VI The Separate Districts of the Pyrenees
For the purposes of travel upon foot, the range of the Pyrenees falls into certain divisions, which are not very clearly marked, but which arrange themselves in a rough manner under the experience of travel. As I come to deal with each of these, it will be seen that there is not one which does not overlap its neighbour, and it will be impossible to describe any mountain district without admitting this overlapping to some extent, because any valley connected by certain local ties with the valleys to the east and west is also, as a rule, connected with the valleys to the north or south of it. Still, the districts I speak of are fairly distinct, and consist in (1) the Basque valleys, (2) the Vals d’Aspe and d’Ossau, with the valleys of the Aragon and Gallego to their south, which I will call “the Four Valleys,” (3) the Sobrarbe, (4) the three valleys attaching to Tarbes, to which I also attach the Luchon valley, (5) the Catalan valleys and Andorra—in which I include the Val d’Aran, (6) the Cerdagne (omitting the Tet and Ariège valleys), (7) the Ariège and Tet valleys, (8) the Canigou.
These I will take in their order, and I will begin with—
I. The Basque Valleys
The valleys immediately adjoining the point which we have taken for the western end of the chain, that is, the knot of hills just to the west of Roncesvalles, which have for their pivot Mount Urtioga, form one country-side and should be considered together.
They are the Baztan to the west, the first of the many valleys into which the main range splits up like a fan as it approaches the Atlantic; the valley of Baigorry, parallel to it and immediately to the east; the valley called that of the St. Jean in its lower French part, and that of Val Carlos in its upper Spanish one; this valley stands eastward of Baigorry, and unites with it before leaving the hills to join the valley of the Nive. The two together, and the lower valley of the Nive, are called by the common name of “The Labourd”; on the south of the range comes the valley of the Arga and the plain south of Roncesvalles: these make one division of the Basque district. The same dialect of Basque is spoken throughout the Labourd (there are variations upon the Spanish side), the same type of house and of food and of hill is everywhere around. The other division of the Basque valleys is the French district of the Soule, just to the east with its corresponding valleys south of the frontier.
As to the Labourd and its accompanying Spanish valleys, the space open for camping or wandering in this corner of the chain is less than in the higher central part. The low round hills are often cultivated to their summits, the valleys are always well populated, roads and villages are many, and though there are one or two fine stretches of forest in which a man can spend as many days as he chooses (notably the forest of Hayra, which lies up southward at the far end of the Baigorry), they are not to be compared in extent or in wildness with the forests further east. The whole width of the Hayra, counting both the French and the Spanish slopes, is, at its greatest extent, not more than three miles. Its length is not six. The small lakes also that are characteristic of the Pyrenees throughout their length, are lacking here, and the prosperity and industry of the Basques press upon the traveller wherever he goes.
If one would stay some three or four days in this district, it is a good plan to leave the train at St. Etienne, just at the beginning of the Baigorry valley. St. Etienne is the terminus of the branch line which strikes off a few miles down the river from the line connecting St. Jean Pied-de-Port with Bayonne, and one gets to St. Etienne by the morning train from Bayonne about mid-day.
Immediately to the west of St. Etienne, connecting it with the Baztan, lies the pass of Ispeguy. It is of course very low, as are all these hills; it is little more than 1000 feet above St. Etienne, or perhaps 1500, but from the summit there is a fine view of the higher distant Pyrenees to the east. The frontier runs here north and south, passes through the summit of the col, down the further side of which an easy valley road leads down on to the main highway of the Baztan.
This highway is the modern representative of the track which for many centuries connected Bayonne with Pamplona. It was, until recent times, a mountain way; the main Roman road went through Roncesvalles. It is now, as was seen when we spoke of roads for driving and motoring, the best approach from the French Atlantic coast into Navarre. From the point where you strike this high road, where the valley debouches upon it, and where the lateral stream you have been following falls into the river Baztan, there is a walk down to the left, or southward, of some 4 miles, into the town of Elizondo, which means in Basque “The Church in the Valley.” For the Basques, like the Welsh, have the terms of their religion mainly in the form of borrowed words, and the Greek Ecclesia, which is “Egglws” in the Welsh mountains, has nearly the same sound here, 800 miles to the south, and with all those days of sea between. Christendom is one country.
There is no easy journey from Elizondo down to the south of the hills and back east again into the French valleys, unless you go on to Pamplona, although of course there is nothing high or steep to stop you, if you have plenty of provisions, except the absence of maps (which do not exist for this district upon any useful scale to my knowledge). If you want to make a mountain journey of it without touching the town of Pamplona, go down a mile or two from Elizondo to Iruita, where the main road branches into two; thence going south and a little east up the stream which comes down from the frontier summits, you may go over a col between that valley and the valley of the Esteribar, where the Arga rises. You will find yourself at the first little Basque village, that of Eugui, by evening; the total distance from Elizondo to Eugui, if you go the shortest way, is only 20 miles. But, I repeat, it is a difficult job. Maps are lacking, the valleys have many ramifications, and the first part of your journey is all uphill for half the day. If the weather is cloudy it is more than possible that you will get into the wrong valley, and find at last, when you have got over your col, and are following the running water on the further side, that that running water is not the Arga at all, but one of the streams that lead you back again into the Baigorry. However, if you make Eugui in the Estribar, the rest is simple: there are villages all round, connected by paths, and not more than a mile or two from one another, and you may go through Linzoian to Espimal and so to Burguete, where you get the main road over Roncesvalles, without fear of losing your way; for there are people everywhere.
It is best, however, when you have slept in Elizondo, which is a very pleasant little town, to take the motor-bus and get on to Pamplona; for the Basques, who detest as much as the Scotch to be behind the world, have a motor-bus along this mountain road. From Pamplona next day you can go by the new road to Burguete, passing through Larrasoaña and Erro. It is a long journey of nearly 30 miles; it can be broken, if you choose, at Erro, but the sleeping accommodation there is nothing very grand. If you push on beyond Burguete, over Roncesvalles, you can, in something under 40 miles, get to Val Carlos, the last town in Spain, and for those who can walk 40 miles this is the best thing to do. If not, break the journey in two at Erro, desolate as the little place is.
The object of course of this walk is the Pass of Roncesvalles, and the vast contrast between the slightly sloping Spanish plain of Burguete, running up to the summit of the Pyrenees, and the great chasm which opens beneath your feet when you have reached that summit, and which forms the entry into France.
You will not easily make a camp in any part of this round, and it is well to remember here, where first mention is made of crossing the Spanish frontier, that the Spaniards will not let a man leave their country unless he has due permission upon a paper form. Why this should be so I do not know, and I have very often gone in and out of Spain without telling the authorities, as I have for that matter gone in and out of Germany on foot, though the German officials are more stupid than the Spaniards, and therefore attach much more importance to such things. Still, it is safer to ask for your permit, and it will be given you by a functionary called a “Corregidor,” at Val Carlos. A few miles beyond, eight to be exact, you are in St. Jean Pied-de-Port, which is the head of the railway to-day, and which has been for nearly 1000 years the depot town at the foot of the pass for armies and for travellers. On this same flat where it stands, was the Roman fort and depot, but not quite on the same place; it stood on the spot now called St. Jean le Vieux, 2½ miles up the lateral valley. This last was the halting place of Charlemagne in the famous story, and St. Jean, as we see it, is a town not of the Dark but of the Middle Ages.
The next district to this of the Labourd, lying immediately to the east of it, we have seen to be called the Soule. It is also Basque, though it is Basque spoken with a different accent, and with certain verbal differences as well. The way from one to the other lies through wilder and more likely land for camping than is to be found in Baztan, Baigorry, or Roncesvalles. It is a good plan, if one has the leisure, to approach the Soule on foot by way of St. Jean, though the more ordinary way is to go round through the plains by train to Mauléon (which is the capital of the Soule).
If one goes on foot directly across from the Labourd into the Soule, he strikes that valley in its higher reaches, and well above Mauléon.
The shortest line, if one does not mind sleeping in a mountain village, is to take the high road from St. Jean Pied-de-Port to Lecumberry, and to follow that way up the valley of the Laurhibar until the high road comes to an end. It did so abruptly two miles or so beyond Laurhibar, some years ago, but as it is being continued, one may follow it every year further up the dale. The high road ends (or ended) about 10 miles from St. Jean; and Lecumberry is the last village still, however far the road may have progressed up the valley. When the road ceases one must continue up the valley by a path on the left bank of the stream. One soon finds on this left bank a series of precipitous cliffs; one must there cross over to the path upon the right bank. It is also possible to keep to the right bank all the way—there is a track on either side—but I speak of the usual way. Henceforward the path remains quite clear and runs close alongside the stream, with steep cliffs upon the further shore, until, in the last mile or two, before the head of the valley, one enters a wood, and it is here that, if you are not very careful, you will lose your way. The contours are complicated, the valleys numerous, and the alternation of wood and open land most confusing. But if you will go due east by your compass from the point where you entered the wood (abandoning the path where it crosses the stream and goes over to the south), and if you will remember always to turn any precipice or ledge of rock by descending to the left of it, and always to descend after you have made the first high open space, you will come upon a clear track not quite three miles from the point where the path enters the wood.
It sounds but a vague indication, but it is a sufficient one, because bad precipices prevent you from going too much to the right, and the natural tendency of man to go downhill when he can will prevent you from going up on to the ledge upon your left. You will find yourself shepherded—if you always go as due east as is possible, and always turn a ledge of rock to the left—into a track which runs all along the high lands above the slopes that dominate the Brook Aphours; a little way down, that track falls into a high road, and a few miles further the road reaches Tardets, the central town in the valley of the Soule, half-way between Mauléon and the highest summits. The whole journey from St. Jean thus described is a big distance, nearer 40 miles than 30, with windings all the way, and you must be prepared if you become fatigued or have bad luck with your weather, either to camp out in the woods at the summit of the pass, or to sleep in the first hamlet upon the eastern side.
There is, indeed, a short cut which strikes the valley much higher, but it is difficult to make and involves the climbing of two cols. For this short cut the directions are as for the last, until your path along the Laurhibar has struck the wood; there, instead of leaving it when it turns south, and instead of going east (as above), you must keep to the track. It will cross the stream, still going due south, wind up between an open space through the woods, and will point before you lose it to the climb over the shoulder of the Pic d’Escoliers; it is a stiff climb of nearly 2000 feet from the point where you crossed the stream and very steep. The 2000 feet or so are climbed in under two miles. When you get to the shoulder of the peak a steep southern slope lies before you, diversified and made perilous by rocks, and separating plainly into an eastern and a western valley. Between you and the eastern valley (which is that you must descend) are steep rocks; they can be turned, however, by going to the right of them, but the whole place is precipitous and difficult. The advantage appears when once you are down on the floor of the valley (which is but 1000 feet from the peak), for you come within a mile to a clear path, and once you have come to this, you are in another two miles, at the village of Larrau, which is the terminus of the great national road, and stands in the last upper waters of the valley.
If you approach the Soule by the more ordinary way you will come by train through Puyoo, change there, and take the train for Mauléon; and Mauléon, as I have said, is the capital of the Soule. But the true mountain town is Tardets, half-way up the valley. Tardets is the market town for all the Basques of the hills, and you can never have enough of it, both of its heavenly hotel, of which I shall speak when I come to speak of hotels, and for its universal shops, and for its kindly people. It stands in an opening of the lower hills, just before the valley narrows and enters the high mountains, and you may reach it from Mauléon by a tramway which runs up the river as far as Tardets and then turns off to the left and goes round to Oloron.
If you approach the Soule in this manner, making Tardets your starting-point, you will do well to equip yourself in that town and then to continue up the valley some five miles past Licq, until you come to the fork of the river. It is an unmistakable point, because a very definite rocky ridge comes down and separates the two sources of the river Saison, which is the river of the Soule. The branch to the right (as you go southward) leads up the valley to Larrau, of which I have just spoken, and the high road follows it; the one to the left (which is the main stream and is called the Chaitza) has no main road along it, but a good mule track, very clear and plain, and leading at last to the village of Ste Engrace, which lies at the extreme end of the valley and gives the whole district its name.
Ste Engrace was a saint of the persecution of Diocletian. She was martyred in Saragossa, and the name of the village is one of the many examples of the way in which the southern influence overlaps these hills. I have said that the Spanish sandal is used to the very foot of the French Pyrenees, and so is the wine-skin which is common to all Spain, and so is the Spanish mule. Here you may see the Spanish saints as well reaching beyond the summits.
From where you leave the main road and go up the Chaitza valley to Ste Engrace is a distance of 8 or 9 miles, and in this valley, in its upper waters, is to be found one of the wonders of the Pyrenees, and also one of the main passages into Spain.
The wonder is the gorge of the Cacouette; the passage is the twin passage of the Port d’Ourdayte and the Port Ste Engrace, and near them to the west are two easier ports.
The Cacouette is a cut through the limestone such as you might make with a knife into clay or cheese, with immense steep precipices on either side, and apart from the track above the cliffs there is some sort of tourist’s way along the cavernous ravine for those who admire such things. Of the two ports, the one path goes up the western side of that cleft in the limestone (which drops 1500 feet into the earth), and the other goes up the eastern side. To take the road up the western side, you leave the Ste Engrace road 3 miles after leaving the great highway, by a lane which goes off to the right and drops down into the valley; it is quite plain, and is the only road so leaving the main track, so that it cannot be mistaken. It climbs the opposing hill, and if you follow it through all its windings it will take you to the Port Belhay, or to the Port Bambilette, both under a mountain called Otxogorrigagne, and both easy. But if you continue just above the limestone precipice, you will come into a very striking circus of rock just under the watershed, up which your path perilously climbs to the summit and the frontier; this is the Port d’Ourdayte.
The Port Ste Engrace, though not half a mile distant from it, is reached in quite a different manner, and the separation between the two is due to this limestone gorge, which cuts off one path from the other.
If you are going to try to cross by Ste Engrace, sleep at the village before starting. There is a good comfortable inn kept by people of the same name as those who keep the inn at Elizondo, Jarégui. It is so steep and difficult a bit that if you were to attempt to do it in one day, without sleeping at Ste Engrace, you would hardly succeed unless you already knew the mountain well, and mist, which is the fatal difficulty of these western Pyrenees, will more commonly catch you in the early afternoon than at any other time in the day, so that you had better make your ascent before noon. When you have slept at Ste Engrace you will find the path the next morning winding round through the woods, at the base of the hill opposite the village. One must ask the way to the start of this path, and it is not always clear after the first two miles; one has now and then to cast about for it a little, but at last it emerges upon a high grassy slope, which runs all the way to the crest of the hill and the frontier. The path does not follow the straight ascent of the hill, it curves nearer and nearer to a precipice which is the same as that climbed by the neighbouring paths of the Port d’Ourdayte; for ten dangerous yards it runs on a tiny platform right along the gulf and makes over the crest into the further Spanish Basque valley, whose capital is Isaba.
Of this valley I can say nothing, for I have not succeeded in crossing the Ste Engrace, though I have twice tried, but I am told that Isaba is among the best of these little mountain Basque villages or towns for entertainment and for cleanliness, and all Basque villages and towns are cleanly. There is a good posada. From Isaba also a high road runs into the higher valleys of Navarre and to Pamplona.
Near this territory of the Soule, and partly included in it, are two great districts where a man may spend many days at his ease in camp there. The first is the great forest of the Tigra, which stretches to the west of Tardets and is full of rocks, rivers, and adventure. You may take it at its greatest width, counting one or two open spaces, to be 8 or 9 miles, and at its greatest length, from the Peak of the Vultures to St. Just, to be much the same. Its high places, some of which are bare peaks, some clothed with woods, range for the most part round about 3000 feet, but the highest point—of which I have never heard the name, and which is on the very south of the forest, just passes 4000 feet. Tardets is always at hand on the one hand, St. Jean Pied-de-Port rather further on the other; from both one may re-provision oneself.
Another and still larger district lies on the further side of the valley to the north and east of Ste Engrace itself. It is the great mass of wood, mainly beech, which stretches all over the hills between this last Basque valley and the Val d’Aspe, next to the east, which is the frontier valley of Béarn. These woods have no common name, they are intersected by clear spaces, notably round the higher peaks of the forest, but they make a district of their own stretching eastward and westward from Lourdios to Licq, northward and southward from the frontier nearly to Lanne, and thus measuring not much less than 10 miles every way, in French territory alone.
There is no forest in which it is easier to lose one’s way than this great stretch of upland. This is especially true in the Souscousse district, due east of Ste Engrace; there is here a labyrinth of complicated valleys, and what seems on the map so easy a passage from the Soule into the Val d’Aspe is in practice nearly impossible to find. To camp in and to explore, this forest is even better than the Tigra; for its summits are higher, and its views more unexpected and remarkable. There are points in it which are more than 6000 feet in height, and the great Pic d’Anie, the first of the really high mountains of the chain, stands high above them, just beyond the southern limit of the trees.
II. The Four Valleys (Béarn and Aragon)
Four valleys in the Pyrenees count together in travel upon foot. They are the Val d’Aspe and the Val d’Oussau on the French side, and the valleys of the rivers Aragon and Gallego on the Spanish side.
These four form a unity for the reason that in one place (which is just to the south of the watershed) they are, without too much difficulty, approachable one from another.
Many historical accidents have also served to unite these four valleys. One pair of them made the platform for that great Roman road to which allusion has so often been made in this book, and which ran from the French plains over what is now called the pass of the Somport, right down through Jaca to Saragossa. The parallel pair of valleys just to the east, the Val d’Ossau and the valley of the Gallego, on the Spanish side, though no highway ran along them until quite recently, had a similar historical unity which bound them both together, and bound a pair of them to the two sister valleys upon the west. For the eastern part of what later became the kingdom of Aragon, the county of Sobrarbe, stretched from the valley of the Gallego eastward, and was a natural line of defence southward against the Mahommedans; while the Val d’Ossau to the north of it was reached by an easy pass and must have formed—though we have no exact historical record of it—a good road for the parallel advance of armies.
It must never be forgotten that when an army is advancing in great numbers it is of paramount importance for it that the host should be able to concentrate before action. But roads, especially roads over mountains, compel men to march in long strings, so that the head of the column will have arrived at a particular point hours before the tail of it; and what is more, the deployment of the column, that is the getting of it all into a front perpendicular to its line of advance, takes time in proportion to the length which the column had before it began to deploy. This accident it was, for instance, which destroyed the French and their allies at Crécy, for though they greatly outnumbered the English they had come up in columns too long to deploy in time. Now it evidently follows from this principle that armies on the march, even under the rudest conditions, will attempt to follow parallel roads. To find two roads parallel to one another and leading to the same field of action is to halve the difficulties of transport and of deployment. But it is very difficult (under primitive conditions) to find two parallel roads which are near to one another, and unless the lines by which the army advances are near to one another the advantage of the alternative routes will disappear in proportion to their distance one from the other. In mountain regions it is especially difficult to find two passages parallel to each other and yet in close neighbourhood. This is precisely the advantage afforded by the trench of the Gallego continued in the Val d’Ossau to the east, and in the trench of the Aragon continued in the Val d’Aspe to the west. Two hosts using the old mule paths could leave Sallent on the Gallego and Canfranc on the Aragon at dawn of one day, and both would meet at Oloron in the French plains before the evening of the morrow; on the southward march a host could assemble in the plains of Béarn, separate to use these two easy passes, and meet at Jaca at the end of the second day.
It is fairly certain therefore—much more certain than a thousand of the historical guesses that are put down as truths in our textbooks—that the easy pass between the Gallego Valley and the Val d’Ossau was twin throughout the Dark Ages to the great Somport pass not 8 miles westward of it. Abd-ur-Rahman must have used both and so must the Christian knights when they came so often to the relief of Aragon in the heavy and successful fighting against Islam which marked the tenth and eleventh centuries.
To appreciate how close these two parallel tracks were to each other one has but to remember that the gap between the Val d’Aspe and the next easy pass westward—right away at Roncesvalles—there is a matter of 40 miles. Between the Val d’Ossau and the next easy pass eastward there is a gap of indeterminate length according to the definition of the term “easy,” but there is at any rate no notch over which one could take any armed force until one gets to the Bonaigo, quite 60 miles away. All between is the mass of the highest and most rugged ridges of the Pyrenees, over which certain paths have always existed, indeed, and over which, in two places at least, at Gavarnie and at Macadou, the French propose to drive roads, but no gap in which was ever passable in the Dark and Middle Ages for a great number of men.
I have said that these two parallel trenches were not only twin in history for the use of armies, but were also communicable one from the other just south of the watershed. North of it, indeed, the Val d’Aspe and the Val d’Ossau, though one can be reached from the other, only communicate by very high and rocky ridges, the easiest of which is the Col des Moines. But on the south side there is one accidental easy passage. You may go all the way from the Somport to Jaca and find nothing but the most difficult mountains on your left, and all the way from the Pourtalet (which is the pass at the top of the Val d’Ossau corresponding to the Somport) down to Sandinies and find nothing but difficult mountains on the right, save just at the beginning of the descent where this accident of which I speak occurs. Its feature is a lateral valley called the Canal Roya which takes its name from the streak of intense red scoring the side of its principal peak.
This lateral valley points right away eastward from the trench of the Aragon, it is nowhere precipitous along its stream (a rare advantage in the Pyrenees) save in one spot where a quite low precipice is easily outflanked along the grassy slopes above it. And the end of that valley consists in a sort of semi-circular ridge of grassy steep banks in three places of which ridge, at least, a man or a beast can walk over without difficulty or danger. These three places are the Port de Peyréguet, the Port d’Anéou, and the col of the Canal Roya. This last is the principal one, the easiest and the lowest. Each is within half a mile of its neighbour, and on the further side one comes down quite easily by large steep slopes of meadow to the valley of the Gallego. The Port de Peyréguet and the Port d’Anéou bring one down just on the north of the flat dip of the pass, the col of the Canal Roya just on the south of it; but whether one comes down just north or south of the flat Pourtalet pass is an indifferent matter. The travelling in all three cases is little more than a walk.
These “gates” up the Canal Roya from the Val d’Aragon into the parallel valley of the Gallego knit the whole four valleys into one system, and to this day their customs and their inhabitants have very much in common, and the two valleys, which were the core and heart of Aragon and the origins of its crusade southward against the Mahommedans, count in history and in local geography with the two valleys which were the heart and origin of Béarn up to the north.
The Val d’Aspe, which is the most important of the four, is that valley in the Pyrenees where the characteristics of the range are most strongly marked. It might serve as the type of all the others. You cannot see the opening of it southward from Oloron without appreciating that you are approaching something distinctive and singular in landscape. It is so clean-cut and so obviously an invitation to the crossing of the hills. The gorges which divide into separate flat steps every Pyrenean valley, are nowhere more marked than here. The village of Asasp which stands at the first of them is singularly characteristic of such an entry; the gap through which the old lake broke is so clear, the walls through which the Gave runs are so perfect.
Somewhat further on when yet another gorge has been passed there opens out one of those circular and isolated spaces of which Andorra is the historical example, and which in greater or less perfection are characteristic of all these hills.
This plain, which still recalls in its contours the old lake which created it, and of which it is the floor, is more regular and more complete than any of the many jasses and “plans” which distinguish the other vales. It is even more striking than that of Andorra. It nourishes five villages which might easily (had not the great international road run through them for 2000 years) have federated to form an independent commonwealth as the eight villages of Andorra federated to form one. Indeed this circus, surrounded by almost impassable hills which meet at either end in narrow Thermopylæ, was very nearly independent at the close of the Middle Ages, and when it appealed against the king for the preservation of its customs, these were preserved by the authority of the king’s court.
Of the small towns or large villages which this little secluded corner of the world contains, Bédous is that which will seem the capital to the wayfarer, for it is the only one which stands upon the main road; it is the terminus of a railway which will soon be finished, and of which nearly all the track is already made. Bédous, by this time, must also have more population, as it certainly has more wealth than any of the surrounding places. But Accous is the true capital of the five, and it is pleasurable to hear with what reverence the villagers of the farms around speak of Accous as though it were an Andorra-viella or a Toulouse. All this wonderful and silent plain is marked with long lines of poplars which enhance by their straight lines the immensity of the heights around them.
If one will pass some days in this singular valley it forms an excellent place from which to explore the high passes into the Val d’Ossau, and the bases of the two great mountains which, to the east and to the west, neither visible from the floor of the valley, are, as it were, its guardians: the Pic d’Anie and the Pic du Midi d’Ossau. The man who does not desire to cover much ground but who wants thoroughly to know some very Pyrenean part of the Pyrenees will do well to stop at the Hotel de la Poste at Bédous, and thence climb at his leisure up on to the platforms from which spring these isolated and dominant masses of rock.
The Pic du Midi remains in one’s mind more perhaps than any of the isolated mountains of Europe. It is quite savage and alone, and you must fatigue yourself to reach it. There is no common knowledge of it and yet it is as much itself as is the Matterhorn. The Pic d’Anie, though it is less isolated, stands even more alone and has this quality that it dominates the whole of the seaward side of the Pyrenees for it is much higher than anything westward of it. Also it is the boundary beyond which the Basques and their language have not gone.
Beyond this plain of Bédous, when you have passed the southern “gate” of it, you come into a long, deep and winding gorge which leads you at last to Urdos, and Urdos is and has been since history began the outpost of the French in these hills. It was the Roman outpost and the mediæval one, and it was the outpost through the Revolutionary wars.
Napoleon, who in everything recognized and imitated the example of Rome, and who, for that matter, caused the Empire to rise again from the dead, determined that a modern road should go again where the old Roman road had gone. He determined this in connexion with his Spanish wars, and decreed in 1808 that a way for artillery should cross where the legions had gone. But Europe, as we all know, would not upon any matter accept in the rush of a few years the constructive desire of Napoleon and of the Revolution. It has taken more than three generations to do not half the vast work they planned, and this road, which like almost every good road over the Alps and the Pyrenees has Napoleon and the Revolution for its origin, waited till past the middle of the nineteenth century before it reached so much as the summit of the port.
Under Napoleon III, in the sixties if I remember right, the thing was done and the road reached the summit of the Somport, the lowest and the most practicable of the high passes of the central mountains. But the Spaniards still hung back, and it was not till the other year that the road upon the Spanish side was completed. Now, however, one may not only go all the way upon a high carriage road from Oloron to Saragossa straight south across the hills, but one may find the whole way marked with mile-stones as the Romans would have marked it, and saved at every difficulty by engineering of which the Romans themselves would have been proud. Once over the summit there is no resting place till one reaches Canfranc, 6 or 7 miles by the windings of the road below one. After Canfranc the valley of the Aragon, which one has been following, opens, and the plain of Jaca lies before one bounded by its great ridge to the southward, the Peña de Oroel.
If one would not go all that length of high-road (from Oloron to Jaca is over 50 miles) there are upon the Spanish side two lateral diversions which a man may take. The first is over the Col des Moines, the other into and over the Canal Roya.
The first can be seen right before one at the summit of the pass; for when one stands upon that summit one has, running eastward from the road, a great open valley at the head of which is clearly distinguishable a bare rocky ridge with a low saddle which is the Col des Moines. It is perfectly easy upon either side, and upon the further side it shows one the splendid and unexpected vision of the Pic du Midi standing up alone beyond the little tarns at its feet: a double pyramid of steep rock upon which the snow can hardly lie in tiny patches and whose main precipices are dark, to the north, away from the sun.
The next lateral valley southward of the Col des Moines is that of the Canal Roya, but one can only enter it after going down the main road for quite a thousand feet. There a bridge will be seen spanning the Aragon and a little doubtful path leading beyond eastward up the lateral valley. It is two hours up that valley to its head by a path going first on the right bank of the stream then crossing over to the left one. One thus reaches by a continuous ascent the cirque or amphitheatre which bounds it at the eastern extremity of the valley. Here there is a difficulty in finding the easiest and lowest col. The map is doubtful and the details upon the map are not sufficiently numerous. The Canal Roya is well worth camping in and returning by to the main Spanish road if one is inclined (and if one is, one would do well to camp near the wood upon the left bank of the stream not quite half-way up the vale for there is no timber further on). But if one does not camp and prefers to get over the col into the valley of the Gallego the rule is to note a sharp peak which stands exactly at the apex of the valley—it is the lowest of the peaks around but very distinct, forming an isolated steeple due east of the last springs of the stream. The way lies to the left or north of this peak and just under its shoulder up a loose mass of fallen rocks on which an eye practised in these things can discover from time to time a trace not of a true path but at least of infrequent travel. Upon the far side easy slopes of grass take one down in about an hour to the Sallent road.
Note that these two cols and the stretch from road to road and from inn to inn can only with some peril be undertaken in one day from Urdos. In fine weather and without accident the thing is simple enough, but when you are baulked for an hour or two by the trail, or if you start a little late, or if you are detained by mist you may very easily not manage the passage from one of the great roads to the other, near as they look upon the map.
With everything going well, carrying little weight and fresh, it is quite three hours (and more like three and a half) from Urdos to the bridge over the Aragon. It will be another two up the Canal Roya and two more over its col and down the other side to the high road, and even from that point on the high road, if you follow the road only, there are two more hours before you reach Sallent. It is a very heavy day of quite 30 miles with two cols, one of 5000 feet, the other of 6500 feet, to be taken on the way, and it is foolish to undertake either the Col des Moines or the Canal Roya from Urdos without allowing for the chance of one night at least upon the mountain.
The second pair of valleys, that of the Gallego on the Spanish side, and the Gave d’Ossau on the French side, are linked together by two very easy passes, and one difficult one of which I shall speak in a moment.
The old port, now called “Port Vieux de Sallent,” or the “Puerta Vieja,” is easy enough, though it went over a higher part of the mountain than the new pass just next door to it. I say it is higher than the pass now used, and this contrast is not infrequently found in the Pyrenees, some feature or other in the topography of the ridge making it more convenient for a native to cross by a slightly higher saddle than by some lower one close by. For instance, the Somport itself is somewhat higher than a quite unknown gap four miles to the west of it, but this lower gap was never used because it led into a Spanish valley of a difficult and most isolated kind.
In the case of the two passes from the Val d’Ossau into Spain, the obstacle which prevented the lower pass being used until quite lately, was a great mass of rock overhanging the sources of the Gave d’Ossau, in the highest part of the valley. When the new highway was made, this rock was blasted and cut so as to take the road round it, and thus the low pass beyond, called Pourtalet, was utilized. It is below 6000 feet and exactly 1000 feet lower than the old Port de Sallent. But even nowadays, if you are on foot you will do well to cross by the old port, high as it is, for it saves time.
While I am on the subject I must warn the reader that the 1/100,000 map does not accurately convey the shape of the last two miles of the road upon the French side, and the line of road mere guesswork upon the Spanish, though the shape of the mountains is accurately given.
This pair of valleys is remarkable for another feature upon the French and upon the Spanish slopes: their wildness. Let me speak first of the French. The French valley, the Val d’Ossau, is one of the wildest and most deserted in the Pyrenees, and also it is the one most densely clothed with forests. The reason of this is that there is less flat ground at the foot of it than in any other. Nowhere does it expand into even a narrow circus, and about Laruns, where it debouches upon the lowlands, and the summit of the pass into Spain, a distance of perhaps 17 miles, there is but one large village, close to the bottom of the valley, and that owes its existence to Thermal Springs; it is called Eaux Chaudes—a dismal place, squeezed in between the torrent and the cliff, dirty, uncomfortable, and sad. Higher up, however, a tiny hamlet, the humblest and most remote in the world, one would think, has of recent years taken on some little importance through travel; this is the hamlet of Gabas, which may be said to consist in three inns, a ruinous chapel, most pathetic, and a customs station. Of the excellent inn at Gabas, I will speak elsewhere.
This valley of the Ossau is the base for two districts, both of which are very Pyrenean, and on either of which a man may spend a day or a month of lonely pleasure. One is the steep and very fine valley of the Sousquéou, the other is the short and extremely steep torrent bed which leads up to the foot of the Pic du Midi.
This mountain dominates all this section of the Pyrenees. The approach to it by the Col des Moines I have already mentioned; this ascent by the short valley from Gabas, through the woods, is better, because you come right up on to the mountain suddenly from the depth of a vast forest, and you feel its isolation.
I know of no hill which seems more to deserve a name or to possess a personality. Round its base there is matter for camping for days or for weeks, good water, lakes to fish in, shelter, both of rocks and of trees, human succour not too far off (Gabas is not three miles as the crow flies from the summit of the mountain), and a complete independence.
The Sousquéou is a less human excursion, though it has a very fine lake at the head of it. The communication with men is steeper and more difficult than from the district surrounding the Pic du Midi, and, as I know from experience, it is not difficult to lose one’s way. Moreover, the exits from the upper end of this valley are not easy, and it is bounded on either side by the most savage cliffs in the whole chain. Should it be necessary to escape from this ravine by any path but that which leads down on to the high road near Gabas, you have no choice but the high and steep Col d’Arrius, which brings you down into the upper valley of the Gave d’Ossau, or on to the very high and most unpleasant Col de Sobe, which gets you into one of the most difficult parts of the Spanish side near the Peña Forata and so down to the Gallego. Its very remoteness, however, and its partial changes, may attract one kind of walker to the Sousquéou, but if he attempts it, let him go with at least three days’ provisions. There are huts in the lower part of the valley, but there is no very good camping ground near the lake I believe, save on the side of the wood to the north. It is a lonely place, not without horrors, and is perhaps haunted; the shape of the hills around is very terrible.
The Spanish side of all this is more simply described, the new high road runs down 8 or 9 miles to Sallent, which can be turned into 5 or 6 miles by taking the old mule track that cuts off the windings of the graded road. The river Gallego runs below and increases as it goes. To the right or westward of the valley there is nothing in particular to be done, there is but one place where you can conveniently cross over into the valley of the Aragon, which is the Canal Roya I have already described; south of that crossing the flank of the mountain lies bare and open affording neither camping ground nor interest. On the left are the curious serrated precipices of the Peña Forata, where climbing makes but a day’s amusement, but where also there is no opportunity for camping, and once Sallent is reached, though the “valley of Limpid Water” which runs north of it is fine enough, there is little to be done but to go on to Panticosa. There is a path over the very high ridge of the Pic d’Enfer, and there is a main carriage road which goes round the flanks of that mountain.
All this part the valley of the Gallego is bounded by some of the highest and most abrupt peaks in the chain, and (as I shall presently describe) another district, meriting another type of description and travel, lies to the eastward, and constitutes those new fortresses of the hills, the roots of old Sobrarbe, where Christendom first began to hold out against Islam, and whence the men of Aragon could securely push southward when the advance to the Reconquest began.
III. Sobrarbe
When one says Sobrarbe one means all that eastern and larger part of the original valleys of Aragon which lie between (and do not include) the valley of the Gallego and the valley of the Noguera Ribagorzana, that is, the valley of Broto (which is that of the river Ara), the valley of the river Cinca and the valley of the river Esera; for, with central ramifications, these three make up Sobrarbe.
That part of it of which I shall here speak, the part right up against the frontier ridge, is included between the big lump of mountains which surrounds Panticosa (of which the Vignemale is the most conspicuous) and the other big lump of peaks which is called the Maladetta group.
It has three towns corresponding to its three valleys, Torla in the Broto upon the Ara, Bielsa upon the Cinca, Venasque upon the Esera.
The Cinca, however, receives, right up at its sources, an affluent longer and more important than itself, called the Cinqueta, and on this stream is a group of villages, none of them important enough to be called a town, but standing so close together as to make a considerable centre of habitation.
But for these towns, the group of villages I have mentioned and one or two tiny hamlets, these Spanish valleys are wholly deserted, and they form by far the most rugged and difficult district of all the Pyrenees.
They also hold the highest peaks of the mountains; the culminating Nethou Peak of the Maladetta group, just upon the eastern edge of the district (11,168 feet); the Posets (11,047), the Mont Perdu (10,994), the Pic d’Enfer (10,109), the Vignemale (10,820) all stand here. Most of the high peaks are in Spain, but it is another feature of the district that the frontier ridge is higher here than in any other part, and is also more continuous. The summit of the Vignemale forms part of it, and the notches by which it may be traversed in these 40 to 50 miles lie but very little below the surrounding peaks. Only 3 of the passes miss the 8000 foot line. The Port du Venasque, at the extreme eastern end opposite the Maladetta, is 7930 feet in height; the Port de Gavarnie at the extreme western end is 7481. These two form the chief thoroughfares over this high and difficult bit; that of Gavarnie, upon the French side, is being prepared for wheeled traffic. The third, the Port de Pinède, also misses the 8000 foot line, but only misses it by 25 feet. All the other passes are but slight depressions in this barrier of cliff. The Tillon or rather the passage to the side of it, is little under 10,000 feet, the Pla Laube is over 8000, so is the Marcadou, so is the better known and more used pass of Bielsa, while the Port d’Oo is 9846, and the Portillon d’O is 9987.
The impression conveyed by this long line, the only line in the Pyrenees where even small glaciers may be found, is of an impassable sheer height, just notched enough at one point on the west to admit a painful scramble into the valley of the Gave d’Pau and on the east to admit one into the Valley of the Lys (into the basin of the Adour, that is) at one end, and into the basin of Garonne at the other.
A journey through Sobrarbe can be undertaken either from Sallent and Panticosa or from Gavarnie, and in either case your exploration of high Sobrarbe begins at the hamlet of Bujaruelo, which the French call Boucharo.
How to reach Bujaruelo from Gavarnie I shall describe later: for the moment I propose a start on the Spanish side.
If you start from the Spanish side at Panticosa, a plain path takes you up the valley of the Caldares until you are right under the frontier ridge. There the path bifurcates; you take the right-hand branch along the chain of lakes that lies just under the wall of the main ridge, and you climb slowly up to the path at the head of it. The whole climb from Panticosa to this pass is 3040 feet, and it will take you from early morning until noon. Or, if you will start before a summer dawn, at any rate until the heat of the morning. For though it looks so short a distance on the map, and though there is no difficult passage, it is very hard going. The reason I mention this matter of hours is that when you have got down the other side into the valley of the Ara, you are still 8 miles by the mule path from Bujaruelo, and though it is all downhill, you will hardly do these 8 miles under two hours and a half; however early you start, therefore, the back of the day is likely to be broken by the time you come to Bujaruelo. Once there a new difficulty arises; for Bujaruelo is not a pleasant place to sleep in. I have not myself slept there, but the verdict is universal. Though you are coming from a Spanish town the Customs may bother you at this hamlet because they cannot tell but that you have come over some one of the high passages from France, such as the Pla Laube up the valley. At any rate, unless you are going to camp out you must push on to Torla, 5 miles on down the valley, and you will pass through a great gorge on your way. Now at Torla the hospitality, though large and vague, is good enough.
If, however, you are taking the Upper Sobrarbe with the idea of camping, you must not go on to Torla, but you must do as follows. Just at the far end of the gorge of which I have spoken the path crosses the river Ara by a bridge called the Bridge of the Men of Navarre. There you will see a path leaving yours to the left, and zigzagging up the mountain side eastward. This is the one you must take. It climbs 600 feet, gets you round the cascade which here pours into the Ara from a lateral valley, and finally puts you on to the level floor of that lateral valley: it is called the valley of Arazas. Here there is excellent camping ground everywhere, and it will be high time to look for a camp by the time you are well upon the floor of that gorge; you may have to go up some little way to find wood, but much of this valley in its higher part is clothed with forests. The next day you must, as best you can, force your way to Bielsa, and unless the weather is fine you may very possibly have to sleep another night upon the mountain.
The trouble of this difficult bit is the great height of the lateral ridges. At the end of this fine valley of Arazas, which curves slowly up northward as you go, is the huge mass of the Mont Perdu, and you cannot get out of the valley without going over the shoulder of it. In order to do this proceed as follows, and go along the stream until the path crosses over from the northern to the southern bank, at a place where the cliffs on either side come very close to the water. The path goes along under and partially upon the face of these cliffs in a perilous sort of way, until it comes to a lateral streamlet pouring right down the side of the terminal mountain. This lateral streamlet you must be sure to recognize, for upon your recognizing it depends the success of your adventure; and you may know it thus: The place where your path strikes it, is exactly 1000 yards from the place where you crossed the main stream. When you come to this lateral streamlet you will see, or should see, a transverse path running very nearly due east and west; and up that in an eastward direction, immediately above you, a distance of 800 yards, upon the shoulder of the great mountain is the depression for which the path makes. It is called the Col de Gaulis.
For all of this by the way you will do well to consult Schrader the whole time. What the going is like on the further side of this col I cannot tell for I have never come down it, but I know that your way descends right by a very short and steep gully in which a torrent makes straight for the valley beneath, and I know that when you have made that valley your troubles are over.
You fall through a descent of just under 2000 feet in a distance of less than a mile as the crow flies. You must therefore be prepared for a very steep bit of work. Once in the valley, however, everything is straightforward. On reaching the main stream of this new valley (which runs north and south) you turn to the right, southward, and follow its right bank between it and the cliff; you cross a rivulet flowing from a deep lateral ravine about a mile further on, and less than half a mile further again see a new path leaving your path and going to your left, crossing over the valley and its stream, and making up a gulley which comes down facing you from the opposing heights. Take this new path up this gulley (the path runs everywhere to the south of the water), and you will find yourself after a climb of somewhat over a 1000 feet on the Col d’Escuain. Thence the way is perfectly clear, running due south-east for 5 miles, just above the edge of the cliffs of the gorge of Escuain, until you reach the village of Escuain perched above that ravine.
Whatever efforts you may have made, and however early you may have started, you will hardly have reached human beings again at this place until, as at Bujaruelo the day before, the back of the day is broken. Nevertheless, unless you are to camp out again upon the mountain, you must try and push on to Bielsa. It is more than 10 miles, however much you cut off the windings of the path, which takes you past the chapel of San Pablo, leaving the village of Rivella on the left up the mountain side, then across a steep cliff down to the profound gorge of the Cinca; from there an unmistakable road goes through Salinas de Sin and follows straight on up the valley to Bielsa just 4 miles further on.
If you can do that in one day you will have done well.
There is another and shorter crossing, which, though it is invariably used by the mountaineers, I have not described because most people unused to the Pyrenees would shirk it. When you have come down from the Col de Gaulis into the valley below, if instead of going southward to the right you go northward to the left, crossing the stream, and climbing up on the further side of it, the path takes you at last to a very high col, called in Spanish the Col of Anisclo, but in French, the Col of Anicle. This col is not far short of 9000 feet high, and it is particularly painful to have to attempt it just after the difficult business of the Col de Gaulis. It means two ports within a few hours of each other, the second one 3000 feet above the valley, and what that is in the way of fatigue, a man must go through in order to know. Moreover, the descent on the far side from the Col of Anisclo is exceedingly steep.
However, if you do this short cut you have the advantage of finding yourself at once in the main valley of the Cinca and, when once you are on the banks of that river, you are not more than 8 miles or so from Bielsa by a good path leading all the way down the stream on the left bank. You save in this way quite 6 miles, and reduce your whole journey from the mouth of the valley of Arazas to Bielsa to a little less than 20 miles.
The distance you have to go before you come to human beings is much the same by either track. Escuain is just about as far from the Col de Gaulis, as is Las Cortez, the first hamlet in the Cinca valley. Again, by this shorter way you miss the gorge of the Escuain, but you see the huge cliffs of Pinède, which are perhaps the finest wall in the Pyrenees with their summits along the crest of 9000 feet, 5000 feet or more above the stream at their feet: it is the edge of this ridge of cliff which must be crossed at the Col of Anisclo. Either way therefore is as fine and either as deserted as the other. But the second much shorter and far more painful.
Before I leave this passage between the first and second of the Sobrarbe valleys—between the valley of Broto, that is (as they call the valley of the river Ara) and the valley of the Cinca—a few notes on the road should be added.
First, I have said that Torla, Bujaruelo (Boucharo) may be made from Gavarnie as well as from Panticosa. This is so; and if you undertake the exploration of Sobrarbe from Gavarnie, it is a much easier business to get to Bujaruelo from the French hamlet, than it is to get to it from Panticosa.
The excellent road from Gavarnie to the top of the port is a very small matter, and from there down into Bujaruelo is an easy descent of three miles. If you start from Gavarnie, therefore, in the early morning, you can with an effort and in good weather go the whole length of the Val d’Arazas, over the Col de Gaulis, and the Col of Anisclo and sleep in Bielsa that same night, or you can, taking it more easily, make a camp at the head of the Val d’Arazas, or you can break your journey in the valley between the two Cols of Gaulis and Anisclo, camping there for the night; I am told the camping ground in this gorge is not very good, otherwise that would be the ideal place to break your journey.
You may next remark that in the lower part of the Val d’Arazas, right on the path, there is a good inn, which will save your camping out in the valley at all, if you are not so inclined; but the inn is so far down the valley that it does not save you very much in the next day’s walk. Further, you should note that all this group of valleys, the Arazas, the Pinède (which is that through which the Cinca flows), the Velos, which is the stream at the foot of the Col de Gaulis, the Escuain, etc., are, unlike most others in the Pyrenees, true ravines. They correspond to what Western Americans mean when they use the Spanish word Cañons, that is clefts sunk deep into the stuff of the world and bounded by precipices upon either side. These not only make the whole district a striking exception in the Pyrenean range, but also make the finding of and keeping to a path necessary as it is throughout the Pyrenees, more necessary here than anywhere else. If, for instance, you lose the path at the head of the Arazas, where it goes up the cliffs, you will never make the Col de Gaulis though it is less than a mile away, and if you miss the path up to the Col of Anisclo you can never get down into the Pinède at all.
It is worth remembering that from the foot of the Col de Gaulis a path of sorts leads up the flank of the mountain to the Spanish side of the Brèche de Roland. I have never followed it, but I believe it to be an easier approach than that over the glacier upon the French side.
Once you are at Bielsa on the Cinca, you are in the centre and, as it were, in the geographical capital of the high Sobrarbe and it is your next business to go on eastward into the last valley, that of the Esera, the central town of which is Venasque. Between the upper part of these two valleys and right between these two towns lies the great mass of the Posets, a huge mountain which lifts up in a confused way like an Atlantic wave and is within a very few feet of being the highest in the Pyrenees. It is a mountain which, though it is not remarkable for precipices or for any striking sky line, should by no means be crossed (though it can easily be ascended), but must be turned.
The straight line from Bielsa to Venasque lies slightly south of east and is but 15 miles in length, but it runs right over the mass of the Posets and crosses that jumble of hills only a couple of miles south of the culminating peak. Venasque must therefore be reached by a divergence one way or the other, and one approaches it from Bielsa by going either to the north or to the south of the mountain group of the Posets. The northern way is a trifle shorter but much more difficult and much more lonely. On the other hand, it takes one into the very heart of the highest Pyrenees, right under the least known and the most absolute part of the barrier which they make between France and Spain. I will therefore describe this northern way first, as I think most travellers who desire an acquaintance with the hills will take it.
From Bielsa a path going eastward crosses the Barrosa (at the confluence of which with the Cinca Bielsa is built), runs round the flank of the mountain and goes right up to the Col of the Cross “De La Cruz,” 4000 feet above the town. You may know this pass, if you have a compass, by observing that it is due east of Bielsa. To be accurate, the dead line east and west from the top of the Col exactly strikes the northernmost houses of the town.
The eastern descent of the Col is quite easy and once down upon the banks of the Cinqueta, you see, half a mile to the north of you, the hospital or refuge of Gistain. From that point you follow up the valley north-eastward, on the right or northern bank of the stream under a steep hill-side for a couple of miles until you come to a fairly open place where the two upper forks of the Cinqueta meet. You cross the northern fork and go on eastward and northward up the eastern one, still keeping at the foot of the northern hill-side.
What follows is not very easy to describe and should be carefully noted. What you have to pick out is a particular col on the opposite slope beyond the stream. This col is three miles or so from the fork, five from the Refuge, and is called “the Col de Gistain.” As you go up this valley the opposing side is formed of the buttresses of the Posets. From that mountain four torrents descend to join the east fork of the Cinqueta, between the place where you crossed and the col you are seeking. The first torrent falls into the valley which you are climbing half a mile or so after you have crossed the north fork and begun the new valley; a second comes in about a thousand yards further on, a third about a mile further yet, and you may see each of them coming into the stream at your feet from down the opposing side, which consists, as I have said, in the buttresses of the Posets.
Another way of recognizing these three torrents (and it is essential to recognize them) is to note that between the first and the second the slope is not violent, while between the second and the third it is a rocky ridge.
When you have seen the third come in, you must watch exactly a mile further on for the entry of the fourth. This fourth one is your mark by which to find the col. Just after passing in front of the mouth of this fourth torrent, your path, such as it is, will cross the Cinqueta, turn sharply eastward, and begin to climb up the right or northern bank of this fourth torrent.
The ascent is not steep, and in 1500 yards you are on the Col de Gistain between 8200 and 8300 feet above the sea, and almost exactly 3000 feet above the spot where you left the north fork of the Cinqueta to follow the eastern valley. Another way of making certain that you do not miss the all-important turning is to count the torrents coming in upon your side, the north side, of the valley; that is the torrents, each coming in from its own ravine, which your path crosses.
They also are three in number and fairly equidistant one from another, the first about a mile after you have crossed the north fork, the next a mile further on, and the next just under a mile beyond that. It is after you have crossed the third and have proceeded another 500 or 600 yards that your path to the Col de Gistain will go off opposite to the right, crossing the stream at your feet, and following the torrent that falls from that opposing side.
Yet another way of making sure is to watch (if the weather is fine) for the col itself, an unmistakable notch with a ridge of sharp rock just to the north of it and a less abrupt arète going south of it up to the summit of the Posets.
I have written at this length of the passage not only from the difficulty of discovering, but also from the danger that will attend any delay in finding it. If you go on past the turning where the path to the col goes off eastward you may get over the wrong port on to the French side, miles from anywhere, or you may take the rocks of the Anes Cruces and find yourself on a ridge beyond which there is no going down either way; while if you turn off too early you may climb right up on to the glacier of the Posets, and lose a day and be compelled to pass a night in that frost.
Once you have got to the top of the Col de Gistain, however, you are free. All the running water below you leads you down into the valley of Venasque; there is no steepness and no difficulty. The rudimentary path follows the stream, there is a little cabane on the upper waters of it, soon the floor of the valley widens out a trifle, and four miles on, not quite 3000 feet below the pass, is another cabane; that of the Turmo. The path from this point becomes more definite; it crosses the stream 2 miles down in order to avoid rocks upon the southern side, recrosses it again a mile later to negotiate a steep and narrow gorge, it comes over once again to the northern side by a bridge a few hundred yards further on, and almost immediately reaches the valley of the Esera at a point 9 miles or so from the summit of the pass. Here an ancient and remarkable bridge, the Bridge of Cuberre, crosses the Esera, and enables you to gain the wide mule track to Venasque, which town lies rather more than 2 miles down the road.
It will be seen that the whole difficulty of this passage lies in making certain of the Col de Gistain.
If I have exaggerated that difficulty I have fallen into an error on the right side, for to miss the col is to fail altogether and possibly to be in danger. If those who have approached the Col de Gistain from the east, or who have only seen the place in clear weather, imagine it to be discoverable under all circumstances, they are in error; indeed, if the weather is bad, it is just as well not to attempt the passage at all.
This northern way from Bielsa to Venasque is, as I have said, the most difficult. The southern way is as follows.
You go down the gorge to the Cinca by the road to Salinas de Sin, there the road branches, the main part goes on down the Cinca, the side road goes sharply off to the left up the first affluent of the Cinca, a lateral valley which points south-east, and is that of the Cinqueta. This road crosses the Cinca, follows the eastern or right bank of the lateral stream for some two-thirds of a mile, then crosses over and in about 3 miles from the crossing reaches the hamlet of Sarabillo. Thence it proceeds, still upon the same side of the stream and facing a considerable cliff upon the further bank, to the village of El Plan, which lies somewhat less than 5 miles up from Sarabillo, and is reached by crossing the stream again just before one comes to the village.
At El Plan one may repose. One will have walked by the mule paths more than 12 miles, and there is a long way before one.
The main path goes on to the next village, that of St. Juan, and so up the Cinqueta to the hospital of Gistain, where it joins the northern route we have just been tracing. The southern way, which I am now describing, is by a path leaving El Plan at the end of the village and going down to the river (which here runs through a broad valley floor), across the river by a bridge, and then up the torrent valley of the Sentina, a little south of east. The path runs on the right or northern bank of this torrent, and any path or tracks to be seen crossing the water are not to your purpose. Keep always to the same side of the stream until you come to the col, which is more than 4 but less than 5 miles from El Plan and is called the Col de Sahun. From this col the path continues a little less clearly marked, but quite easy, down the sharp valley on the further side to the village of Sahun, which lies exactly due east of the col and just over 3 miles from it. The whole passage, therefore, from El Plan to Sahun, is a matter of not more than two hours, and from Sahun to Venasque there is an excellent mule road following up the open valley of the Esera; a distance of just 4 miles.
By this southern approach the whole distance is but a plain walk of under 20 miles with only one low and easy col to climb, but of course it tells you far less of what the Pyrenees can be than does the northern passage.
With the valley of the Esera and the town of Venasque you have come to the end of Sobrarbe, and of all that remote and ill-known district which is the most savage and the most alluring in these great hills. Indeed, you are no longer properly in the Sobrarbe, but rather in the subdivision of Ribagorza, which had a Count to itself in the Middle Ages, and was the march between Aragon and Catalonia. From Venasque you can get back again at your ease next day, by one of the best known mule tracks in the Pyrenees, to the French valleys and to wealth again at Luchon.
IV. The Tarbes Valleys and Luchon
Three valleys, two profound, one shallow, depend upon and radiate from the town of Tarbes which stands in the plain below the mountains. Their rail system and their road system converge upon Tarbes, and it is from Tarbes that they should be explored.
The two long valleys are the valley of Lourdes, down which flows the Gave de Pau and the long valley of Arreau or Val d’Aure (it is the longest enclosed valley of the Pyrenees). The short valley is the valley of Bigorre, wherein the Adour arises.
For a man on foot these three valleys are of interest chiefly in their highest portions alone. The energy of French civilization has penetrated them everywhere with light railways and with roads, and has united them all three by a great lateral road running from Arreau to Luz over what used to be the difficult and ill-known port of Tourmalet; while it has thus done a great deal for those who only use the road, it has hurt the district from the point of view which I am taking in this division of my book.
There is indeed one great hill which no development of roads can effect, and which is the chief interest of all these three valleys for the man on foot. It rises in the very centre of the district and is called the Pic du Midi de Begorre. This peak stands thrust forward from the main range, a matter of more than 10 miles from the watershed, and isolated upon every side save where the isthmus of the Tourmalet binds it to the general system not much more than 2000 feet below its summit. But the Pic du Midi de Begorre, fine as it is, does not afford so many opportunities to the man exploring the Pyrenees on foot as do other peaks. It is a bare mountain, all precipice upon the northern side, and steep every way. There is no camping ground save at the foot of it in the little wood above Abay. Moreover, there is a road right up it, an observatory upon the top, and arrangements for sleeping and for eating and drinking as well. No other of the great mountains of Europe have been put more thoroughly in harness. The chief use of it (for the purposes of this book) is that from its summit you will get a better general view of the eastern Pyrenees than from any other point reached with equal ease, and that you can see in one view, as you look southward, the Maladetta on your extreme left, the Pic du Midi d’Ossau on your extreme right, each about 30 to 40 miles away. It is also a point from which the sharp demarcation between the mountain and the plain, which characterizes the northern slope of the Pyrenees, is very clear; for this peak, jutting out as it does from the mass of the hills, dominates all the flat country beneath.
The roads of these three valleys are somewhat overrun—even in their upper portions. That from the end of the light railway from Luz to Gavarnie, is, in the summer, the only really spoilt piece of the Pyrenees; that from Arreau up to Vielle Aure in the furthest valley is less frequented, but there is no particular reason for stopping in it or for camping in it, especially when one considers the waste spaces on either side, where one may be wholly remote and at peace. There is, however, in one branch of this valley, that is in the gulley which runs due south from Trainzaygues, a good camping ground of woods and stream. A road runs up it to the refuge of Riomajou at its summit, and from this two difficult cols can be reached by two branch paths which go over either shoulder of the Pic d’Ourdissettou, that on the right or west gets one down to Real and Bielsa; that on the left ultimately and with some difficulty to Gistain and El Plan. There is also an entry from the main valley into the Sobrarbe, going up the main valley through Aragnouet, and up the very steep pass called the Pass de Barroude; one also comes out by this way on to Real and Bielsa, but it is by the other fork of the Spanish valley.
The pass called the Port de Bielsa proper marks what was once perhaps the main pass north and south over these hills. It leaves the valley at Leplan above Aragnouet and stands between the two passes just mentioned. These and all the difficult ports, springing from the three valleys of Tarbes and crossing the central part of the range, lead one into the Sobrarbe and the track described in the last division of this chapter.
The valley of Arreau has an eastern fork following the Louron at the head of which are further high passes, all in the neighbourhood of 8000 feet, which lead one into the Posets group and the eastern end of Sobrarbe. Of these the most interesting is the port of Aiguestoites, which is that upon which one comes by error if one misses the Col de Gistain on the northern way from Bielsa to Venasque.
The Cirques—the great semicircles of precipices—which have always been remarked as distinctive of the Pyrenees, are crowded in this region. The Cirque de Gavarnie is the most famous, and therefore, in our time at least, impossible for a man who really wants to wander. You cannot be alone there; but the Cirque of Troumouse is not hackneyed and should be seen once at least. You may reach it by taking the road up from Luz to Gavarnie, and following it as far as Jedre. Here the Gave branches, you go up the zigzag of the road, past the church of Jedre, and take the path which leaves the highway to the left and follows up the eastern Gave, or Gave de Heas on its left bank. The path crosses that stream 2 miles further on and follows up the right bank to the little hamlet of Heas (which gives the torrent its name). It continues getting less distinct past the chapel of Heas; you turn a corner of a rock and find yourself in this huge, bare, deserted circle of precipices with the Pic de Gerbats at the left end of it, the Pic of Gabediou at the east end, and in the midst the highest point, the Pic d’Arrouye, which just misses 10,000 feet. The path continued will take you up past some cabanes over the little glacier, and across that steep and very difficult ridge down into the Spanish valley of Pinède—which ends up, of course, in Bielsa.
But for these ramifications of their higher ravines, the three valleys of Tarbes are the least suitable for a man travelling on foot; of the three, however, the Val d’Aure will afford the most variety and the most isolation.
If, for any reason, one of these three valleys is chosen for a short holiday, Tarbes—where there is a good hotel, The Ambassadeurs—is the centre from which one should start and to which one should return; it faces right at the mountains, it is the most truly Pyrenean town of all the plain, and it is full of excellent entertainment. From Tarbes also start the three lines which take you up each valley, to Argelès, to Bagnères de Bigorre, and to Arreau.
Luchon
The valley of Luchon stands by itself as a separate division of the Pyrenees. It has character altogether its own, formed both by political accidents, which separate it from its twin valley of the Upper Garonne—the Val d’Aran—and by its physical conformation which thrusts the level floor of it up further into the hills than any other of the Pyrenean gorges. It is indeed made by nature to be one of the great international roads of Europe and to lead into Spain, for it resembles in many ways the trench running from Oloron southwards along which the main Roman road, and the main modern road find their way into Aragon. The valley of Luchon would undoubtedly have formed the platform for such a road had not two accidents interfered with that destiny: the first, the great height of the ridge at the end of this particular valley; the second, the lack of open country to the south.
The Roman road from Oloron over the Somport finds a wide plain and an ancient city at Jaca, within a day’s journey of the central summit. But the valley of the Esera (which is the Spanish valley corresponding to that of Luchon) is a good three days’ travel in length before it gets one out of the hills, and the first town of the plains on the Spanish side (the modern symbol of whose importance is the presence of the railway) is Barbastro 60 miles in a straight line from the watershed, and not far short of 90 following the turns of the mule path and lower down the road which reaches it.
But for these accidents the way through Luchon would undoubtedly be the great avenue from Toulouse to Saragossa, and even as it is the pass over the ridge here (called the Port de Venasque) is the most trodden and the clearest of all the passes, other than those followed by direct highways.
The valley of Luchon is the very centre of the mountain system, for it lies just east of that division between the two halves of the mountains, the eastern and the western chains. It is a frontier also between two types of scenery and two kinds of travel. It is the last of the deep flat valleys running north and south, which are, so far eastward, the characteristic of the chain. Immediately beyond it, to the east, begins a combination of hills of which St. Girons is the capital, and into which still further east penetrate the much larger valleys of the Ariège and of the Tet.
The Thermal Springs of Luchon, and a chance popularity which made it the wealthiest holiday place in all the mountains, have now fixed it as a sort of central spot which sums up all travel in the Pyrenees. For nearly a century it has had the character, which continually increases in it, of great luxury, and of a colony, as it were, of the main towns of Europe. But, for reasons which I mention when I come to speak of inns and hotels in these mountains, it is in some way saved from the odiousness which most cosmopolitan holiday places radiate around them like an evil smell. The influence of Paris is in some part responsible for better manners and greater dignity than such tourist places usually show.
The little town is very old; it is probably the site of the Baths which were mentioned as the most famous of the Pyrenean waters as early as the first century, and which certainly stood in this country of Comminges. For Luchon is the modern centre of the Comminges, and the Comminges is first historical district of the Pyrenees west of the old Roman province.
For a man travelling on foot in the Pyrenees the chief value of Luchon lies in its being the only rail-head which lies close against the highest peaks. Here one can have one’s letters sent and one’s luggage, and to this place one can always return from the wildest parts of the Sobrarbe, or of Catalonia, which lie on either hand just to the south-west and south-east. It is also the best place in the whole range in which to change English money.
The valley, though it has great historical interest (and everybody who has the leisure should see St. Bertrand at the mouth of it), has, like those valleys to the west of it which have just been mentioned, little to arrest a man on foot, except in its last high reach. The ridge which runs north for 12 miles beyond Luchon and lies west of the railway, is high and densely wooded; but it is not good camping ground and it leads nowhere, while that to the east, less steep and not quite so densely wooded, has but one large field for camping, the forest of Marignac; and even in Marignac there is nothing but the wood to attract one. Once through the wood one is back again upon a high road and the valley of the Garonne.
Above Luchon, however, there spread out a number of valleys which are worthy of exploration in themselves, and one of which is the main way over into Spain. For this last we must continue the high road (which follows up the Pique, the river that waters all the Luchon district) until one comes, at the end of the causeway, to the hotel that was formerly a hospice, and is still called by that name. From this point a steep path takes one 3000 feet right up to the main ridge and to the little notch in the rock which is called the Port de Venasque. The path, though not so clear, is equally easy on the other side, bringing one down into the valley of the Esera and to the town of Venasque in the Sobrarbe. The whole way from Luchon to Venasque, counting this steep ridge, is one day’s easy going. There is no way across the central range more simple or less difficult (though it is high), and it has very fine views; as one crosses the summit one has right before one culminating peaks of the Pyrenees, the group of the Maladetta.
Just to the east of the Port de Venasque (which is about 8000 feet high—to be accurate, 7930) is the Pic de Sauvegarde, a path which is almost a road leads up to it; one pays a toll; it is a sort of Piccadilly. The one purpose of the climb is to see from the summit a very good all-round view of the high peaks, which crowd round this turning point in the chain.
A less frequented valley, but one quite sufficiently frequented, is that of the Lys, which one turns into out of the main road by going off to the right; about 2½ miles after leaving Luchon, a carriage road, 4 miles in length, takes one up through the woods at Lys to an inn; thence forward in the lovely valley and the half circle of peaks above, there is country wild enough for every one, but no good camping ground.
A further experiment for the man on foot, and one in which he will be more dependent upon himself and less in fear of invasion, is that of the Val Dastan, by which, and the high Port d’Oo, one can get down to Venasque. For this valley one goes up the new lateral road from Luchon as though one were going into the Val d’Aure and to Arreau. One may leave the road at any point after St. Aventin to follow the stream below, but it is best to go on to a village called Gari, which is somewhat more than 5 miles from Luchon. At Gari is a road going south along a valley; you follow that valley still going southward, till the road comes to an end in the neighbourhood of a wood which bars the upper end of the vale. A path, however, continues the line of the road, makes its way through the wood, and at the upper end of it you come out upon a fine lake. There is an inn to the south of this lake, and if you will go on a little north of the inn along the shores of the lake you will find very good camping ground. Indeed, it is wise to camp over-night on this side of the range, for the climb up from Luchon is fatiguing, and the country of a sort inviting one to rest and look about one.
Rejoining the path it passes between two small lakes, just after leaving the wood, and climbs up the torrent past the little tarn called the Lac Glacé, immediately above which is the Port d’Oo. This port is a very high one, it falls little short of 9000 feet, and it is not more than a depression in the ridge around. On the further side a steep scramble marked by no path, gets one down into the valley beneath the Posets, and this valley is the same as that which I have described as lying to the east of the Col de Gistain and leading to the Bridge of Cuberre, and so to Venasque. It is a long and difficult way round to that town from Luchon by the Port d’Oo, but it is the wildest and therefore the best excursion one can make in the circuit of these hills.
I should mention before I leave this district that curious plain, Des Etangs “Of the Lakes,” where is the Trou du Toro, a small circular pond.
The main source of the Garonne lies high up as befits the dignity of such a river in among the very noblest peaks of the Pyrenees; it springs from the eastern point of the Maladetta, flows down in a torrent to this plain “Of the Lakes,” plunges into the little pond, and there wholly disappears! It reappears 2000 feet down at the Goueil de Jeou, on the northern side of the mountains, having burrowed right under the main range, and so runs down to Las Bordas. Sceptics to whom all in these bewitched mountains is abhorrent, from the realities of Lourdes to the legends of Charlemagne, annoyed by this miraculous action on the part of the Garonne, poured heavy dyes into the Trou du Toro, and then went and watched anxiously at Goueil de Jeou to see the coloured stream emerge; but the Garonne was too dignified to oblige them, and the water came out limpid and pure; as for the dye, it has stuck somewhere underground in the hills, and is colouring rocks that will never be seen until the consummation of all things at the end of the world.
V. Andorra and the Catalan Valleys
One may consider together Andorra in the Spanish valley of the Segre, the upper valley of the Noguera Pallaresa and Val d’Aran, for the journey through Andorra down to Seo, thence up out of the valley of the Segre into that of the Noguera, and so over to the Upper Garonne, makes one round, in which one covers one whole district of the Pyrenees, all Catalan.
There are two ways by which the curious country of Andorra can be reached from the north; both ultimately depend upon the valley of the Ariège.
The first shortest and most difficult way is by the vale of the Aston, a tributary of the Ariège which comes down a lateral valley and falls in near the railway station of Cabanes as the line from Foix to Ax; the second and easier way is by climbing to the sources of the Ariège itself, the main river, and over the Embalire.
As to the first—all the spreading rocky valleys which combine to feed the river Aston, form together a district of the very best for those who propose to explore but one corner of the Pyrenees during a short holiday. Even if such a traveller be unable or do not choose to force one of the entries into Andorra, he will have found on the Aston a country in which a man may camp and fish and climb anywhere, with a sense of liberty quite unknown in this kingdom. Here are half a dozen or more little lakes, deep forests, occasional cabanes, good shelter, good bits of rock for such as like the risk, and outlines and distances of the most astonishing kind, and no landlords. Of the many high valleys I have seen in the world, there is none less earthly than the last high reaches of the torrent which runs between the Pic de la Cabillere and the Pic de la Coumette, and which is the chief source of the Aston. The whole basin of this river includes six main streams, and, of course, many smaller torrents feeding these and the names of the peaks alone discover their desertion and the mixture of fear and attraction which they have had for the shepherds of these highland places. You may spend a week or a month or a whole summer in the neighbourhood and never come on this enchanted pocket which is bounded on the frontier by the high ridge running from the “silver fountain,” the Fontargente, with its high peak and chain of lakes.
The Aston has at its sources, cutting them off from Spain, a ridge of 8000 to 9000 feet, it is a ridge the passes of which are but slight notches between the higher rocks.
The ways into Andorra across this ridge from the Upper Aston are as numerous as these notches are, and nearly every notch can be climbed with knowledge and patience, but the only parts where something of a track exists are the Fontargente on the east, and the Peyregrils on the west. It is easy enough to fail at either, and there is therefore merit and sport enough in succeeding at either.
For the Peyregrils you must start from Cabanes and follow up the main stream of the Aston, by a clear path through the forest, taking with you the 1/100,000 map as a guide. A little after a point where a bridge is thrown over the river (called the Bridge of Coidenes), the two main streams of the Aston meet, one is seen flowing down from the south-east by the wooded gorge before one as one climbs, the other comes in cascades down a steep gully, pointing directly north and south. It is this gully which must be taken for the Peyregrils. One goes up over a steep rock still in the thick of the wood. On the far side of it one comes out into open grass country, and has one’s first sight of the main range. The path comes down again to the stream, having turned the cascade, crosses the stream and flows along its right or eastern bank between the water and a range of cliffs which are those of the Pic du Col de Gas. About a mile from this crossing of the stream, as one goes on southward with a little west in one’s direction, one comes to a side torrent falling in from the left; the path crosses this torrent, and still continues up the right bank of the main stream. It is a difficult point—for the path appears to bifurcate, and by taking the left-hand branch, as I did four years ago, one may lose oneself in the empty valley under the Cabillere and be cut off for two days as I was, or for ever, as I was not. It is by making these easy mistakes that men do get cut off, and you may be certain that people who are found dead in the mountains under small precipices, are not, as the newspapers say, killed by some accident, but by exhaustion. They have wandered in a mist, or have been lost in some other fashion, until privation so weakens them that they no longer have a foothold; and in general, the great danger of mountains is not a danger of falling, but of getting cut off from men. Here, as in many other difficulties of this kind, your compass will save you; for if you find you are going more and more to the east, you are on the wrong path. The right one goes south by west along the left bank of the stream. There is a broad jasse or pasture which one traverses in all its length, one crosses another torrent coming in from a rocky gorge upon the left, the torrent and the path together turn more and more westward until one’s general direction is due west, and at last one comes up against steep cliffs which are those of the Etang Blanc.
Thence, the way is plain, for the stream receives no further affluents and there is therefore no ambiguity of direction. The path follows the stream round a corner of rock whence one can see a tarn called the Etang de Soulauet, lying immediately under the watershed, and from that tarn the traveller goes straight up for 500 yards or so over the crest, straight down the steep further side, and finds at the bottom of the valley the stream called Rialb: such is the passage called the Peyregrils.
Once one is down on the banks of the Rialb, one has but to follow the trail which runs along the bank of that stream, cross it, reach the hamlet of Serrat, and so follow the broadening water to the little town of Ordino; four miles beyond is Andorra the Old. The whole distance from the pass to Andorra is somewhat over 12 miles, counting all the windings of the way. On this, as on so many crossings of the Pyrenees, the difficulty is wholly on the French side, once on the Spanish the broader valleys lead one without difficulty down one’s way.
The other entry into Andorra from the valley of the Aston, that by the Fontargente, is managed thus:—
When the Aston divides just after the bridge, one takes the south-eastern fork, one crosses the bridge and finds a clear path going up the right bank of the main stream of the Aston through a wood. Four miles on this path brings one out of the wood, and for another 4 miles it goes on still following the same side of the stream in a direction which is at first east of south, and at last curls round due south. There is a bridge or two crossing to the other side, but one must not take them. One must keep close to the eastern or right bank of the Aston all the way until one comes to a place difficult to recognize, and yet the recognition of which is immediately essential to success. It is a jasse rather narrow and small, lying between a rocky ridge upon the left or east and a line of cliffs upon the right or west. Here are a few cabanes, and even if one has missed the place on first coming to it, it can be recognized from the fact, that, at the further end of this jasse, the two sources of the Aston meet in almost one straight line, making with the main stream one has been following, a shape like the letter “T.”
The path branches and takes either valley or arm of the “T”; it is that to the left or east down which one must turn—the one to the right or west leads nowhere but to the impassable cliffs and precipices of the Passade and the Cabillere. The eastern or right-hand path then must be followed in a direction just south of east for exactly 1 mile, during all of which it keeps to the north of the stream. At the end of that mile it crosses the stream, turns gradually round a high lump of rocky hill, going first south, then in a few yards south-west until it comes, at about a mile from the place where it crossed, upon the large tarn or small lake of Fontargente, “The Silver Water.” The port lies in view just above the lake not 500 yards off. Once over it, it is the same story as the Peyregrils, a trail following running water which leads one through the upper villages to Canillo, the first town, to Encamps, the second one, and so down to Andorra the Old. The distance from the main range to Andorra by this trail is 2 or 3 miles greater than by the Peyregrils.
These are the two difficult and mountain ways of making Andorra from the north.
The easier and much the commoner way is to approach it from the upper waters of the Ariège.
One takes the main road from Ax to Hospitalet up which there is a public carriage or “diligence”; it is as well to go on foot, for one will get to Hospitalet before the diligence if one starts at the dawn of a summer’s day, and it is important to get there early as there is no good sleeping place between the French side and the town of Andorra itself. At Hospitalet the main track for Andorra runs down in a few feet to the torrent of the Ariège, crosses it, and follows its left bank. It goes over the frontier which is here an artificial line, and though you are still on the French side of the range, you are politically in Andorra, upon this deserted grassy slope which forms the left bank of the Ariège.
At the second torrent which comes down this slope into the river—or rather the second stream, for they are quite small—the telegraph wire, which has hitherto followed the path, will be seen going over to the right, up a somewhat steep side valley. This is at a point about 4 miles from Hospitalet. You have but to follow that line if it is fine weather, and you will come right over the ridge and down on to the Spanish side of the Andorran hamlet, Saldeu. If it is misty on the heights you will almost certainly lose the line, and possibly your life as well. Nevertheless the crossing can be made even in bad weather by going somewhat further south to the point called the Port d’Embalire. To find this needs a certain care. Note with your compass the trend of the Ariège; it curves round more and more as you follow it, and when it begins to point due south (which it does after a perceptible bend) you may note a fairly plain track coming down from the opposite side of the valley: it comes down and strikes the Ariège at a spot almost exactly 2 miles from the place where the line of the telegraph left the stream. Here opposite the road turn sharp up away from the Ariège (which is now but a tiny brook) and go due west by your compass right up the mountain, which is here nothing but a steep grassy slope, and you will strike the Embalire.
It is one of the few crossings which can be made in any weather, because you will find upon that slope, a little way up, the beginnings of a made road; that road was never completed. It has never been metalled, but it is culverted and graded, and is as good a guide as the best highway in the Pyrenees could be. Probably it never will be finished, for the Andorrans are opposed to an easy entry into their country; but so long as its platform remains, one can never lose one’s way upon the Port d’Embalire. The further side is a steep and easy descent over a sort of down, and one finds Saldeu by this longer route about 4 miles from the summit. Whether one has followed the telegraph line or come over by the Embalire, the two tracks join at Saldeu, and the rest of the way is identical with that which you will come to by Fontargente, that is, through Canillo and Encamps to Andorra the Old.
Easy as the way is, however, it should be remembered that it is a long day from Ax, for counting every turning, it is not far short of 30 miles, and more than half of that is uphill. Ax stands at about 2000 to 2400 feet (according to the part of the steep town one measures from) and the summit of the Embalire is almost exactly 8000 feet. There is no break in the rise from one to the other.
The interest of Andorra lies in its survival, and the recognition it receives of being an Independent European State. All these enclosed valleys of the Pyrenees led a more or less independent life for centuries; from a decline of the Roman power until the union of Aragon and Castille on the Spanish side, and on the French side in some places, up to the Revolution itself, they boasted their own customs and could plead their own law.
The violent quarrel between Madrid and Aragon, in which the independence of Aragon was fiercely destroyed, affected the greater part of the Spanish valleys, and killed their independence; but it did not attack the Catalan valleys—of which Andorra was the most secluded and remote, and therefore Andorra survives.
One may study in Andorra what all these valleys were in the long period of local and natural growths between the very slow death of the Roman bureaucracy, and the rapid rise of the modern. The French, through the Prefect of the Ariège (as representing the Crown of France, which in its turn inherited from the county of Foix) claim a partial control over the Andorrans who pay to the Government in Paris £40 a year in fealty. The Spaniards have a hold on it through the Bishop of Urgel, who is not only their Ordinary but also their Civil Suzerain: he gets only £18 a year from the embattled farmers.
The Andorrans have all the vices and virtues of democracy clearly apparent. They are very well-to-do, a little hard, avaricious, courteous, fond of smuggling, and jealous of interference. Also in Andorra itself one great shop supplies their external needs, and conducts all their international exchanges. Catalan, a provincial dialect in Spain, is here the national language. They are divided, as are all Catholics, into Clericals and Anti-Clericals, the Clericals making, I believe, a working majority, and there is not among them, so far as one can see, a poor man or an oppressed one.
From Andorra the Old, a good open path leads through the narrow gates of the country, down on to the valley of the Segre, and so to Seo de Urgel.
Though it is but a few hours’ walk from Andorra to Urgel, it is as well to pass the remainder of the day and the night at Urgel, especially if it is the first Spanish town you have seen, as it is the first for many people who cross the mountains at this place. You will certainly find nothing more Spanish along the whole range. This lump of a town with its narrow oriental streets was the pivot of the Christian advance into Catalonia. The Carolingian armies came pouring through that easiest of the passes, the Cerdagne, enfranchised Urgel, first of all the Mozarabic Bishoprics, and may be said to have refounded its Christian existence. For some reason difficult to discover Urgel fossilized quite early in the Middle Ages. No line of travel, no road linked up the long valley of the Segre, the armies and the embassies of the French knew nothing of Lerida, and it is characteristic of Urgel to-day that even to-day there should be no great road beyond it up the valley.
From Urgel your road back into France through the upper valley of the Noguera Pallaresa, and the Val d’Aran is difficult to discover in its earlier part, unmistakable in the high mountains; which is the reverse of the rule usual in other crossings of the hills.
You must go down the high road which runs south of Urgel until you come, in something over a mile, to Ciudad, which is that hill-pile of white houses, once fortified, which rises over against the Cathedral city.
There you must ask the way to Castellbo, which is two or three hours away up a torrent bed, and you must go up this torrent bed by way of a road.
If you start early from Urgel you will be at Castellbo well before noon, and the hospitality of the place is so great that you will wish to stay there. There is only one drawback to eating at Castellbo which is that you have after it to make a passage of the mountains which, though here not very high, well wooded and fairly inhabitated, do not bring you to proper food and shelter until you have gone close on 20 miles and have reached Llavorsi in the further valley of the Noguera; and so, if you stop to eat your mid-day meal at Castellbo, it is quite on the cards that you will have to camp out in the hills and that you will not make Llavorsi until noon of the following day; for the col in between, though it is very easy, is higher above the sea than the Somport.
From Castellbo you have but to ask for the village of St. Croz, which is perched upon a height just up the same valley, but from there to the port the way is difficult to find for the very reason that there are no physical difficulties. It is all one long ridge of wooded grass like a down, with rather higher peaks to the right and to the left and with more than one indication of a path several directions. A good rule, however, for finding the exact place where you should cross, is to make for a spot due north-west from the village of St. Croz, and this spot is further distinguished by the fact that it is on the whole lowest upon the whole saddle. It is a mile and a quarter or a mile and a half from the village, and as you go to it over the easy grass you get a superb vision of the Sierra del Cadi barring your view of Catalonia and standing up against you much higher than ever it seemed from the floor of the Cerdagne. No hills in Europe look so marvellously high.
As the saddle of this port, which is called the port of St. John, is so long and easy it might seem indifferent at what point one crossed it; it is on the contrary very important to get the exact place and for this reason, that on the further or north-western side of it there is a profound ravine densely wooded, if one does not make the exact spot one has no path through this wood. That means hours of delay and one may very well come out upon the right instead of the left bank of the ravine; in which case in order to find the trail for Llavorsi at the bottom of the valley one may have a precipitous descent into the ravine and a bad climb out of it on the other side. Look, therefore, carefully for the path which begins to be clearly marked the moment the saddle is crossed, and follow down it until you come to a steep rock which overhangs the main stream at the bottom of the valley. This main stream is the Magdalena and runs not quite 2000 feet below the summit of the port. The trail is very distinct when once one has reached the valley; small villages are passed; it climbs up on the left bank to avoid a precipitous place and comes down to the water again at a place where the Magdalena falls into the main stream of the Noguera.
Here you must descend to the floor of the valley and take the road which is being made and which will in a few years form another great international highway up the valley of the Noguera. The road runs all the way on the left or eastern bank of the stream, which is broad and rapid and confined by very high steep hills upon either side. Three miles from the place where the path descended to the junction of the Magdalena and the Noguera, you will find another large river coming in. The road crosses by a wooden cantilever bridge where one pays a toll (I think of ½d.), and once across one is in the unpleasing village of Llavorsi.
The valley opens somewhat and is called Anéu, having on the left the exceedingly rugged and tangled chain of the Encantados, a wilderness of rocky peaks and lakes—and on the right a clear ridge which cuts off this country-side from the Val Cardos and the Val Farreira, both wild districts at whose summits is a bit of country as lonely as the Upper Aston.
All the way from Llavorsi up this Anéu valley the new road runs. I have not visited it for four years, and by this time it must be nearly finished, at any rate it is perfectly straight going and in all between 10 and 12 miles, with the exceedingly filthy village of Escaló about half-way.
It is not easy to give advice about sleeping in this walk from Urgel to Esterri. The distance between the two towns in a straight line is less than thirty miles, but the perpetual turning of the path makes it quite forty by the time one has reached Esterri, and what with the casting about for the right crossing on the port and the height of that crossing, it is too much for anyone to try and do in one day. Even if one were to sleep at Castellbo it would not mend matters much, for Castellbo is but a sixth of the distance, if that, and I would not recommend sleeping at Llavorsi. I have said that if one ate at Castellbo in the morning, it would mean camping out in the woods below the port of St. John and this is perhaps the best plan after all: to leave Urgel on the morning of one day, to camp in the deep woods above the Magdalena and to sleep at Esterri, on the night of the second day. There is a good inn at Esterri, where everything is comfortable and clean, and the whole place is more civilized than any other town or village in the Pallars.
The next day you will go over the Pass of Bonaigo into the Val d’Aran, unless you prefer the much less amusing walk by the new road up over the Port de Salau to St. Girons. It is less amusing because it gets you into France almost at once, whereas the walk into the Val d’Aran keeps you in Spain and shows you a very interesting geographical and political accident of the Pyrenees.
The town of the Val d’Aran is called Viella, and it lies 20 miles west by north of Esterri, between the two there is no obstacle but a high grassy saddle called the Port of Bonaigo the summit of which is exactly 3283 feet above the floor of the Noguera at Esterri, and the interest of which lies in this, that it stands right upon the junction of that “fault” which was mentioned in the first division of this book.
The Bonaigo is the exact centre of the Pyrenean system. On your left as you cross it, to the south that is, is the Saburedo, which is the last peak of the western branch. To your right upon the north the hills lift up to the Pic de l’Homme, which is the terminal peak of the eastern branch, and the ridge uniting these two branches runs in a serpentine fashion north and south with the saddle of the Bonaigo for its lowest point.
You will reach the summit, going easy from Esterri, in about three hours, and thence you will see, if the weather is clear, the distant snow of the Maladetta to the west, and in the vale at your feet, the first trickling of the Garonne. For by the twist the watershed here takes, you are crossing geographically from Spain into France, though the valley of the Garonne before you is still politically Spanish. The descent upon the Val d’Aran is somewhat steeper than the ascent from the Noguera, a path of sorts begins at the foot of it, and runs down the Garonne to the first hamlet, the name of which is Salardú. At Arties, a road begins, and 5 miles further on you come to Viella and to rest.
In Viella there is nothing but oddity to note: the oddity of a French valley governed by Spain. You are quite cut off, you will hear no news, and the only sign that you are on the north of the mountains will be the great and excellently engineered road leading down the Garonne from gorge to gorge and reaching at last the French frontier at a narrow gate where is the “King’s Bridge.” Some miles further on is the French railway-head at Marignac. An omnibus starts in the early morning from Viella at whatever hour it pleases and gets down to the French railway in time for the mid-day train, but whether you take it or walk down on foot, you had better stop at Bosost, not half-way down, and there take the whittle woodland road westward over the frontier by a very low gap called the Portillon and so saunter into Bagnères de Luchon, the noisy and wealthy capital of luxury. To come into Luchon suddenly after such a journey is as sharp a change as you can experience perhaps in all Europe. Do not forget before you reach Bosost to look up the gully which comes in from the left at a place called Las Bordas, some six or seven miles from Viella. This gully is that of the true Garonne, the fork of the river which we saw having such strange adventures rising on the wrong side of the main watershed of the mountains, burrowing right through them in a tunnel and coming out upon the northern side; surely the only river in the world which behaves in such a fashion.
The walk which I have just described will have shown you most thoroughly all the wild north-western corner of Catalonia, and have taught you Andorra as well. Whether you take Cabanes for your starting place, entering Andorra by the difficult passes of the Aston, or whether you take Ax for your starting place and enter by the easy pass of Embalire, you will not make the whole round to Luchon in the best weather under six days, and indeed a man who has but a week in which to begin to learn the Pyrenees, might very well choose this little square of them for his first introduction.
VI. Cerdagne
The Cerdagne forms a district quite separate from the rest of the Pyrenees. Its scenery differs from that of the rest of the range, its facilities for travel, its politics, everything in the place is different; and though both valleys are Catalan, it is well not to include in the same summary a description of the Cerdagne and a description of the Roussillon.
The Cerdagne is the only broad valley in the Pyrenees, and it is a broad valley held in by walls of high mountains. All the other trenches which nature has cut into the range, are, without exception, profound and narrow. They expand occasionally into enclosed circles of flat land, the floors of ancient lakes, with a circle of steep banks all around, first wooded, then rocky, and reaching almost to Heaven. But these solemn circuses of secluded land, held in by narrow gates at either end, and small compared with the rocks around them, have a totally different effect upon the mind from those produced by such a landscape as the Cerdagne. You here have a whole country-side as broad as a small English county might be, full of fields, and large enough to take abreast a whole series of market towns. This is the sort of plain, which, were it bounded by hills, rather low like our English downs, would seem a little country by itself: a place large enough to make up one of our European divisions, like the counties of England, or the minor provinces of France. A broad river valley, such as decides a score of places scattered over Western Europe, here binds many households all united historically and defines a corporate condition for a fixed community of men.
This picture is framed in two great lines of hills roughly parallel to each other, and the effect when one comes upon it out of the last of the narrow valleys, may be compared to the effect upon a child’s mind when he first sees the sea.
In order to perceive the full contrast of this exception in the Pyrenean group, it is best to approach it from the west; whether you are coming on foot over the foothills of the Carlitte groups down on to Mont Louis or Targasonne, or whether you are coming by the high road over the pass of Porté, there comes a point in your journey where, after so many gorges and narrow cliffs, the hills here suddenly cease at your feet and you see the whole sweep of the Cerdagne as broad as a field of corn; you will have seen nothing like it all your way from the first foot hills of the Basque and the shores of the Atlantic.
On the eastern side, beyond the plain, you see the long ridge which is among the highest of the Pyrenees, and which stands steeply out of the flat. It stretches, as it were, indefinitely away into Spain and was called for centuries by the Mohammedans, and still is, the Sierra del Cadi. At its feet are a group of villages and towns, Saillagouse, Odeillo, Bourg Madame, Puigcerdá (with its curious little isolated hill), Angoustrine, Palau, Osseja, Nahija, Err, and Caldegas, and that fascinating territory Llivia, which stands enclosed, making a little island of Spanish territory in the midst of French.
The structure of the Cerdagne explains its history. It is a slightly sloping shelf upon the Spanish side of the watershed, but the watershed here is not as it is everywhere else a steep ridge with rocks, it is a large imperceptible flat which, for the first few miles upon the northern side, slopes quite gently down towards the valley of the Tet, and on the south side slopes still more gently and easily away towards Spain. The Segre, the last and largest tributary of the Ebro, rises in this gentle plain in innumerable rivulets, which joins innumerable other rivulets at Llivia, and then receives the river of Val Carol, the river of Angoustrine, and the little river of Flavanara below Puigcerdá. There is in the whole extent of this plain no natural feature to form a frontier, and (as its upper waters form the only approach to the province of Roussillon) Mazarin, when the treaty of the Pyrenees submitted the Roussillon to the French Crown, claimed as a sort of right of way, the upper stretch of this wide plain.
The negotiations were not difficult, the frontier was drawn just so as to give the French Government everywhere the road down the Val Carol and up by Mont Louis to Perpignan. It was not the frontier between two civilizations or languages, the few square miles of the French Cerdagne, which is geographically Spanish, are Spanish also, Catalan Spanish, in customs, hours, architecture, and even cooking. It is Spanish in everything save the functions of government; and here you see just what differences government can and cannot make in a country-side. Government, where it exists against the will of the governed, effects nothing; but here there is no such friction, and you may compare the contented Cerdagne, which takes its orders from Paris, with the contented Cerdagne that takes them from Barcelona and Madrid. The subtle effect of the contrast is sufficiently striking; it is seen in the type of roadway, the paving of courtyards, in clocks that keep time upon one side and not upon the other, and in a certain hardness, which French assurance breeds, and which the Spanish ease avoids. It is a good plan as one enters the Cerdagne to take the by-road which leads straight across the plain from Urgel to Saillagouse. This by-road, when you have pursued it for about a mile, enters the isolated Spanish district of Llivia, and when you reach that town you find yourself in Spain, although all the villages round you in a circle are French villages. You have the Spanish delay, the Spanish tenacity, and the Spanish disorder. On coming out of it again, and immediately over the stream on the first village, the influence of the distant prefecture and of a strong hand upon the local community is apparent.
The Cerdagne has one bad drawback that, for all its beauty and wealth, its entertainment is bad. There is not, I think, one good inn in the whole of it, and at Saillagouse, where the exterior looks most promising, the people are so hard-hearted that there is no comfort to be found under their roofs. If you are thinking of food, the best place perhaps for your head-quarters is the little village of La Tour Carol. But if you are thinking of sights, your best head-quarters is the town of Puigcerdá, just beyond the Spanish frontier, 3 miles or so from Latour.
Puigcerdá is the capital of the Cerdagne, and there the people gather as to a fair. It was the capital of the Cerdagne long before the people knew or cared whether they were governed from the north or from the south. One and a half miles away, over the river in French territory, the tiny hamlet of Hix marks the place where the old capital was before Puigcerdá was founded and ousted it in the early Middle Ages. From many points in Puigcerdá, from the terrace in front of the Town Hall, from the northern end of one of its streets, but especially from its church tower, you take in one view the whole of the Cerdagne. As one gazes upon that view, one should remember that this was the principal highway of organized Christendom against the Mohammedan, and through this went Charlemagne and his son.
The Carolingian tradition is nowhere stronger, strong as it is throughout the Pyrenees, than in this fruitful plain. The very mountains perpetuate it with the name Carlitte, and the valley of Carol and the popular songs perpetuate it also. It was this broad floor, full of provisions and free from ambuscade that allowed Christendom to dominate Catalonia, and render free the country of Barcelona, first of all Spanish territory, from the weight of unchristian government. It is the Cerdagne, therefore, to which we owe the later segregation of the Catalonians from the rest of Spain, their forgetfulness of warfare, their active commercial unrest, their modern submission to Jews, their great wealth. The Cerdagne should possess a great road throughout, for it is all of one type and all of one valley. By some historical accident it is not yet (I believe) so served throughout. After Puigcerdá there is a good new road all the way to Urgel. Another from Puigcerdá turns out of the valley of the Segre and runs off south and east to Barcelona. Certainly Urgel—that town we spoke of in connexion with Andorra—every one travelling in this part should see: Seo, the “Bishopric,” the “See”; a sort of Bastion first thrown out against the Mohammedans by Charlemagne. It is more intensely Spanish perhaps than any other large town in these hills, and that because it has long been so thoroughly cut off from communication with the north. Here also you can find good hospitality. The people are kind, and local travellers are common. Urgel is, however, more easily approached from Andorra than from Puigcerdá. And upon that account I dealt with it in connexion with the little republic.