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.
THE BASQUE VALLEYS
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.