Part 3

From the first, or western axis, descend with a regular parallelism, eight valleys. Each valley bifurcates in its higher part into two main ravines, and a whole system of minor streams, spread over an indefinite number of tortuous dales and gullies, attach to each valley.

There is a mark or limit for each of these western French valleys, which is the spot where it debouches upon the open country. Thus the Gave d’Ossau falls into the Gave d’Aspe at Oloron; nevertheless the two valleys must be regarded as separate, because the meeting of the two streams takes place in the open plain. On the other hand the valley of Baigorry, and the neighbouring valley of St. Jean, though containing two large separate streams, must be treated as one system, because these streams meet at Eyharee near Ossés, and the open plain is not reached before a point some miles further down beyond Canbo.

The test, though it may sound arbitrary upon paper, is quite easily appreciated in the landscape, and the separate valleys are more clearly marked, perhaps, than those of any other European mountain chain.

These eight valleys (see plan G over page), going from west to east, are first that of the Nive (the bifurcations of which give St. Jean and the Baigorry), next that of the Gave-de-Mauléon (Larrau and Ste. Engrace), and both of these are Basque; next comes the valley of the Gave d’Aspe (with the bifurcation of Lourdios and Urdos), up which went the main Roman road into Spain and which is the first of the Béarnese valleys; next is the Val d’Ossau (with the bifurcation of Gabas and the lac d’Arrius), next the valley of the Gave de Pau (with the bifurcations of Cauterets and Gavarnie), next the valley of Bigorre, a short valley bifurcating in two minor streams at its head. Next, or seventh, comes the Val d’Aure, with Vielle upon its western bifurcation and Bordères upon its eastern; and lastly the bifurcated valley of the Garonne, whose level and deep floor comes nearest of all to the main chain, and holds on the west Luchon, on a branch called the Pique, on the east Viella in the Val d’Aran.

[Illustration: PLAN G.]

[Illustration: PLAN H.]

Once past this point, the structure of the hills along the eastern run of the broken Pyrenean axis changes. The mountains here are penetrated by only two valleys, but each is much longer and more important than any of the eight just mentioned, and these two great valleys run, not parallel to each other, nor north and south as do the eight western ones, but at a steep slant: the one (that of the Ariège) goes westward, and the other (that of the Tet) eastward. Save for these two main valleys no regular features can be discovered in the eastern portion; all is here a labyrinth of dividing and subdividing lateral ridges, and the only thing giving unity to the group is this system of two great trenches which run up towards each other, the one from the Plain of Toulouse, the other from that of Perpignan, to meet on the high land of the Carlitte group. Strictly speaking, the western valley is not wholly that of the Ariège, but those of the Ariège and Oriège combined, and it is further remarkable that no regular passage exists from the one depression to the other, but by a curious topographical accident, which will be described later in the book, the crossing from the Ariège to the Tet has to be made by going over on to the south side of the range, and then back again on to the north side.

The importance of these two main valleys upon the eastern half of the northern slope of the Pyrenees is sufficiently evident from the historical fact that each determines a great historical district: the one, that of the Ariège, was the country of _Foix_, the other, that of the Tet, was the _Rousillon_. And while the eight small western valleys running parallel to each other separate local customs and dialect alone, the ridge of the Ariège and the Tet may almost be said to have separated two nationalities, and owed ultimate allegiance for a thousand years, the one to a Gallic, the other to an Iberian lord.

Beyond the valley of the Tet and eastward of the Canigou runs the little fag end of the range, which falls into the sea at Cape Cerberus, and is called the “Alberes.” Here there is but little distinction between the northern and the southern side, the general shape of a sharp ridge is maintained throughout, but the height lowers more and more as the sea is approached. These hills are everywhere passable; the ancient road into Spain which crosses them, should count, geographically and historically, rather as a road crossing round the Pyrenees at their sea end, than as a road crossing the chain.

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A Pyrenean valley upon the French side always presents the same main characteristic, and this is true not only of the main valleys, but of the innumerable lateral valleys which ramify from the main valleys in all directions.

The characteristic of these French Pyrenean valleys is that they are sharply divided by very narrow gorges into two or more level basins. These level basins in the smaller valleys and on the high levels where there is pasturage and no habitation are called “Jasses”; the large and low ones are called “Plains” or “Plans”; but they are the same in their essential feature, which is a level floor more or less wide, bounded by the steep hills upon either side, and ending and beginning with a rocky gate through which the valley stream cascades. The whole formation suggests the former existence of great and small lakes, which burst their way through the gorges at some remote time (as in plan I below).

[Illustration: PLAN I.]

These gorges are very rarely of any length, a point in which the Pyrenees differ from the Alps. Here and there, especially in the limestone formations, you do get long and difficult passages. One, the Cacouette in the Western Pyrenees, in the upper waters of the Gave-de-Mauléon, is not only very profound but absolutely impassable, like the Black Cañon of Colorado, but it does not lead from one part of a valley to another. It occupies the whole of the upper valley; and in general, you will not find a Pyrenean stream running, as do the Alpine streams, for some miles between precipices.

Each main valley has a clearly marked mouth where it debouches upon the plain; by this I do not mean that perfectly flat land comes up to and meets the hills in every case; on the contrary, at the mouth of most of these valleys are moraines left by old glaciers, but I mean that the character and aspect of the hills visibly and immediately changes, and that each of the valleys has a distinct final “gate” where it meets the lowlands, just as a river will meet the sea at a definite mouth. Now each of these openings has its characteristic town. Mauléon, for instance, is at the mouth of the last Basque valley, Oloron at the mouth of the Val d’Aspe, Lourdes at the mouth of the valley of Argelès, etc.

Further, these towns at the mouths of the valleys have invariably chosen for their site, whether they be prehistoric or mediæval, some rock on which to build a citadel; and in every case a castle is still to be found holding that rock. Lourdes, Foix, Mauléon are excellent examples of this.

Higher up the valley, the first plain above the mouth will, as a rule, contain the first mountain town. Thus Argelès lies above Lourdes, Bédous and Accous above Oloron, Laruns in the first flat of the Val d’Ossau, etc.

According to the length of the valley and the number and size of the Jasses, there may be one or more such towns enclosed by the mountain sides; thus in the valley of Lourdes we have Argelès, and above it Luz; in the valley of Soule we have Tardets above Mauléon, and higher still we have Licq. But all the valleys, whether they contain one or more of these upland towns, have, just under the last watershed, a hamlet or village usually giving its name to the Port or Col—that is _the Pass into Spain_—above it, and the reason of this is evident enough; habitations were necessary as a place of departure and arrival for the crossing of the mountains. Of such are Gavarnie, Urdos, Morens, and the rest. These high villages have least history, least wealth, and until recently had the worst communications. For much the greater part of the year they are lost in snow, and there was an interval between the making of the great roads and the beginning of modern tourist travel when they were in peril of destruction. The new great roads drew away wealth and visitors from all but a very few, and but for the beginning of modern mountaineering they had hopelessly decayed. Even so famous a place as Gavarnie, the best known of all the valley heads, was dying in the middle of the century. There are days now when it is at the other extreme: fine days in August when, for the crowd of rich people, you might be at Tring or at some reception of the late Whittaker Wright’s. Even to-day, one or two of them, however clean or kindly, are odd in the way of poverty. I have known one where they had no butter and never had had any butter, and another where I was charged 8_d._ instead of 5_d._ for a bed because it was the season.

The typical Spanish valley differs, in the centre of the Chain at least, from the typical French valley. With the exception of Andorra (which reminds one in all features of the French side; for it has the same enclosed plain, the same steps and rocky gorges between, the same Jasses, and the same arrangement of towns and villages) the greater part of the valleys, whether Catalan or Aragonese, are not only broader and their streams larger than on the French side, but their arrangement also is different, most of them lack wide pasturages, nearly all of them lack enclosed plains, and there has been no motive to penetrate them since the building of the new roads, for travel upon this road is rare. The Spanish valley, therefore, often many days’ walking in length, never direct, and forming a sort of little province to itself, will have towns and villages scattered in it, haphazard and thinly. Very often a considerable town will be found at the very end of the valley, as Esterri in that of the Noguera Pallaresa, or Venasque in that of the Esera. The lateral communications from one Spanish valley to the next are usually more difficult than those between the French valleys; for many months they are impossible, and there is no such general arrangement of towns on the plain holding the approaches to the valleys as in France, for the reason that the whole plan of the mountains on the Spanish side is far more troubled and irregular.

Thus the first town of the Aragon is Jaca; but Jaca is right in the mountains, and nothing at the outlet of the hills 50 or 60 miles down the valley makes a head town for Jaca. Jaca is a bishopric on its own. On the Gallego there is nothing but a succession of villages of which Sallent right up at the head of the valley is among the largest: it is almost a little town and so is Biescas close by. The Cinca and the Esera have indeed a town upon the plains at Barbastro, but the Noguera Ribagorzana has none, nor has its sister the Noguera Pallaresa, while the Segre has its bishopric and chief town right up in the highest hills at Urgel, and there is nothing to compare with that town until you get to Balaguer.

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The southern side of the watershed differs greatly in general structure from the northern, and must be separately recorded.

There are indeed certain accidental similarities. The enclosed valley of Andorra to the south recalls the enclosed valley of Bédous or Accous to the north, and the very high first miles of the torrents, just under the main range, do not differ much whether they are found on the north or on the south side of the mountain. But the general plan and contour of the range presents a great contrast on either side. The main feature of the southern slope is, as I have said, a series of parallel ranges pushing out like ramparts in front of the main heights. If you follow a French valley (on the western part of the Pyrenees at least) you will find it running fairly north and south to the point where it debouches upon the plain some 20, or 25 miles at most, from the watershed.

A Spanish valley will at first appear to have the same character, but just when you think you are in sight of the plains (for instance, just after leaving Canfranc upon the banks of the Upper Aragon) you see—beyond the first lines of flat country, and barring the view like a great wall—another high range: in this case the Sierra de la Peña, the ridge of rock which takes its name from the “Peña-de-Oroel,” a mountain with its eastern end just above Jaca. Beyond this again you have the San Domingo ridge, and to the east of it, another running also east and west, the Sierra de Guara.

Pamplona again is situated at the mouth of a true Pyrenean valley (that of the Arga), not very different from the valleys to the north. It stands also on a plain, but immediately in front of it runs another range of hills, and if you climb these, you find yet another, strictly parallel and straight, standing before you and masking the approach to the Ebro. This formation in parallel outliers continues as far east as the Segre valley, that is for full three-quarters of the length of the Spanish Pyrenees, and in a sense it continues even further east than the river Segre; for the Sierra del Cadi, though it joins on to the main ridge at one point, is essentially an outlier in slope and formation. This parallel formation sometimes comes quite close to the central range, as, for instance, in the Colorado peaks close to Sallent and Panticosa, and the long ridge to the south of Vielsa and El Plan. Indeed the characteristics of Sobrarbe, as this country-side is called, consist in these long parallel ridges.

One result of this formation is, as I have said above, that the river valleys do not run straight, as they do to the north of the range, but are thrust round at right angles when they come up against these ridges. Sometimes they will eat their way through a ridge, as do the two Nogueras, and the Arga itself south of Pamplona; but the greater part of the rivers on the Spanish side suffer the diversion of which I speak, and none more than the river Aragon, which gives its name to the whole central kingdom; for the Aragon, after having run south and straight for a few miles, like any northern river, suddenly turns westward, and runs under the foot to Sierra de la Peña for two days’ march. According to its first direction, it should fall into the Ebro somewhere near Saragossa; as a fact it does not come in until far above Tudela.

Another result of the formation is that the mountain tangle stretches much further on the Spanish side than it does upon the French. If you stand upon the Pass of Salau where the French have made, and the Spanish are making, a high road, you have before you to the north, at a distance of less than 10 miles, the railway and a fairly open valley. Fifteen miles at the most, as the crow flies, you have the main line and the true lowlands at St. Girons. But if you turn and look out in the opposite direction over the valley of Esterri and the higher Noguera Pallaresa, you are looking over 60 miles of mountain land. From the high ridge, which is your standpoint, to the summit of El-Monsech, which is the final rampart of the hills beyond the plains of Lerida, is more than 50 miles, and the slopes of that rampart take you nearly another 10.

A further consequence of this formation is that communications are very difficult to the south of the Pyrenees. The traveller naturally ascribes the lack of communications to the character of Spanish government. It is not wholly due to a moral, but partly to a material cause. The main Spanish railway from Saragossa to Barcelona may be compared to the main French railway from Toulouse to Bayonne, but the Spanish side everywhere suffers from its great wide stretch of wild mountain land. Toulouse itself is little more than 50 miles from the crest of the mountains. Saragossa is half as much again. The Spanish Pyrenees push out civilization, as it were, far from them. Lerida, a large town of the plains, is quite 60 miles from the watershed in a straight line. Pau or Tarbes are less than 30. The difficulty and expense with which the civilization of the plains, and the things belonging to it, must reach the remote upper Spanish valleys largely account for the curiously high degree of their isolation from the world. Many thousands of men are born and die in those high valleys, without ever seeing a wheeled vehicle, and without knowing the gravest news of the outer world for two or three days after the towns have known it.

It is not easy in such a system to establish general divisions. We saw that this was simple enough upon the French side: eight main valleys to the west of the “fault,” and two large sloping ones on the eastern limb. In the Spanish Pyrenees, the nearest thing one can get to a classification is _first_ to group together the Basque valleys of Navarre, the streams of which all flow down to meet at last near Lumbier and fall into the Aragon a few miles further south. _Next_ to take the group of valleys along the mouths of which stands the great Sierra de la Peña, of which the chief is the ravine of the Upper Aragon. These dales, which have at their extremities the huge masses of the Garganta and the Pic d’Anie, form the original stuff of Aragon. These few square miles were the seat from whence that race proceeded which fought its way down to the Ebro, and to the sources of the Tagus, and which can claim the Cid Campeador for its historic type. _Next_ comes the group of valleys beginning with the Gallego and ending with that of Venasque, which forms the eastern limb of Aragon, and has borne for many centuries the title of “Sobrarbe.” _Next_ to consider the two Nogueras as the Western, the Cerdagne and Andorra as the Eastern Catalonian land.

[Illustration: PLAN J.]

It should be noted that the fine tenacity of Spain in general, and of these hills in particular, has preserved with exactitude the ancient and natural divisions of the land. The long unbroken ridge which encloses the Basque valleys is also the frontier of Navarre. The unity of Aragon survives in the present administrative division of Jaca. The eastern valleys are still called the “Sobrarbe,” and the “fault,” or break between the two main lines of the Pyrenees, still forms an historical and racial break to the South as to the North of the chain. Beyond it eastward begins the Catalan language, and the next group to consider are the great Catalan valleys of the two Nogueras and of the Segre. The two Nogueras ultimately fall into the Segre, but in the mountain regions the three form three large parallel valleys, each with a character and nourishment of its own and all Catalan. Of these three, the Segre is the most striking; its upper waters are the centre of the flat valley of the Cerdagne, the only natural passage from the North into Spain, and one of its earliest tributaries nourishes the Republic of Andorra.

East of the Segre valley, and of the Sierra del Cadi which bounds it, no classification is possible. It is a labyrinth of little valleys. A flat welter of hills running down everywhere to the sea, and narrowing at the extreme end into Cape Cerberus: these last crests, as I have said, take the name of “Alberes.”

This contrast in structure between the northern and the southern side of the range runs through many other aspects of the hills beyond structure alone. We have seen that it affects the type of civilization, leaving the deep but short French valleys far more open to the culture and influences of the plains than were the Spanish just over the watershed. There is much more.

The fall of the light is in itself a contrast. The slopes of the Spanish mountains, and especially of the high mountains, look right at the blazing sun. They are more bare of wood, much, than are the French slopes. They are more burnt. Water is less plentiful. Insects are more numerous, and there is less cultivation; but one cannot say that there is, as a rule, a scantier population. Small villages and hamlets are rarer in the remote gorges, but small towns a little lower down are common, and apart from the population economically dependent upon summer tourists in France, it might be doubted whether the Spanish side were not as well garnished as the French; one might venture to imagine that in the Dark, and early Middle, Ages, when the full effect of the natural condition of the mountains could be felt, the population of either side was sensibly the same.

The highest peaks are upon the Spanish side, but it does not show splendid isolated masses of rock like the two Pics-du-Midi, or lonely masses like the Canigou. On the other hand, the general character of the rocks is more savage and more fantastic, and it is upon the south side of the range that one most feels creeping over one that sentiment of unreality or of a spell, which so many travellers in the Pyrenees have been curious to note. The local names express it upon every side. There are “The Mouth of Hell,” “The Accursed Mountain,” “The Lost Mountain,” “The Peak of Hell,” “The Enchanted Hills” or “Encantados,” and hundreds of other legendary titles that express, as well as do the mountain tunes, the sense of an unquiet mystery.

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