I.
We ought to be useful to our fellow-mortals; I have climbed the Bergonz
in order to have at least one ascent to tell about.
A stony, zigzag pathway excoriates the green mountain with its whitish
track. The view changes with every turn. Above and below us are meadows
with girls making hay, and little houses stuck to the declivity like
swallows’ nests. Lower down, an immense pit of black rock, to which from
all sides hasten streams of silver. The higher up we are, the more the
valleys are contracted and fade from sight; the more the gray mountains
{353}enlarge and spread themselves in all their hugeness. Suddenly,
beneath the burning sun, the perspective becomes confused; we feel the
cold and damp touch of some unknown and invisible being. A moment after,
the air clears up, and we perceive behind us the white, rounded back
of a beautiful cloud fleeing into the distance, and whose shadow glides
lightly over the slope. The useful herbage soon disappears; scorched
mosses, thousands of rhododendrons clothe the barren escarpments; the
road is damaged by the force of the hidden springs; it is encumbered
with rolling stones. It turns with every ten paces, in order to conquer
the steepness of the slopes. You reach at last a naked ridge, where you
dismount from your horse; here begins the top of the mountain. You walk
for ten minutes over a carpet of serried heather, and you are upon the
highest summit.
What a view! Everything human disappears; villages, enclosures,
cultivations, all seem like the work of ants. I have two valleys under
my eyes, which seem two little bands of earth lost in a blue funnel.
Nothing exists here but the mountains. Our roads and our works have
scratched upon them an imperceptible point; we are mites, who lodge,
between two awakings, under one of the hairs of an elephant. Our
civilization is a pretty, miniature toy, with which nature amuses
herself for {354}a moment, and which presently she will break.
[Illustration: 380]
You see nothing but a throng of mountains seated under the burning
dome of heaven. They are ranged in an amphitheatre, like a council of
immovable and eternal being’s. All considerations are overpowered by the
sensation of immensity: monstrous ridges which stretch themselves out,
gigantic, bony spines, ploughed flanks that drop down precipitously into
indistinguishable depths.{355}
[Illustration: 381]
{356}
{357}It is as though you were in a bark in the middle of the sea. The
mountain-chains clash like billows. The tops are sharp and jagged like
the crests of uplifted waves; they come from all sides, athwart each
other, piled one above another, bristling, innumerable, and the flood of
granite mounts high into the sky at the four corners of the horizon.
On the north, the valleys of Luz and Argelès open up in the plain by
a bluish vista, shining with a dead splendor resembling two ewers of
burnished pewter. On the west the chain of Bareges stretches like a saw
as far as the Pic du Midi, a huge, ragged-edged axe, marked with patches
of snow; on the east, lines of leaning fir-trees mount to the assault of
the summits. In the south an army of embattled peaks, of ridges cut
to the quick, squared towers, spires, perpendicular escarpments, lifts
itself beneath a mantle of snow; the glaciers glitter between the dark
rocks; the black ledges stand out with an extraordinary relief against
the deep blue. These rude forms pain the eye; you are oppressively alive
to the rigidness of the masses of granite which have burst through the
crust of our planet, and the invincible ruggedness of the rock that is
lifted above the clouds. This chaos of violently broken lines tells of
the effort of forces of which we have no longer any idea. {358}Since
then Nature has grown mild; she rounds and softens the forms she moulds;
she embroiders in the valleys her leafy robe, and, as an industrious
artist, she shapes the delicate foliage of her plants. Here, in her
primitive barbarism, she only knew how to cleave the blocks and heap
up the rough masses of her Cyclopean constructions. But her monument is
sublime, worthy of the heaven it has for a vault and the sun which is
its torch.
II.
Geology is a noble science. Upon this summit theories grow lively; the
arguments of the books breathe new life into the story of the mountains,
and the past appears grander than the present. This country was in
the beginning a solitary and boiling sea, then slowly cooled, finally
peopled by living creatures and built up by their debris. Thus were
formed the ancient limestones, the slates of transition and several of
the secondary rocks. What myriads of ages are accumulated in a single
phrase! Time is a solitude in which we set up here and there our
boundaries; they reveal its immensity, but do not measure it.
This crust cleaves, and a long wave of molten granite heaves itself up,
forming the lofty chain of {359}the Gave, of the Nestes, the Garonne,
the Mala-detta, Néouvielle.
[Illustration: 385]
{360}
{361}From here you see Néouvielle in the north-east. How this wall of
fire worked in lifting itself amidst this upturned sea, the imagination
of man will never conceive. The liquid mass of granite formed a paste
among the rocks; the lower layers were changed into slate beneath
the fiery blast; the level grounds rose up, and were overturned. The
subterranean stream rose with an effort so abrupt, that they were stuck
to its flanks in layers almost perpendicular. “It was congealed in
torment, and its agitation is still painted in its petrified waves.”
How much time rolled away between this revolution and the next?
Monuments are wanting; the centuries have left no traces. There is
a page torn out in the history of the earth. Our ignorance like our
knowledge overwhelms us. We see one infinity, and from it we divine
another which we do not see.
At last the ocean changed its bed, perhaps from the uplifting of
America; from the south-west came a sea to burst upon the chain.
The shock fell upon the dark embattled barrier that you see towards
Gavarnie. There was a frightful destruction of marine animals: Their
corpses have formed the shelly banks that you cross in mounting to la
Brèche; several layers of la Brèche, of the {362}Taillon and of Mont
Perdu, are fields still fetid with death. The rolling sea, tearing up
its bed, drifted it against the wall of rocks, piled it against the
sides, heaped it upon the summits, set mountain upon mountain, covered
the immense rock, and oscillated in furious currents in its ravaged
basin.
[Illustration: 388]
I seemed to see on the horizon the oozy surface coming higher than the
summits, lifting its waves against the sky, eddying in the valleys, and
howling above the drowned mountains like a tempest.
That sea was bringing half of the Pyrenees; its raging waters overlaid
the primitive declivity with calcareous strata, tilted and torn;
upon these the quieted waters deposited the high horizontal layers.
{363}Yonder, in the south-west, the Vignemale is covered with them. In
order to raise up the summits, generations of marine creatures were born
and died silent and inert populations which swarmed in the warm ooze,
and watched through their green waves the rays of the blue-tinged sun.
They have perished along with their sepulchre; the storms have torn open
the banks where they had buried themselves, and these shreds of their
wreck scarce tell how many myriads of centuries this shrouded world has
seen pass away.
One day at last, the great mountains which form the horizon on the south
were seen to grow, Troumousse, the Vignemale, Mont Perdu, and all the
summits that surround Gèdres. The soil had burst open a second time. A
wave of new granite arose, laden with the ancient granite, and with the
prodigious mass of the limestones; the alluvia rose to more than ten
thousand feet; the ancient summits of pure granite were surpassed; the
beds of shells were lifted into the clouds, and the upheaved tops found
themselves forever above the seas.
Two seas have dwelt upon these summits; two streams of burning rock have
erected these chains. What will be the next revolution? How long time
will man yet last? A contraction of the crust which bears him will cause
a wave of lava to gush forth or will displace the level of the seas. We
live {364}between two accidents of the soil; our history occupies, with
room to spare, a line in the history of the earth; our life depends upon
a variation in the heat; our duration is for a moment, and our force a
nothing. We resemble the little blue forget-me-nots which you pluck
as you go down the slope; their form is delicate, their structure
admirable; nature lavishes them and crushes them; she uses all her
industry in shaping them, and all her carelessness in destroying them.
There is more art in them than in the whole mountain. Have they any
ground for pretending that the mountain was made for them?
III.
Paul has climbed the Pic du Midi of Bigorre: here is his journal of the
trip:--
“Set out in the mist at four o’clock in the morning. The pastures of
Tau through the mist; the mist is distinctly visible. The lake of Oncet
through the mist; same view.
“Howker of the Five Bears. Several whitish or grayish spots on a whitish
or grayish ground. To form an idea of it, look at five or six wafers, of
a dirty white, stuck behind a leaf of blotting-paper.
“Beginning of the steep rise; ascent at a footpace, head of one to tail
of another; this recalls to {365}me Leblanc’s riding-school, and the
fifty horses advancing gracefully in the saw-dust, each one with his
nose against the tail of the one before him, and his tail against the
nose of his follower, as it used to be on Thursdays, the school-day for
going out and for the riding lesson. I cradle myself voluptuously in the
poetical remembrance.
[Illustration: 391]
“First hour: view of the back of my guide and the hind-quarters of
his horse. The guide has a vest of bottle-green velvet, darned in two
places, on the right and on the left; the horse is a dirty brown and
bears the marks of the whip. Several big pebbles in the pathway. Fog. I
meditate on German philosophy. {366}“Second hour: the view enlarges; I
perceive the left eye of the guide’s horse. That eye is blind; it loses
nothing.
“Third hour: the view broadens more. View of the hind-quarters of two
horses and two tourists’ vests fifteen feet above us. Gray vests, red
girdles, berets. They swear and I swear; that consoles us a little. .
“Fourth hour: joy and transports; the guide promises me for the summit
the view of a sea of clouds.
“Arrival: view of the sea of clouds. Unhappily we are in one of the
clouds. Appearance that of a vapor bath when one is in the bath.
“Benefits: cold in the head, rheumatism in the feet, lumbago, freezing,
such happiness as a man might feel who had danced attendance for eight
hours in an ante-chamber without fire.
“And this happens often?
“Twice out of three times. The guides swear it does not.”
[Illustration: 392]
{367}
[Illustration: 393]