A Midsummer Drive Through the Pyrenees Part 21

We look helplessly down along the lanes and neat streets for the familiar little porch over the Gave and the open s.p.a.ce in front and the overhanging eaves of our hotel. Gone the church, gone the store of the shoes and soap, gone the carriage-shed, the Hotel de l'Univers,--all landmarks gone. It is not until we are driven to the humiliation of actually asking our way, that the alleys are unraveled and show us safely home, into the scoffs and contumely of the unregenerate.

After lunch, the weather is still gloomy, but there is no rain, and we leave Luz for Bareges toward the last of the afternoon, if not in sunshine, at least over a dry road. Some of us are on foot, so but one carriage is needed for the others, and the Widow Puyotte stands smiling at the door as we move away, wishing us fine weather for the morrow's ride on from Bareges over the Col du Tourmalet,--since any further wishes for to-day's weather would be manifestly inoperative.

The Baths of Bareges are on the continuing girdle of the Route Thermale as it extends its way onward from Luz toward Bigorre; they lie about four miles up a short, desolate, east-and-west valley which opens from the hollow of Luz and closes beyond them in a col over which goes the road. These baths are much higher than Luz, and the way is a steady incline throughout. The valley soon shows itself in marked change from the fertile basin we have quitted; it grows bleak and less cultivated; rubbly slopes of shale and slate cover the hills; the vegetation becomes scanter. We are nearing now the Pic du Midi de Bigorre, the summit seen so plainly from Pau, far eastward of the Pic du Midi d'Ossau. It is not as yet in sight from this valley, however, though we are approaching it nearly and though it closely overtops the col which rises beyond Bareges. The road continues desolate, and the dull grey-green pastures hardly serve to relieve its deserted and forlorn squalor. The clouds brood on the hills, the air grows chilly as we ascend, and more than once we sigh half dubiously for the bright parlor left behind at Luz.

We move leisurely, almost reluctantly, on, not in haste to reach the climax of this unhospitable avenue; but the four miles shorten themselves unexpectedly, and it seems but a short walk before we are in sight of the Baths of Bareges.

Murray and Madame the Widow had each spoken dishearteningly of Bareges.

With their verdict concurred also the few other accounts we had heard of it. Murray stigmatizes it as "cheerless and forbidding," "a perfect hospital," and remarks that "nothing but the hope of recovering health would render it endurable beyond an hour or two." Another marks it curtly as "a desolate village tucked into the mountain side, with avalanches above and torrents below; in summer the refuge of cripples; in winter the residence of bears." No one at Luz was found to say a good word for Bareges, except as to the undoubted cures its waters effect; and on the whole the outlook summed itself up as very far from promising.

In view of this abuse we have been predisposing our minds to extenuate the shortcomings of the place and to extol rather than dispraise it. One does not like to maltreat even a resort when it is down. But as we draw up the hill and see the black surroundings and enter the frowsy, dismal street, the desire to extol vanishes and even the possibility of extenuating becomes doubtful. The carriage pauses, while two of us who have hurried ahead examine the two hotels reputed best; each is equally uninspiring, and the one we finally choose we thereupon immediately regret choosing and regretfully choose the other. Meanwhile the carriage is being circ.u.mmured by an increasing hedge of idlers and invalids, staring with great and open-minded interest at the arrival of visitors who seemed actually healthy and were coming here uncompelled; and the visitors themselves are glad to vanish from the public wonder into the stone pa.s.sageway of the hotel.

Within is a large, cobble-paved court around which the hotel is built, and out upon the upstairs veranda overlooking this we are led and a.s.signed to rooms. The rooms are clean, but unadorned and bare, and so seems the hotel throughout. It is not the lack of adornment, however, that dispirits us; Madame Baudot's at Eaux Chaudes was unadorned likewise, and yet was an ideal of inviting comfort. Here, there seems to be something more,--an inexplicable taint of depression over the hotel, which strangely affects us. We struggle hysterically against it, trying to laugh it off, speculating vainly over the dreary, disconsolate weight which each has felt from the moment of entering the village; and at length conclude to investigate the mystery by a survey out-of-doors.

II.

It takes little time to convince us that Bareges deserves all the abuse it has received. We came unprejudiced and in a sympathetic mood, willing to defend the much-reviled; but we admit to each other that the revilers have only erred on the side of timidity. The pall of the place is unmistakable and wraps us in completely; even a genial party and determined high spirits are slowly forced to succ.u.mb. There seems something gruesome about it; the curious burden is not to be shaken off, try as we may.

The village is sorrowfully set, to begin with; the valley here is high and more gloomy even than below; the narrowing hills, grey-black or a sickly green, stand and mourn over their own sterility. Though it is daylight still, the sun has long pa.s.sed behind them, and the air is chilled and mouldy. The village is merely one long, shaky street crouching in along the side of the mountain; it is lamentably near the torrent, for the rough Gave de Bastan just below is one of the scourges of the Pyrenees, and each spring it tears by and even through the street, and scours down the valley, swollen and resentful, causing discouraging damage along its track. Many of the houses are taken down each fall and re-erected in the summer; and as we walk on through the street, these quavering shanties of pine combine with the jail-like appearance of the heavier stone buildings and the harsh hills and clouds around, all in a strange effect of utter repellence.

But it is the people we meet who intensify the impression. No one visits Bareges for pleasure; its extraordinary springs are the sole reason of its existence, and only those who must, come to seek health in them.

Sad-faced invalids, who have tried other baths in vain and have been ordered hither as a last resort; wounded or broken-down soldiers; cripples, who stump their crutches past us down the earthen road,--these are the ones who haunt Bareges, anxious and self-centred and unhopeful.

Style and fashion are things apart; there is not a landau to be had in the place, and scarcely a smaller vehicle. In cold or storm, the sick hurry from boarding-house or hotel to the bath-establishment in close-shut sedan-chairs; on fairer days, they limp their own way thither. Talk turns on diseases; there is no fresh news, Bareges is a long ride from the news bearing railway; the discussions begin with this or that spring or symptom and end in a disconsolate game at ecarte.

Truly disease is a hideous visitant to the fairness of life,--a hard interruption to its store of joys.

Beyond all this, however, there is a something further about Bareges,--this incubus of depressingness, seemingly the very soul of the spot. Sickness and dreary location will account for it in part; but many have felt that certain subtle spirit pervading a region or even a single house, which in part defies a.n.a.lysis; it is in the air; it overhangs; it may be light and joyous and animating, or forbidding. And Bareges is a striking instance; morbid, abhorrent, funereal, there seems here some influence at work which is not entirely to be accounted for, yet to which it is impossible not to yield.

At the upper end of the street is the long, grim bath-establishment, and we enter its stone corridors and are led about by a noiseless and mournful attendant. Here are rows of waiting sedan-chairs; an office for presentation of tickets; long lines of stone cells, each with its tub or douche or vapor-box; and underground, public tanks of larger size. "I inconsiderately tasted the spring," records a traveler of years ago, "and, if you are anxious to know what it is like, you may be satisfied without going to Bareges, by tasting a mixture of rotten eggs and the rinsings of a foul gun-barrel." Our spirits fall lower and lower in this damp impluvium; never before have we felt so grateful over our limitless good health; we dodge out with relief into the darkening air, and, under the beginnings of a rain-storm, thankfully slip back to the refuge of the hotel.

Certain it seems that if cheerful surroundings are essential to a cure, the waters of Bareges must fail of their full mission.

They accomplish remarkable things, notwithstanding; they are among the strongest of the Pyrenean baths, and are particularly noted for their power in scrofulas and grave skin-disorders, wounds, ulcers and serious rheumatic affections. So healing for wounds are they, that the government sustains here a military hospital for maimed and disabled soldiers. In winter the scene is desolation. The cold is rigorous.

Avalanches pour down from the mountains on both sides and often leave little for the spring freshets to do. Modern engineering grapples even with avalanches; wide platforms have been cut in the rocks above the town, on the slopes most exposed, and immense bars of iron set in them and attached with chains. These outworks have proved themselves surprisingly effective in breaking the force of the snowslides; but the scent of danger is always in the air; the ledge of the town is for months deep in drifts; the frailer houses are taken up, the rest closed and stoutly barred; the inhabitants are gone, leaving behind a few old care-takers to hold their lonely revels in the solitudes.

III.

We sit about in the evening in the dim little parlor, and agree once more that Bareges has not been exaggerated. We are united in will to leave this detestable spot to its ghosts of ruin and disease, and to leave it as quickly as we can. Our Luz driver, whom we have judiciously retained to remain with his landau over night, appears respectfully at the door, and is instantly instructed to be ready early in the morning for farther progress; he looks dubious, and warns us of continuing rain; it is nothing; we leave to-morrow in any weather.

"Have you found us a second carriage?" I ask him.

"Monsieur, there is but a _pet.i.te voiture_, a small wagonette, up the street, which one could hire; it is small; if monsieur will have the goodness to come out with me to see it?"

So two of us sally forth into the drizzle with the driver, and a few rods up the street turn off into an alley-way, where the wagonette is found under a shed. It _is_ small,--deplorably small; the seat will ungraciously hold two persons, and a stool can be crowded in in front for a driver. There is no top nor hood of any sort, and the hotel barometer is still falling steadily.

But we are resolved to leave Bareges.

"Is this the best that one can obtain?" I ask ruefully.

"There is one other, monsieur, close by; but it is yet smaller."

This clinches the matter, and we conclude a bargain with the proprietor for an early departure and hurry back to the dim joys of the hotel reception-room.

IV.

The clouds themselves descend with the drizzle during the night, and we are greeted when we wake by a white opacity of mist and fog filling the hotel courtyard and leaking moisture at every pore. We think shiveringly of the wagonette, but more shiveringly still of Bareges; and resolutely array ourselves for a long and watery day among the clouds.

Our route will continue by the Thermal Road on to Bagneres de Bigorre.

There is again a col in the way which we must cross,--the Col du Tourmalet, a shoulder of the Pic du Midi de Bigorre, separating this Valley of Bastan from the greater lateral Valley of Campan. It is a long ride with the ascent and descent,--twenty-five miles at the least; but it can be easily made in the day, and there is a midway halting-place beyond the col for lunch.

Our Luz landau appears promptly on the scene, comfortably enclosed and inviting; and the ridiculous wagonette creeps up behind it, in apologetic and shamefaced comparison. The driver of the wagonette, however, a tough, grizzled old guide, is not shamefaced in the least, but grins broadly and contentedly as he sits there wrapped in his tarpaulin, wet and shiny under the steady rain. The landau soon hospitably receives the favored majority, and disappears into the mist up the street; and the remaining two of us turn to the wagonette,--and turning, involuntarily catch the infection of the old guide's grin.

After all, there is a certain zest in discomfort; we clamber in and draw the rough robe around us, unfurl our complicated Cauterets umbrella, and agree that the truest policy is to make little of discomfort and much of its zest.

Old Membielle gathers the tarpaulin about his stool before us, chirrups toward the damp steam which symbolizes a horse, and we move off up the long, soppy street, past its houses and jails and grey bathing-penitentiary,--and out at last from Bareges. Out from Bareges, though into the vast unknown; and our spirits rise higher as the baleful spell of the spot is lifted and left behind.

V.

Bareges is the most convenient point for the ascent of the Pic du Midi de Bigorre. The baths lie almost at the foot of this mountain, and one can make the ascent in about four hours, and descending by another side rejoin the road to Bigorre at the village of Grip, beyond the col before us. We resign the ascent, of course, under stress of barometer; but this climb is a.s.suredly one of the best worth making in the Pyrenees. The Pic is prominently seen from distant points everywhere through the region: it is visible from Pau, from the Maladetta, from the plain of Toulouse. Consequently these points must lie within its own ken. Its huge, shapely dome rises 9400 feet into the air, and standing as it does solitary and apart at the edge of the plain and not buried among rival summits, the view from the top has been solely criticised as too vast for detail and too high for exactness, and commands, it is said, a fifth of all France. The ascent is easy, there being little snow upon the path in the summer; there is a bridle-trail throughout, a small inn higher than half way, and an observatory now erected upon the summit.

We are only intellectually cognizant of this Pic du Midi, however, as we jog on up toward the pa.s.s; for the driving fog curtains all the peaks, at times lifting so far as to show the nearer slopes and perhaps the hills ahead, but for the most part enfolding even the road and ourselves in its maudlin affection. We pull steadily on through the morning, over a good road and up through a still dreary region of moist, spa.r.s.e turf and shaly slopes of slate and rock and profitless debris. The occupants of the landau, as they look down toward us at times from the turn next above, wave dry and encouraging greetings, through the open windows; and we wave back damper but equally encouraging greetings in return, having found that good spirits had fallen to us with unexpected and gratifying ease.

Altogether it has not been in the least a long morning, when we finally reach the crest of the Col du Tourmalet, 7100 feet in elevation, from which begins the descent toward the Campan Valley and Bigorre. This col is not loved by mountaineers during the winter; it is exposed to the full sweep of storms, and is one of the wild pa.s.ses on which, as the local saying goes, "when the hurricane reigns the son does not tarry for the father nor the father for the son." Before the Route Thermale pushed its way over, it was but a foot-pa.s.s, wearisomely traversed in saddle or litter by infrequent travelers or by invalids sentenced to Bareges.

Just at the summit of the col, for a supreme minute, the clouds part at the rear, right and left, and roll away beneath, and we catch for once the long stretch of the desolate Valley of Bastan, with the windings of the road reaching backward and downward along the hills. It is over while we look; the fog writhes and twists down and all is greyness again.

The carriages slip rapidly down the other side, with all brakes set and forty hairbreadth margins recorded for the outer wheels; and, an hour from the col, we are safely at the hamlet of Grip, where the horses and we are doomed to a two hours' halt and a lunch. The first inn, irrationally placed in a patch of field apart from the main road, does not look attractive from the distance, and we drive on to the second.

This one, while carefully non-committal in appearance, is at least on close terms with the road, and as there is no third, we cheer us with reminders of Laruns and descend.

It is a creaky little inn, facing a wet, cobbly yard and having the air of being retiring in disposition and somewhat surprised at the advent of visitors. The landlady is away, it appears, and we are received by her spouse, a mild-mannered old man who is not used to being a host in himself but resignedly a.s.sumes the burden. The lunch is promised for the near future. The horses are led off, the carriages covered to remain in the road, and the driver and the jovial guide turn to and help with the fire and stabling arrangements in a way which shows that they are entirely at home in the locality.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

We stand for a while on the decrepit, covered balcony overlooking the yard, exchanging humorous reminiscences of the ride, and idly commiserating the three fowls and a wet pig which appear below. We are absorbed too in a wooden-saboted farmhand of gigantic proportions who clicks across the cobbles at irregular intervals and exchanges repartee with a milk-maid in the doorway. He has a huge, k.n.o.bby frame, bulging calves, a colored kerchief turbaning his head, a rough costume throughout, and a fascinating though belying air of desperate and unscrupulous villainy.

But the weather has still its tinge of rawness, and two or three of us go down stairs again and invade the den of the kitchen, where the fire is now under way and the inevitable omelet just in contemplation. The old man acts as extemporary cook. He finds a black and somewhat oily frying-pan, suspends it over the fire to heat, and throws in a handful of salt to draw out the grease. He now looks thoughtfully about for a rag to scour it withal; there is a rag of sooty environment and inferentially sooty antecedents hanging beside a box of charcoals next to the chimney-place; he horrifies some among us by promptly catching it up; gives the pan a vigorous rubbing-out with this carboniferous relic; and certain appet.i.tes for omelet fade swiftly away. Their losers speak for a subst.i.tution of coffee and bread and fresh milk in lieu of all remaining courses, and beat a hasty retreat from the scene.

The omelet duly appears upon the lunch-table presently set for us in the little room upstairs, and serves at least as a centre-piece, over which to tell the story of its birth; and the coffee, excellent bread, and a huge pitcher of new, creamy milk amply reconcile all abstainers, and fortify us in a feeling of good-tempered toleration even for Grip.

VI.

Bagneres de Bigorre is placed at the opening-out of the broad Campan Valley, some distance out from the higher ranges and about twelve miles on from Grip. The fog pa.s.ses off as we start again, though it is lightly raining still. In an hour or more we have finished the descent to the floor of the valley, and for the rest of the short afternoon the road runs uneventfully to the northward, for the most part level, and beaded with occasional villages and lesser clumps of houses. Finally, as the light begins to fail behind the clouds, an increased bustle on the road and more frequent houses pa.s.sed announce the nearness of our destination, and the horses are soon trotting into Bigorre and up the welcome promenade of the main street to the Hotel Beau Sejour.

Past discomforts quickly recede in the warm haze of present satisfactions. We absorb to the full the pleasant glow of the hotel drawing-room, after we have comfortably repaired the ravages of the day. Bareges is a grotesque phantom, and we can hardly admit that to-night there are people still in that shuddering, shivering, banshee-haunted line of hospitals, high in its weird valley, in the cold and in the falling rain. Rayless and despairing their mood must be; escape would seem immeasurably more to be prized than cure. Even the old man of Grip and his rag brighten by comparison, and we agree in viewing our present surroundings as a climax of utter content.