steadily on through the morning, over
a good road and up through a still dreary region of moist, sparse turf
and shaly slopes of slate and rock and profitless débris. The occupants
of the landau, as they look down toward us at times from the turn next
above, wave dry and encouraging greetings, through the open windows; and
we wave back damper but equally encouraging greetings in return, having
found that good spirits had fallen to us with unexpected and gratifying
ease.
Altogether it has not been in the least a long morning, when we finally
reach the crest of the Col du Tourmalet, 7100 feet in elevation, from
which begins the descent toward the Campan Valley and Bigorre. This col
is not loved by mountaineers during the winter; it is exposed to the
full sweep of storms, and is one of the wild passes on which, as the
local saying goes, "when the hurricane reigns the son does not tarry for
the father nor the father for the son." Before the Route Thermale pushed
its way over, it was but a foot-pass, wearisomely traversed in saddle or
litter by infrequent travelers or by invalids sentenced to Barèges.
Just at the summit of the col, for a supreme minute, the clouds part at
the rear, right and left, and roll away beneath, and we catch for once
the long stretch of the desolate Valley of Bastan, with the windings of
the road reaching backward and downward along the hills. It is over
while we look; the fog writhes and twists down and all is greyness
again.
The carriages slip rapidly down the other side, with all brakes set and
forty hairbreadth margins recorded for the outer wheels; and, an hour
from the col, we are safely at the hamlet of Grip, where the horses and
we are doomed to a two hours' halt and a lunch. The first inn,
irrationally placed in a patch of field apart from the main road, does
not look attractive from the distance, and we drive on to the second.
This one, while carefully non-committal in appearance, is at least on
close terms with the road, and as there is no third, we cheer us with
reminders of Laruns and descend.
It is a creaky little inn, facing a wet, cobbly yard and having the air
of being retiring in disposition and somewhat surprised at the advent of
visitors. The landlady is away, it appears, and we are received by her
spouse, a mild-mannered old man who is not used to being a host in
himself but resignedly assumes the burden. The lunch is promised for the
near future. The horses are led off, the carriages covered to remain in
the road, and the driver and the jovial guide turn to and help with the
fire and stabling arrangements in a way which shows that they are
entirely at home in the locality.
[Illustration]
We stand for a while on the decrepit, covered balcony overlooking the
yard, exchanging humorous reminiscences of the ride, and idly
commiserating the three fowls and a wet pig which appear below. We are
absorbed too in a wooden-saboted farmhand of gigantic proportions who
clicks across the cobbles at irregular intervals and exchanges repartee
with a milk-maid in the doorway. He has a huge, knobby frame, bulging
calves, a colored kerchief turbaning his head, a rough costume
throughout, and a fascinating though belying air of desperate and
unscrupulous villainy.
But the weather has still its tinge of rawness, and two or three of us
go down stairs again and invade the den of the kitchen, where the fire
is now under way and the inevitable omelet just in contemplation. The
old man acts as extemporary cook. He finds a black and somewhat oily
frying-pan, suspends it over the fire to heat, and throws in a handful
of salt to draw out the grease. He now looks thoughtfully about for a
rag to scour it withal; there is a rag of sooty environment and
inferentially sooty antecedents hanging beside a box of charcoals next
to the chimney-place; he horrifies some among us by promptly catching it
up; gives the pan a vigorous rubbing-out with this carboniferous relic;
and certain appetites for omelet fade swiftly away. Their losers speak
for a substitution of coffee and bread and fresh milk in lieu of all
remaining courses, and beat a hasty retreat from the scene.
The omelet duly appears upon the lunch-table presently set for us in the
little room upstairs, and serves at least as a centre-piece, over which
to tell the story of its birth; and the coffee, excellent bread, and a
huge pitcher of new, creamy milk amply reconcile all abstainers, and
fortify us in a feeling of good-tempered toleration even for Grip.
VI.
Bagnères de Bigorre is placed at the opening-out of the broad Campan
Valley, some distance out from the higher ranges and about twelve miles
on from Grip. The fog passes off as we start again, though it is lightly
raining still. In an hour or more we have finished the descent to the
floor of the valley, and for the rest of the short afternoon the road
runs uneventfully to the northward, for the most part level, and beaded
with occasional villages and lesser clumps of houses. Finally, as the
light begins to fail behind the clouds, an increased bustle on the road
and more frequent houses passed announce the nearness of our
destination, and the horses are soon trotting into Bigorre and up the
welcome promenade of the main street to the Hotel Beau Séjour.
Past discomforts quickly recede in the warm haze of present
satisfactions. We absorb to the full the pleasant glow of the hotel
drawing-room, after we have comfortably repaired the ravages of the
day. Barèges is a grotesque phantom, and we can hardly admit that
to-night there are people still in that shuddering, shivering,
banshee-haunted line of hospitals, high in its weird valley, in the cold
and in the falling rain. Rayless and despairing their mood must be;
escape would seem immeasurably more to be prized than cure. Even the old
man of Grip and his rag brighten by comparison, and we agree in viewing
our present surroundings as a climax of utter content.