Part 14
As for the packing of it I have already spoken of this in connexion with the knapsack. A few additional remarks may be of use. See that your bread is always covered from the air; to wrap it in paper is enough for this, and if it will fit into the sack so much the better. Work if possible a broad band of cloth into the straps where they catch the shoulder, keep the straps short so that the weight hangs high, carry the blanket loosely over either shoulder: it gives far less trouble thus carried than it does when it is rolled and tied over the chest. If you carry a knapsack, however, roll the blanket tight upon the top of it, it will then incommode you even less than when it is carried loosely. Wrap your matches as I have said in a waterproof cloth (if you have no knapsack), and wrap in the same the maps you need for each particular climb; forward the rest by post to the town for which you are making if it is in France; if it is in Spain, don’t, for they will not get there.
I had forgotten to mention that most useful thing, a pocket compass. Take a large cheap one, and allow for the variation when you put it on your map: but of using this and of several other little points I will speak later. I have dealt with what regards equipment: let me now speak of Camping.
Camping in the Pyrenees differs from camping under any other conditions that I know. The structure of the range, its climate, and even the political condition of the valleys, make it differ from camping in Ireland or in the Vosges, or in those few parts of England where the wealthy will allow plain men to indulge in this amusement. It is not the same as camping in the Alps, in Savoy, or in the Apennines, or in the Ardennes; and it is the particular conditions of camping in the Pyrenees which made me say just now that one can do without a tent.
Though geologists are careful to describe the very varied structure of the range, yet to the traveller one feature, peculiar to these among all mountains, perpetually appears common in every part of it, and that is the continual presence of overhanging rock. I can remember no considerable stretch in any main valley, not any in a crossing between two valleys, where you are not perpetually finding examples of this formation. It is this upon which one must first depend for shelter. Next to such overhanging rocks one must depend upon the great forests; lastly, upon the cabanes. But before speaking of their various advantages rules of time must be given, for upon the time of day chosen for the halt the success of a camp will depend.
I am speaking of course throughout these notes of the warm weather alone; that is, of the end of June, July, August, and the first part of September. Seasons vary, and there are years when the whole of September may be included. At the end of the season one may count, especially in the eastern part of the Pyrenees, upon a sufficient succession of fine nights to make camping possible; but if one comes upon a streak of bad weather it will last, especially in the western part, for three or four days, and it is better, if the people of the valley foresee such weather, to let it go over before taking the heights. Thunderstorms and very heavy rain may happen upon any night in these mountains. They are said (I do not know upon what authority) to be commoner upon the French than on the Spanish side. More dangerous than these, though less momentarily annoying, are the mists which gather quite suddenly in the higher parts of the range, and which as suddenly interfere with every form of travel.
It is absolutely necessary, unless one is quite certain of the finest weather, to cross the col or port, in the route one has traced out for the day, before that day is far advanced. The reason for this is twofold; first, that wood for a camp fire is not usually to be found upon the higher slopes, secondly that good water is not easily to be found there. It is further necessary to choose the place for one’s camp an hour or so before sunset, and it is wiser to make it even earlier. The disappointments which I remember within my own experience in this matter have nearly all proceeded from pushing on from a likely place discovered in the afternoon; one so pushes on in the hopes of finding a likelier spot before the end of the day. Such an extension of one’s journey is nearly always ended in a rough, unsuitable camp, sometimes without a fire, and under the most uncomfortable conditions. When therefore you have found in the course of the afternoon, the shelter of good rock, overhanging a dry place by the stream you are following, pitch upon it and do not regret the hours you appear to lose.
When you have chosen the place for your camp your first act must be to gather at once as much dry, _large_ wood as you can find. The local customs in this matter are very liberal. Even if you are quite close to a village, no one grudges you the use of wood, and your only possible disturbance will come from the frontier guards if you are so foolish as to choose their neighbourhood, which, by the way, can only be the case if you encamp near one of the few chief crossings of the range. These may ask you questions and make trouble, not for your gathering of wood, but for their suspicion that you are smuggling.
The temptation to gather only small wood is strong. It always seems as though the branch you have chosen will be large enough to last for some hours. But a little experience of these fires will show you that nothing small enough for you to drag will be too large for your purpose. The eight hours or more during which you must feed the fire consume a great deal of wood, and the keeping of the fire in depends upon having large logs for its foundation. You will not, of course, be able to cut these into the right length, you will have so to arrange them when the fire is once well started that they burn through their middles. You can then, later, shift into the centre of the flame the halves that fall aside. If there is any breeze pile a few stones to windward of your hearth, for you will have to sleep to leeward of the fire, and an arrangement of this kind will break the force of the wind and prevent the smoke and flame from coming too near you. If the wind is too strong, you must make your fire and your camp under the lee of some great rock, or it will both burn out in a very short time and make itself intolerable to those who depend upon it for warmth. For a wind that rises in the middle of the night, you have, of course, no remedy; short of heavy rain it is the worst accident that can befall you. If you have enough wood make your fire of a crescent shape with the hollow towards the wind. It is the warmest and the best way. You must so arrange that in sleeping you lie with your feet towards the fire, and your great provision of wood must be brought quite close to hand otherwise, most certainly, you will not have the energy to feed it in the few wakeful moments of the night. That wood should be somewhat green or wet matters little if you have a great fire well started, but if you let it get low while you sleep, it will be impossible to revive it, and when the fire fails, there is an end to sleep for every one. It is impossible to say what the effect of such a fire is by giving reasons for it; it does not perhaps warm one so much as do something to the air which makes sleep possible and easy without a shelter, and it is the universal aid and solace of all the Pyrenean mountaineers, whom you will often find in groups, woodcutters or shepherds, gathered round one of these great blazes for the night.
The conditions of a good rock shelter, of a neighbouring stream and plenty of wood, though common, are not universal, and if from the structure of the hills and from the nature of the map you fear you will not reach one, or if the greater part of the afternoon is passed without your finding such a place, your next choice must be a spot in one of the great woods that everywhere clothe the range. They are more common upon the French than upon the Spanish slope. Here there is always cover from the wind, for they are very dense, and even a partial cover from the rain, but it is important to make your fire in a clearing, and luckily there is nearly always a succession of open spaces between the forest and the stream. With such a fire and with such an arrangement to leeward of it the Pyrenean blanket with which you have provided yourself will be ample covering for the night.
As for using cabanes, I have already said that there is no grudge felt against you for doing so, but you must treat any man coming upon you in such a shelter as though he were the owner, for the local shepherds will certainly regard you as their guest, and will think they are doing you the favour of a host. Moreover, your fire, if you make one here, must be lit outside the building, though the local people who use the cabanes most constantly, will often make it inside. On the whole the night is more comfortably spent in the open than in one of these shelters, unless one is caught by rain.
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The open sandy spaces such as are quite common by the side of the larger streams may be used with safety. There are no places where a spate will be so rapid as to endanger one, unless one choose, as a companion and I were once compelled to choose, a cave almost cut off by the water. The only places where it is essential that one should _not_ camp, are the higher flats where wood is rare, and where the cold of the night is exceptionally severe. It is a choice to which one is often compelled, if one pushes on too long, after having miscalculated the fatigues and duration of the climb; but it is an error which one always regrets.
A further recommendation is, _not to camp by the map_. The map may look like that on p. 131, and one may say that one will follow up the stream at one’s leisure. The reality may turn out a series of ascending precipices, quite unassailable.
But it is a great temptation. A man may have known the Pyrenees and experienced time and again the error of trusting to a map for a camping site, but there is something so convincing about the print and the colours that after years of experience one may commit the same folly again. It was but this year that, trusting to the 1/100,000 map, I planned to camp at the place where the Cacouette falls into the main stream below Sainte Engrace. I did not know the spot; it seemed to come at a convenient hour in the ascent of the mountains: I should be there about 5 o’clock. There was wood marked, good water; it was on the lee side of the wind that was then blowing from the south. When I came to it the place was a sharp ledge of limestone higher than Cheddar cliffs, dotted here and there with trees and affording between the wall of rock and the water not three feet of ground. It was not to be approached from above; it could not be reached from below. A more impossible place for camping never was. I had the same experience some years ago on the Aston, though that was before I knew the Pyrenees well. There a place was chosen by my companion and myself for its mixture of wood and meadow upon the map, there were cabanes and apparently plenty of good water; it was so plain on the map, that one did not hurry to reach it before darkness; but when we got there it was a marsh; no cabane appeared until daylight, and there was even that very rare thing in the Pyrenees, doubtful water. As for the wood that should have dotted the pasture, it turned out to be tough little live bushes, and all green, that would neither cut nor burn.
There is one last and very grave danger of which I would warn the reader in connexion with travel on foot in the Pyrenees, with a map and even with a map and a compass. Without map or compass it is more than a danger, it is a sort of necessary misfortune perpetually attending men, and the gravity of it is proved by the fact that the local people who use neither compass nor map when they go into a district with which they are unacquainted, carefully ask the marks of the path and get themselves accompanied, if they can, by someone who knows the country-side. This danger may be called “Getting into the wrong valley.”
As one sits at home, one thinks of the scheme of mountain valleys too simply. One thinks of the stream as coming down through a ravine with its head waters appearing below a definite saddle or notch in the watershed. This stream, let us say, is flowing north. One sees on the further side another stream rising just on the other side of the notch and flowing on through a simple valley, going to the south. The crossing of the port between these valleys seems to depend upon no more than physical endurance and fine weather. One goes up one stream to the saddle, crosses the saddle, follows the other stream downhill, and so makes one’s passage from France to Spain.
There are many passes of this simplicity, but there are many more that, both between the lateral valleys and over the main range, present the danger of which I speak, and which consists in a complexity at a summit such that it is difficult in the extreme to know—even when one is certain one has gone up the right part of the hither slope—what one should do on the thither.
This danger of “getting into the wrong valley” cannot be seized without illustration, and in the following rough sketches I give examples of this.
In the first example is a bit of country such as one very often gets in these mountains with summits round about the 2600 metre line and the last valleys under the ports somewhat above the 2000. I have marked with hatching the contours below 2200 and in black the summits above 2600. The main watershed I have indicated by a dotted line.
When one is crossing a port of this type one sees before one from the summit a confused and gentle slope leading apparently to one obvious valley on the far side like the obvious valley out of which one has just ascended. It seems indifferent whether one should come down on to this by M or by N, to the left or to the right, yet the two valley floors to which each leads are quite separate and may lead one round to different river basins. How deceptive such a place is, the rough sketch appended may help the reader to grasp. It shows the kind of thing one sees from the summit of such a pass and how indifferent the choice appears between the ways by which one may descend.
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This type of confusion exists sometimes in a still more dangerous form, as in the contour lines of sketch on next page.
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A man arrived at the port P climbing up from the valley Q, which is deep and well defined, sees before him another valley R exactly in line with the last, also deep and also well defined. On either side of him, as he gets to the saddle, run high ridges perpendicular to the line of the two valleys. It seems common sense to take the watershed as running along these ridges and across the port, and if Q is the French valley, R will be the Spanish one. As a matter of fact the watershed may not run in this simple way at all, but (as indicated upon the sketch map) take a sharp turn to the right. R may be a French valley after all, and the proper way down into Spain may be over the gradual grassy slopes indicated by the arrow line. A man standing just at the port, and having a rocky ridge A and the rocky ridge B to his left and right, sees before him the obvious trench of the valley R and takes for granted that it is the Spanish valley, whereas his true way is across the vague grassy land towards S, and the watershed which he thinks runs from B on to A really turns round from B and runs on to the distant mountains before him.
[Illustration]
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It must be remembered that on these summits all traces of a path as a rule disappear. What is worse, indications of a path may begin on the other side into the wrong valley and not into the right one.
A second type of this peril is that in which some feature upon the ridge which looks quite unimportant upon the one side turns out to be all-important upon the other. Thus a man coming from A in the map below, where the valleys are hatched and the highest summits are black, would have before him the plain ridge B-C. It is indifferent where he crosses it from that side, but on the far side he finds a confusion of falling valleys, and if he does not pick out the right one he may find himself in a few hours shut in by high walls which constrain him to a journey he never meant to make. He may have intended to follow valley (1), and so to reach food and shelter, he may find himself in valley (2) caught for the night far from men and with walls of 3000 feet between him and them.
[Illustration]
Sometimes this confusion takes the form of one’s being led on to an obvious notch in the ridge before one: a notch lower than the general line of the ridge which (one thinks) cannot but be the port. When one has climbed to it, however, one finds that the valley one was seeking lies far to the right or to the left of such a notch, and that the gap which was so noticeable on the one side of the pass corresponded to nothing useful upon the further side.
There is a good example of this under the peak called Negras where an obvious notch which one thinks surely must be the way over to the Gallego, leads to nothing more useful than an enclosed Tarn under the precipices of the mountains.
A sketch of the aspect of this particular ridge will make the difficulty plain.
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All the contours upon the Aragonese side invite one to the notch at N, yet the true way lies over the ridge between A and B, and the nearer to B the better is the descent upon the further side. Indeed at A it is perilous, at B it is a very gradual descent of easy grass.
The third type of mountain structure which may lead one into the wrong valley is what may be called “The Double Col.” It is damnably common and a good example of it will be found in the track I describe later on in this book when I speak of the short cut from the Ariège Valley into the Roussillon.
The accompanying sketch will explain the character of this sort of tangle, and it is most important that anyone unacquainted with these mountains and wishing to learn them should seize it thoroughly, for it is the worst of all the lures that get a man astray.
Observe carefully the numerous contours on the sketch map overleaf. They are numerous because it is necessary to show the minute details of such a case. I will suppose them to be about 50 feet apart. The traveller is coming up the valley marked V, the floor of which is marked in black upon the sketch, and the apex of which is, let us say, 6000 feet above the sea; he climbs the last little slope of 250 feet and reaches the col at C, which is 6250 feet above the sea. On this saddle he has upon either side of him precipitous slopes, which lead up to two summits of mountains upon the right and the left, the one towards A, the other towards B. Right in front of him opens another valley corresponding apparently to the valley V from which he has come, and which we will call W. The floor of this also is marked in black upon the sketch. It will be observed from the contour lines that the descent on to W is easy, though the walls bounding it on either side become increasingly precipitous as one proceeds.
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Hidden from him by rising ground upon the right, as he stands at C, there is yet another valley, the floor of which is also given in black. This valley we will call Y, and it is this valley which leads the traveller towards his object; valley W only gets him deeper into the wilderness. Both valleys W and Y, are so precipitous that once engaged in either of them one is caught and compelled to pursue them for many miles. It is evident that on a very large scale map such as this, and with full contour lines giving every few feet of height, the traveller would make no error. Once at C he would go up to the right around the base of mountain B, rising continually until, somewhat under 6500 feet, he came to the second col, D, which would bring him down into valley Y.
But consider how this corner would look upon an ordinary small scale map!
The whole distance from the apex of valley V to the apex of valley Y is not half a mile. It would occupy little more than a quarter of an inch upon your French map. The general trend and nature of the valleys, which the traveller shut in by high mountains cannot grasp, would seem obvious upon such a map and he would take it for granted that he could make no error and that the passage marked from V to Y would be perfectly plain sailing. It would never occur to him that he could be trapped into the little ravine W leading nowhere and in no way connected with his journey.
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