A Midsummer Drive Through the Pyrenees Part 15

The springs of course are as regularly sought. Their routine cannot yield to religious inst.i.tutes. These waters are chiefly useful in throat and lung diseases, though the baths are healing for abrasions and wounds. Both hot and cold waters are here; at one spot, oddly enough, the two temperatures well up close together. The springs have long been known, and anciently, as now, they were more popular than those of the sister valley. One of the kings of Navarre sent hither disabled soldiers from his wars in Italy; many had been wounded by the arquebus, then a new weapon, and from the cures effected, the waters were called after its name. They are seven in number, ardently sulphureous and officiously odorous. They are not to be dealt with in the spirit of levity of Eaux Chaudes' "sober young German": fifty gla.s.ses are not lightly to be tossed off. "Caution is necessary," warns Murray, "in using these waters; bad consequences have arisen from a stranger taking even a gla.s.sful to taste. It is usual to begin with a table-spoonful and a half!"

Habit, however, makes even the lion-tamer fearless: these invalids buy their course tickets, ent.i.tling to cure, concert and ecarte; and they bathe and gamble and engulf their deadly draughts with the immunity of long familiarity.

A distinctive attraction of Eaux Bonnes is its abundance of promenades.

There are walks of all grades of difficulty. One can mount to a summer-house or to the summit of the Pic de Ger. If he does not want to mount at all, he can walk for half a league along a perfect level,--the Promenade Horizontale. This walk is unique among walks. It was artificially laid out for precisely such people,--those who do not want to ascend and descend. It runs back around the bend of the Gourzy overlooking the Laruns hollow, the carriage-road grooving its way down far below it. In this region of angles and slants, this marvelous path moves leisurely forward, plane as a spirit-level, broad and well kept, shaded with trees, relieved with benches, and affording inspiring views throughout. Each of the promenades has its view and its cascade and almost its hour. With so many idlers, it is easily believed that each is duly popular. And when one tires of promenades or of liveliness or even of fine weather,--can he not easily drive to Gabas?

"We are all kept in good order here," observes Blackburn, in his account of the Pyrenees resorts; "everything is _en regle_ and _au regle,_ and if we stay a whole season we need not be at a loss how to get through the days. It is all arranged for us; there is the particular promenade for the early morning, facing the east; the exact spot to which you are to walk (and no farther) between the time of taking each gla.s.s of water; the after-breakfast cascade, the noon siesta, the ride at three, another cascade and more water or a bath at four, promenade at five, dinner at six, Promenade Horizontale until eight, then the Casino, b.a.l.l.s, 'societe,' ecarte, or more moonlight walks,--and then decidedly early to bed."

Caillou and the liverymen predict a fine to-morrow for the long carriage-journey we have planned. The breeze is resolutely east, they say. This fact seems anything but convincing to us, accustomed to the weather signs of the west Atlantic seaboard. But here, as is quickly explained, the reversed signs prevail, and it is the _west_ wind that dampens feathers and the spirits of rheumatics.

The band on Sunday plays at night as well as in the afternoon, and as the music, though secular, cannot be excluded, we throw open the windows and frankly welcome it as we sit in our balconies overlooking the lighted park in the mild evening air. The band plays well, and people throng the paths and listen appreciatively. Two overtures, a waltz movement, the _Melody in F_, a march, and a cornet obligate which is vigorously applauded, may serve as index of the unpartisan scope of selection. Music is enjoyed to the full in Europe; many a well-to-do city fosters its orchestra and has its public music-stand in the square or in the Volksgarten. In Bordeaux, workmen and mechanics, small urchins and sailors from the quays, fringed the more aristocratic circle of chairs, and listened as intently and as seriously as a Thomas audience at home. It cannot but have a humanizing effect. These listeners below us,--and so with the rough populace of Bordeaux,--have become tranquilized, soothed, softened; the buzz of harsh or random talk dies down; all faces are turned for the time to the common centre, all thoughts mingle in a common stillness of enjoyment.

CHAPTER XI.

OVER THE HIGHWAY OF THE HOT SPRINGS.

"Like a silver zone, Flung about carelessly, it shines afar;

"Yet through its fairy course, go where it will, The torrent stops it not, the rugged rock Opens and lets it in; and on it runs, Winning its easy way from clime to clime."

--ROGERS' _Italy_.

It is Monday morning at Eaux Bonnes. The dome of the sky is of unspecked blue. The departing diligence for Laruns has just rolled away down the road, and now a landau with four horses, and a victoria with two, stand before the Hotel des Princes. A formal contract, wisely yet ludicrously minute in detail, bristling with discomforting provisos for contingencies, and copied out in the usual painstaking French handwriting, has been discussed and gravely signed. We are to be conveyed to Cauterets as the first day's stage, and thereafter to have the carriages at command, for an agreed price per day, if we wish to retain them. Thus we can journey on to Luz, Gavarnie, Bareges, Bigorre and even Luchon. The memorandum is handed us; it provides for delays and breakdowns, disputes, damages, sickness; it stipulates for return prices from the place of dismissal. The average price for two such conveyances in this region, "keep" included but not _pourboire_, will be found to hold within from seventy-five to ninety francs a day,--thirty-five to forty-five francs for each carriage; I record it as matter of information for possible comers. The carriages, the horses and the drivers are all strong and all well-cushioned, and the drivers are resplendently tinseled besides.

We are now to enter oft the _Route Thermale_. This carriage-road is one of the marvels of modern engineering. The chief resorts in the French Pyrenees are imbedded each at the head of a north-and-south valley running up from the plain against the crest of the range. Between them, the huge mountain ridges, like ribs from a Typhon's spine, stretch down in irregular parallels from the backbone of the chain. Before this road was built, these resorts could only be visited successively by a tedious double journey in and out of each separate valley, or by high foot-paths over the ridges between. Thus the traveling from one to another had its serious drawbacks. The railroad came, skirting the plain, though not yet provided with the offshoots which now run partway up into the valleys; but even by rail the detours needed would be circuitous and wasting, and they missed utterly the out-of-door fascinations of true mountain travel. Something yet was called for.

The Route Thermale was the result; it is another of the wonders of Louis Napoleon's regime. It has revolutionized the comforts of Pyrenean summer travel; the ridges need no longer be skirted, for they can be luxuriously crossed,--and by one of the best carriage-roads in Europe.

Beginning at Eaux Bonnes, and running in the main parallel with the central crest, it rears itself serpent-like over four of these great intervening barriers, attaining and crossing in turn the broad valleys between them, connecting northward with the stations, southward with the springs. This immense band, sinuous and unbroken, uplifting itself to the snow, plunging again from snow to the maize-fields, stretches along the central Pyrenees a full hundred miles. Four days' journey away lies its distant end at Luchon. The hostile mountains shower it with earth and stones. Winter buries it in ice, spring a.s.saults it with freshets; it is rarely pa.s.sable before June, and mountain storms even in summer measure their strength against it. But Napoleon III inspired this road, and it emerges, quickly rejuvenated, from tempest and torrent, to laugh unconquered. Of the undertakings of the Bonaparte family, only two were ever baffled by opposing forces.

Such an enterprise as this gives a new light, for the stranger, upon the popularity of the Pyrenees. This costly road-building could only have arisen from a demand great enough to require and sustain it,--from an amount of summer traffic, a mult.i.tude of summer visitors, commensurate in part at least with the outlay. Evidently, figments of lonely settlements and dark paths belong in limbo with those of dismal inns.

The next great synclinal, adjoining the Valley of Ossau, is the Valley of Lavedan, and at its head in the mountains lies Cauterets, our next point of attack. The notch of the road in each intervening ridge is called a _col_, that which is in the ridge that now bars us from Cauterets being the Col d'Aubisque. Over the Col d'Aubisque, accordingly, opposite the Pic de Ger, our way to-day lies.

II.

We abandon Eaux Bonnes, almost reluctantly, to its summer's festivities, and drive down the broad street and around the end of the park and so out through the curtain of rock into the road of the main valley. The slow ascent begins almost at once. We rise gradually along a wooded hill, stopping once to enjoy a cataract which, like a happy child, is noisy for its size and entirely lovable nevertheless. A long reach of valley is then entered, bottomed by the Gave, the road well up on the side. In an hour or more, we finally turn to cross the valley, and commence the serious ascent of the opposite side. Facing us now from the side we have left is the ma.s.s of the Ger, very near, very high, and uncompromisingly precipitous. All the morning this Pic looms stonily above us; the sunshine brightens its snows but cannot soften the stern rock-features. Steadily, though with frequent rests, the horses toil higher, and the Pic seems to rise as we ascend. Often we are walking, by the side of the carriages. Other peaks are now coming up into view; the road mounts in long zigzags, shaded plentifully at times and always astir with a trace of breeze. Our admiration at its skillful construction increases hourly. Patiently surmounting all obstacles, it moves surely upward, unvexed by resistance, broad and smooth and firm, and protected by parapets wherever the paternal solicitude of the Department could possibly conjecture a need for them. The trees become scanter as we near the top. Road-makers are at work cutting stones or repairing here and there; they doff their faded berrets in greeting.

They have frank, hardy faces, marked with belief that life is worth living:

"_Les tailleurs de pierre Sont de bons enfants; Ils ne mangent guere Mais ils solvent longtemps_!"

[Ill.u.s.tration]

By eleven o'clock the top is gained. We are on the Col d'Aubisque, 5600 feet above tide-water. The horses pause for a well merited breathing-spell, and we step to the ground for a survey. Across the valley towers the Ger, still apparently as high above us as at the start. Farther to the right, the Gourzy, though still in the near distance, has dwindled to a moderate hill, and Eaux Bonnes has throughout been niched from the field of view. To the left, other peaks, several heretofore unseen, stand silently out; their rocks and snow "of Arctic and African desolation," as Count Russell has observed of another scene, "since they are both burnt and frozen." The Pic du Midi d'Ossau, which should lie to the southwest, is not in sight, being hidden by intervening heights.

We turn for a view to the east. Here barren pastures sprawl over the hills, dotted in places with herds of cattle or flocks of mountain sheep. But the Valley of Lavedan, which we expected now to overlook, is not yet in sight. After a long descent before us, there is another though lower col to surmount before we can point out the villages of the new valley.

We seat ourselves by a s...o...b..nk, and enjoy the pleasures of rest for a season. Enter to us, a peasant upon the scene,--a woman, crossing the col from the Lavedan side. The large bundle magically balanced upon her head-cloth wavers never a trace as she steps lithely up the last acclivities and comes upon us. From a stick held over her shoulder depends another bundle, and over all she is carrying a war-worn and ludicrous umbrella. The interest is mutual. Promptly I spring up and pull off my cap in introduction. Her round face, simple and good-tempered, a comely type of her neighborhood, opens gradually from a stare into a smile, as the ladies add their greetings. She seems rather glad of the excuse to rest and lay aside her bundles, and in a few moments has grown quite communicative. She has come, this morning, she tells us, from Arrens, a small village on the way down toward the Lavedan valley and to be our destined halting-place, we recollect, for luncheon. She is taking to Eaux Bonnes a few woolen goods, stockings and hoods and shawls, knit by herself and her old mother during the long winter. They are not for fine people; oh, no, but the guides and the hotel maids like them.

"And your husband," we ask,--"what is he?" "A charcoal-burner, monsieur; he has his pits in the forests of the Balatous; it is a hard life."

"It is hardest in winter, is it not?"

"It is hard always, monsieur,"--this very simply; "but we have enough, though not more.--On the left of the road, madame,--our home,--as you walk out from the inn at Arrens toward the monastery."

Again the conception of discontent is a stranger; the idea puzzles her; her life has always been thus; she did not expect anything otherwise. It is a genuine forest-nature, mute yet never inglorious, reciting uncomplainingly its lesson of pa.s.siveness and endurance.

Her dress, coa.r.s.e in texture, well worn but well cared for, appears to differ little in detail from the costume of the Ossau valley we have now quitted, but is more strictly, so she tells us, that of the peasantry of the Lavedan district next to be met with. The pleasant face is framed in by the ever-favorite hood or head-mantle. This is sometimes, as here, a kerchief, of conspicuous colors, peculiarly coifed,--the precise twist varying according to the mode of each locality. Often, as with the women of Goust, the kerchief is of plain white, tied below the chin, and set off with a short outside cape, black or colored, over the crown. At times the cape alone is worn without the kerchief, and on occasion the larger capulet of red supersedes them both.

Artfully we lead the conversation into a philosophical discussion, while the camera is secretly made ready,--when, from the side we have come, enter also another peasant, an old man this time, quite as good-humored and quite as characteristic as the first comer. He has dispensed with jacket or blouse, and displays the loose, baggy-sleeved cotton shirt often worn in subst.i.tution, an outlawed pair of _ouvrier's_ trousers, and the local berret and _spadrilles._ His features have the true Gascon cast of shrewdness and tolerance. We formally introduce the two to each other, and the camera is trained upon the pair. But now the woman, discovering the plot, evinces that bashful disinclination, common among women the world over, to pose for immortality when without her best finery; though the old man, I am pleased to record, does not appear in the least sensitive about his. Silver, however, is a great persuader; now it proves a worthy adjutant of its nitrate; the drivers, who are greatly absorbed in the situation, add their encouragements to the reluctant one, and finally agreeing and ably supported by her new acquaintance as leading man, accoutred as she is, she plunges in; conscious att.i.tudes are unconsciously taken,--as taken they always are for photography, be it in Paris or the Pyrenees, by all humankind; and the two wights, humbly and happily serving their separate lives, valued items in Nature's wide summation, stand forth together in the dignity of humanity to mark this trifling meeting in permanent remembrance.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "ACCOUTRED AS SHE IS, SHE PLUNGES IN."]

There they talk together on the road, as we finally drive down the hill, their figures silhouetted against the sky. They have been on the whole pleased and awakened by their adventure; they will discuss and compare their emotions, finger their silver, wonder and speculate, and go their separate ways, convinced anew that the ways of the world and its worldlings are verily strange and inscrutable.

III.

The noonday heat has now become noticeable, and seems greater on this easterly shoulder of the ridge. We are grateful for the rapid downhill trot, which makes two breezes blow where one breeze blew before. Even that one is less marked on this side of the col, and as we descend, turn by turn, beyond the limits of snow patches and into the zone of undergrowth and then of greener vegetation, the air grows perceptibly oppressive. The view has wholly changed since leaving the crest. The Ger and its a.s.sociates have fallen from sight; their valley is gone, and we face a scene entirely new. We climb again, to surmount the secondary col; and then commence the final descent.

It is now that the Route Thermale shows its mettle. This section of the road was among the most difficult portions encountered by the engineers.

Nature stood off and refused all aid. "Beyond is the valley," she curtly told them; "between are the ravines; make what you can of them!"

A hopeless task it seemed. But Nature reckoned without Louis Napoleon.

The road is here, serene and self-sufficient. It literally carved its way down to the valley. Slopes often greater than forty-five degrees have been cut into intrepidly; arches and viaducts thrown over gaping clefts, bridges over unbridgeable chasms. The road turns on itself; it doubles and twists and dodges; it crawls midway along the ledges, gouges a path into the hill around a landslide's groove, looks over uncomfortable brinks with easy unconcern, and in short outplays Nature at every point. And all the while it continues wide and firm, and we trot ceaselessly downward with not one pause. The parapets are less frequent than nearer Eaux Bonnes; often there is but a low line of heaped-up earth between us and the verge, and sometimes even this is wanting; but nowhere is the way too narrow for teams to pa.s.s, nowhere is there danger, save from a drunken driver or a thunderbolt.

We look back from the moving carriages, and the camera is pointed toward the ledge of road we have just traversed. The picture proves an eloquent witness to all that can be said of the Route Thermale.[19]

[19] See Frontispiece.

Far below and in front, a patch of grey and brown has come into view; the drivers point out its cl.u.s.tering houses: it is Arrens. Many kilometres are traversed before that patch grows larger,--more still, before we have curved and dropped at last down to its level and are speeding along on a straight line toward the village. We find a ragged little street, and attract the usual waiting audience of Arcadians, and drawing up before the door of the inn are glad to escape for a time from the outside heat and glare.

IV.

The shady patch of garden at the side of the inn is an unqualified blessing. Roses overhang the paths, and green branches bend over its plot of gra.s.s. We have found the little dining-room dark and rather stuffy, have thrown open the windows and shutters, have confidently spoken for an artistic meal, and can now ruminate approvingly upon rest and refreshment, the sweet restorers of life. How should one tolerate its zigzaggings without the gentle recurrence of these its aids?

The kitchen opens invitingly from the hallway, and presently some of us drift indoors and group around its entrance. There is a hospitable stir of preparation within; a blazing and clattering that charm both eye and ear. The landlady and her daughter are busy with a fiery fury. We grow bolder. We crave permission to enter and watch operations. The old woman pauses and looks up as she cracks an egg on the edge of a plate, and then a.s.sents, willingly enough, but with unmistakable astonishment. She is used to predatory raids of visitors but evidently not to this inquiring spirit. Yet purposeful travel, we might tell her, is hundred-eyed and has glances for just such matters as this. It seeks out cities and scenery and history; but it seeks out life no less. We are gaining impressions which cannot be drawn from books, as we come close to these homely ways and habits, questioning, appreciating the people we meet, understanding their capacities and objects and limitations. One sees the breaking of an egg; he can see, besides, a thousand accompaniments to the event,--a biography summed up in an act.

At present, we note the breaking with rather more concern than the biography. Egg after egg is being deftly chipped, and its lucent content dropped first upon a plate,--a thrifty half-way station for possible unsoundness,--and then slid off into a clean-looking oval saucepan. The pan is then hung from an unfamiliar variety of crane close over the fire, and the contents wheedled and teased by a skillful spoon and bribed with salt and b.u.t.ter and a sprinkle of parsley. And even as we watch, the golden ma.s.s melts together; sighs and quivers, and thickens into wrinkles; bodies itself slowly into form and shape, under crafty oscillation; and is at last dexterously rolled out, a burnished ingot, upon the long platter, with a flourish that bespeaks practice and confidence. The stiff face of the old woman involuntarily relaxes with honest pride; she looks up half unconsciously for approval, and we all applaud galore.

Manifestly, externals vary, fundamentals persist. Barring details of place and process, the culinary art follows much the same laws and works out much the same results in this remote Department of the French Republic as in the Middle States of the American.