Chapter V: Preface: To the Fourth Edition (3)

The whole point of view of antiquity differed from ours in speaking of such tribes, nor is it easy to pick out from the scraps of observation that have come down to us the kind of information that we want. Sometimes a name survives, sometimes it does not; sometimes we get a hint of a variety of race, most often we lack it. It is the very meagreness and eccentricity of the information upon a barbarous race and custom which affords such opportunities to our dons for those forms of speculation which they love to put forward as dogma, the most absurd example of which, perhaps, is the interpretation and enlargement of Tacitus’ “Germania.” It is therefore exceedingly difficult to know of what kind were these people beyond the old Roman pale. We do not know what language they spoke. We only know that, like other Gallic communities, they centred round fortified places, that their pacification was easy, and that, like everything else in Western Europe, they were of an unchangeable kind.

The whole district between the Garonne and the Pyrenees came to be called, during the first four centuries of our era, “The Nine Peoples.” The Convenæ are early noted to have attached to them upon their right and upon their left, to east and to west, the Consevanni and the Bigerriones. The first of these were (to follow the high authority of Duchesne) organized as early as the first century; what is now St. Lizier was their old capital and later their bishopric, which takes its present name from Glycerius, a saint of the sixth century. They held all those hills of which St. Girons close by is now the centre. The Bigerriones are not heard of until the mention of them in the Notitia of the fourth century. They must have held Bigorre, and the three valleys which I have called the valleys of Tarbes. Tarbes—then Turba—was their capital, and was and is their bishopric.

The Auscians do not concern us. They and the three groups into which they are later distinguished held the western plains and foot hills. The Tarbelli held both the foot hills and the mountains of the west; their capital was at Dax. They also split into, or are later recognized as three separate groups, making up with the two other sets of three “The Nine Peoples,” under which title all this country below the Pyrenees became permanently known. But of the three only the _Civitas Benarnensium_, whence we get the name Béarn, and the _Civitas Elloronensium_, with its capital at Iloro, which has become Oloron, concern us. The capital and soon the bishopric of the _Civitas Benarnensium_ was at Lescar, as far as we can make out, and Lescar bore the chief sanctity in Béarn until that country was swept by the Reformation. The sovereigns of Béarn were buried there, even the Protestant sovereigns, and it remained a bishopric, whose bishop was the President of the Parliament of Béarn, until the Revolution; but it was the Reformation which destroyed its original character of a capital.

We have, therefore with the earliest ages of our civilization, five peoples holding the northern Pyrenees, the Consevanni, the Convenæ, the people of Bigorre, the Béarnese, and the Elloronians.

It is remarkable that in such a list, our Roman originators and their geographers overlooked the Basques. The category ends precisely at the present limit of the Basque tongue. For the Val d’Aspe, of which Oloron is the town, is the first French-speaking valley. Why it is that we hear nothing of the Basques it is difficult to say, especially as the second of the great Roman military roads went right through their country. Bayonne, which is the Basque’s town of the plains on the north, is heard of in the fifth century. It has a garrison; but no bishopric until the tenth. Pamplona, which is their town on the south, was known before the beginnings of our Christian history. But the Basques themselves are not known to us from the Romans. The name of the Consevanni survives locally. The country round St. Girons is still all one country-side and called the “Conserans.” Of the Convenæ we have a pleasant legend in St. Jerome telling how Pompey got together all the brigands of the mountains, drove them northward hither, and forced them into a garrison (a stronghold which, like Lyons and the rest, was one of the many “Lugdunums”). It was destroyed early in the dark ages, and later revived by St. Bertrand, a little way off in his Episcopal town. Their name survives in the district of Comminges. The Béarnese name of course survives and so does the Bigorrean, while the Elloronean, though no longer the title of a district, is preserved in the town name of Oloron.

All this country, not only that of the five tribes along the mountains, but the whole territory occupied by the nine peoples (who afterwards became twelve), lay in a profound peace under Roman rule, and we may be certain of its increasing wealth throughout the first four great formative centuries of our era.

The advance of Rome upon the Spanish side was of a very different kind. Rome, after the Carthaginian wars, inherited broad belts of civilized and half civilized land. All the Mediterranean slope below the mouth of the Ebro, and a belt quite three days’ marches wide inland to the north of that river, was full of ancient populated towns, alive with the full civilization common to every shore of the inland sea. So, we may be certain, were the broad plains of the south where the most complete and earliest absorption of the Celt-Iberian in Roman speech and ideas took place. The advance into the north-west and therefore along the Pyrenees covered more than a century of strict and perpetual warfare, which was intermixed by the civil wars of the Roman commanders. The extremities of the Asturias were reached in the century before the birth of our Lord, but the advance was not, as upon the north, a rapid expansion beyond the old boundaries. It took the form of siege after siege and battle after battle, in which those numerous and crushing defeats, which Rome (like every truly military power) reckoned to be a necessary part of history, interrupted the slow progress of her law. The Celt-Iberian towns were walled and strong; their resistance was painful and tenacious; there was no sudden illumination of a willing people by a new culture, such as had taken place in Gaul, rather was northern Spain kneaded by generations of warfare into the stuff of the Empire.

When the work was accomplished, it was complete throughout the Peninsula; and though the silent strength of the Basques prevented the Roman language from invading their valleys, the administration of the whole territory south of the Pyrenees must have been as exact and as bureaucratic as that to the north of it. There was, however, this great difference due to local topography between the Spanish and the French hills, that the municipalities upon which Rome stretched her power, as upon pegs, were less common, were farther apart, and approached less nearly to the central ridge upon the southern than upon the northern side. What you see to-day south of the Pyrenees is what you might have seen at any time in the last 2000 years—a very few scattered towns, still the centres of government, and all the rest rare isolated villages living their own life, free from the criminal, and, by a regular payment of small taxes, half independent of the civil law. Alone of the true mountain sites, Jaca in the middle, Pamplona and Urgel at either extremity, were bishoprics. Huesca, St. Laurence’s town, a fourth centre, is in the plains. For the rest the confused storm of hills ending in those parallel ranges, pushed right out on to the burnt flats of the Ebro, forbade the establishment of a municipal civilization.

Upon all this land to the north and to the south of the mountains came, after five hundred years of a high civilization, the slow decline of culture, and the infiltration of the barbarians. In a sense the nominal divisions between the barbaric kingdoms has its importance, for they help us to understand changes of dynasty and of custom. But they were of no political effect. The mass of the people knew little of the chance soldiers who, with their mixed retinues of Roman, Breton, German, Slav, and the rest—some able, some not able to read the letters of Rome—sat in the old seats of office, issued their writs through the still surviving Roman Bureaucracy and from palaces which were but those of decayed Roman governors.

For the greater part of Western Europe, and especially of Gaul, this process of decay was one into which Europe slowly dipped as into a bath of sleep, and out of which it rose more rapidly through the energy of the Crusades and of the renewed Pontificate into the splendour of the Middle Ages. But the Pyrenees suffered in this matter a peculiar fate. When Spain was overrun by the Mohammedan, and when in the first generation of the eighth century the Asiatic with his alien creed and morals had even swept for a moment into Gaul, the Pyrenees became a march: at first the rampart, later, when they were fully held, the bastion of our civilization against its chief peril. It is this episode by which the Pyrenees became the military base of the advance against Islam—an episode covering the whole life of Charlemagne and after him the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries—which gives them their legendary atmosphere and fills all their names with romance.

The northern slope, during the long business by which Gaul became itself again, was but a remote border province. The new life of Gaul, after the shock which had so nearly destroyed Europe was over, sprang from Paris. The influence of Paris radiating upon every side built up again accuracy of knowledge, unity of government, and general law. To this influence the Pyrenees seemed the most remote of boundaries. The valleys were little affected by the growth of the French Monarchy; they remained for centuries broken into a maze of half-republican customs, of tiny independent lordships, guarded and menaced by separate and jealous walled municipalities upon the plains—all of this vaguely and slowly coalesced into larger districts, doubtful of their sovereignty and perpetually struggling upon their boundaries and their sub-boundaries.

In this development nothing was more striking than the way in which this remote border at first looked rather to the south, where the interest of religious war was ever present, than to the north, whence government was slowly coming towards it. The French Pyrenees fought and felt with the whole range, not with the plains. Jaca in the worst time, when it was the only mountain bishopric free from the Mohammedan, counselled with and was perhaps suffragan to Eauze. Urgel sat in the provincial Synod of Narbonne. As the success of the Reconquista pushed the noise of crusade further and further from the range, the northern valleys looked more and more towards their northern towns. Their nominal allegiances grew stricter—as of Foix to Toulouse—and every French bishopric was bound more and more to its northern metropolitan, the Spanish sees to the new metropolitans of the Ebro.

At last an issue was joined between Northern and Southern France of the first moment to the unity of Gaul itself and of all Christendom. The Crusades, the knowledge of the East, the awakening of the intelligence and of its appetites, had bred throughout the wealthy towns of what had been from the beginning Roman land, a desire to be rid of the restraints of fixed religion. The South of France began to move towards its pagan past. It was a movement which had already had its strange echo in the north, a movement which in England had only been pulled up at the last moment by the martyrdom of St. Thomas. Here in Gaul, in the sunlight, and backed by so much gold, the rational and sensual revolt became a larger thing, and when various sources of disruption, speculation, and achievement had met in one stream, it was commonly called the _Albigensian_ movement. The issue was decided, after heavy fighting, in the early thirteenth century, and the victory was with the cause of the unity of Europe. Toulouse (the true centre of the storm) and its lord were conquered. Northern barons swept down, held no small part of the southern land, and from that time onward the French Pyrenees are normally dependent on Paris.

Two exceptions survived, the straddle of the Basque across the chain and the straddle of the Catalan. The Basque had his country of Navarre upon either side of the chain; with it went Béarn, and these were independent of the French crown. The Catalan, able to traverse the chain by the flat floor of the Cerdagne, preserved the unity of his mountain province, and the Roussillon counted with Spain. Apart from this easy passage into the Roussillon from the south, by way of the Cerdagne, the isolation of the Roussillon was the more easily accomplished from the long spur of the Corbieres, which runs north and east towards the sea and cuts off from France the wealthy plain of which Elne had once been, Perpignan had later become, the capital.

This arrangement endured, in name at least, until the seventeenth century. The last heir of Navarre was also the heir nearest to the French throne at the close of the religious wars, and as Henry IV of France he united the two crowns. A man who, as a boy, might have rejoiced at that union, could have lived to see, under Mazarin, the signing of the Treaty of the Pyrenees, which gave the Roussillon also to the French Crown. The date of this final arrangement coincided with what is ironically called “The Restoration” in England: this date, which definitely closed the power of the English Monarchy, and substituted for it the power of a wealthy oligarchic class, coincides throughout Europe with the struggle between absolute central government for the equal service of all, and local aristocratic custom. In England the latter conquered; in Spain and France the debate was decided in favour of the former.

Such centralized governments could but further define and insist upon a new boundary, and from that time onward, for 250 years that is, the Pyrenees have been once more as they were under the clear administration of Rome, a fixed political boundary; and, save certain exceptions that will be mentioned later, everything north of the chain has been administered from Paris, and has slowly accepted, side by side with the local tongue, the tongue of Northern France and the habit of a centralized French government.

South of the chain the process by which Christendom recrystallized out of the flux of the dark ages, followed a different course; it was a process to which Spain owes all her national characteristics, for out of the mountains a Spanish nation was formed, and from its various communities, as from roots, the Catholic kingships grew southward until they once more reached Gibraltar.

To understand this process, it is necessary to consider factors absent in the topography of the Gaulish plains, and especially the factor of that unconquerable tangle of mountains which occupies all the north-western triangle of the Peninsula.

The ocean boundaries of the Iberian quadrilateral are nearly square to the points of the compass. It is not so with the internal divisions that mark off its central part. Here the edges of the high and arid plateaux, the deep trenches of the rivers, the mountain ranges, the boundaries of the plains at their feet, run slantways from north-east to the south-west. This slant determined the boundaries of Mohammedan expansion, while the Asiatics and Africans still retained the energy to advance; it determined the successive frontiers of the Reconquest, as our race slowly ousted the invader and reached at last the sea-coast of Granada. The Arab and the Moor were masters of Narbonne and all the Roussillon on the east, when, on the west, they could not cross the mouth of the Mulio a hundred miles to the south. They were at Jaca within a day’s march of the watershed along the Roman Road, when, to the immediate west of it, they could not hold Fuente; they could not even reach Pamplona, though that western town is two marches at least from the main crest. Toledo was reconquered a generation before Saragossa, though Saragossa is by nearly two degrees more northerly, because Toledo was west of Saragossa. The last Mohammedan kingdom was crowded, after the thirteenth century, into the extreme south-east, as the surviving remnant of the free Europeans of the Peninsula had been crowded into the extreme north-west in the eighth.

If the boundaries of undisputed Mohammedan rule be traced for various dates, the receding wave will be found in general to follow curves that lead, like the main features of the land, from the north-east downwards towards the Atlantic.

This main character in the geography and history of Spain, the south-westerly trend of the mountain ridges, largely determined the fortunes of those fighting bands of mountaineers who ceaselessly pressed southward until they had wholly driven out the invader and reconstituted the unity of Europe. It determined the first advance to be, not from the Pyrenees, but from the Asturias, and the first captain connected with the Christian resistance after the overwhelming of all that civilization, _Pelayo_ (from whose blood Leon, Castille, Aragon, and Navarre descend) had his stronghold, not in the Pyrenees, but a week’s march to the west, along the Biscayan coast at Cangas. Within the decade of the invasion he had checked the invader in his own hills at Covadonga.

All the eighth century is full of that successful spirit in the north-west—but nowhere else. Alfonso, the husband of Pelayo’s daughter, struck the note with his boast, “No pact with the infidel,” and the tradition or prophecy that Christendom would regain the south, springs from him. He conquered down to the Douro, over what is to-day the mountain frontier of Portugal; he began those long cavalry raids into the heart of Moorish land. He rode into Astorga, into Zamora, into Segovia itself—within sight of the central range of the Guadarama: riding back with booty, harassed and harassing, nowhere permanently fixing himself save in the towns of the west, upon the Lower Douro, but building on the ridges of his defence, those block-houses, the “Castille” from which, long after, the frontier province began to take its name.

All the ninth century that spirit grew. The body of St. James was found under the Star at Compostella—its shrine became the national sacrament as it were, a perpetual refreshment for arms, and a symbol, in its wild isolation among the rocks of Galicia, of the impregnable places from which the Reconquista drew its ardour. The advance continued. The frontier counties consolidated and were named.

Leon was permanently held, Burgos was founded. If one takes for a date the opening years of the tenth century, just after Alfred had saved England also from the pagan, and just after the Counts of Paris had saved northern Gaul, there is a full Spanish kingdom standing up against the Mohammedan power, a king has been crowned in Leon and has died in peace at Zamora. The cavalry raids have pushed—once at least—to Toledo. All the north-west lay permanently Christian beyond a line that ran from the corner of Gaul to the Douro and down the Douro to the sea; and this united triangle of Roman land formed a base from which the pushing back of the alien could proceed.

* * * * *

How did this disposition of forces affect the Pyrenees? Let it first be noted that the newly organized Christian country lay wholly to the west of the range. In the Pyrenees themselves the Mohammedan flood had washed every valley. The crest had been traversed and retraversed; both slopes were for a moment held by the invaders. Abd-ur-Rahman had sent or led his thousands by the Roman roads of Roncesvalles and Urdos and over the Ostondo and the lower passes of the west. The mule tracks of these rocks had been twice crowded with the white cloaks of the Arabs. In the east, Narbonne was held for fifty years, and with it all the Catalans. Even in the high centre of the chain, where there is no passing between the Somport and the Cerdagne, wherever there was something to rob or to destroy, the invaders had penetrated. There was not here, as in the Asturias, untouched land.

When the crest of the wave retreated, when the Mohammedan came back defeated from Gaul, the high valleys attained—it may be guessed—a savage independence.

Jaca has legends of its battle at the very beginning of the Independence, before Charlemagne had come to the rescue, and from all the valleys of the Sobrarbe, bands of men must have been perpetually volunteering for skirmishes down into the plains. Navarre was the natural leader of the movement, the largest and the most fertile belt of Christian land, but the little lordship upon the Aragon, fighting down south and east towards the Ebro, the western count of the Asturias fighting down south and west, cut off the advance of the Basques; and though Navarre in the period of birth and turmoil which is that of Gregory VII’s reform of the Papacy, of the establishment in England and in Sicily of Norman power, and of preparation for the Crusade, was the head of all the southern Pyrenees and called itself an “Empire,” it was blocked by the double line of advance, and the Basques, upon the foundation of whose tenacity and courage, as upon a pivot, the Reconquest had proceeded, took little more part in the wars; but the Basque strip of Navarre gave its first king to Aragon, and the son of that first king, Sancho, raided so far as Huesca and was killed beneath its walls; his son again, Peter, took the town two years later just as the hosts of Europe were gathering for that first great march upon Jerusalem which threw open the curtain of the Middle Ages; and _his_ son, Alfonso (who had united in one crown Leon and Aragon), went forward under his great name of the Batallador, and twenty years later (1119) swept into Saragossa, the last of the Mohammedan strongholds in the north.

Thus were the west and the centre of the Spanish slope recovered for our race and civilization.

Meanwhile Catalonia upon the east had been since Charlemagne, since the early ninth century, a march of Christendom; but it was not until the same creative period which had brought forth the leadership of Navarre and the advance from Aragon, the Normans, Hildebrand, and the resurrection of Europe, that Catalonia began to go forward. Its first true monarch was Berenguer the Old, who lived round and about the date of Hastings, and was first master of the whole province. He also founded and maintained the Cortes of Barcelona. His son, for a moment, raided the Balearics, and when he died Catalonia and Aragon, united under one crown, saw the alien finally driven from these mountains. All the plain from far beyond the base of the hills was now permanently held by strong and united kingships which pressed forward to the Ebro valley, and finally saved all the Spanish province of Europe. A lifetime later, the last of the foreign armies had been broken at Navas de Tolosa. Far off in the south Islam lingered, tolerated and on sufferance, but Spain was reconquered. For just 500 years Spain, a quarter of all that makes up our civilization, had lain in peril between our religion and the other.

I have said that with the thirteenth century, the Albigensian crusade upon the north, the destruction of Islam upon the south (the two successes were contemporaneous), the Pyrenees ceased for ever to be a march between two civilizations, and became a mere political boundary between two provinces of Europe; and I have said that the nature of that boundary was finally fixed in the seventeenth century, or rather during a period which stretches from the close of the sixteenth to just after the middle of the seventeenth.

If that political boundary be examined to-day it will be found to coincide with the watershed, save at certain particular points, the character of which merits examination.

I take for my boundaries, as throughout this book, Mount Urtioga on the west, and the beginning of the Alberes on the east, which may conveniently be placed at the Couloum.

In this distance, there is a slight discrepancy between the political boundary and the watershed here and there in the Basque valleys. Mount Urtioga itself, though upon the watershed, is entirely in Spain, and the sources of the torrents which feed the valley of Baigorry all rise a mile or so beyond the political frontier, which is here composed of two straight conventional lines.

The head waters of the Nive are wholly in Spain also, as is all the left bank of that river to a point four miles below Val Carlos. The right bank, however, is French, so far as the torrent Garratono. Thence forward from the sources of that torrent (that is, upon the Atheta) the frontier now follows the watershed, now leaves the very head-springs of the torrents in Spain until, a few miles further east, it makes a considerable invasion of Spanish territory, not because the frontier itself bends, but because the watershed here goes northward in a half circle. All the upper valley of the Iraty is politically in France; but from the Pic d’Orhy, where a definite ridge begins, it follows the frontier strictly for mile after mile (with the exception of a curious little enclave which gives Spain two or three hundred yards of the head-waters of the Aspe), and there is no further exception throughout all the high Pyrenees until one strikes the curious anomaly of the _Val d’Aran_.

I have said in describing the physical structure of the Pyrenees that the two main axes of those mountains were joined by a sort of fault, a serpentine bridge of high land which united them from the Sabouredo to a point ten miles northward, the Pic de l’Homme overhanging the Pass of Bonaigo. The valley caught on the French side of this twist is the Val d’Aran, containing the upper waters of the French river Garonne. Geographically of course it is French, but politically it is Spanish so far as a certain gorge where is a bridge called the King’s Bridge, and where the Garonne pours through a narrow gate of rock into its lower valley. The story goes that when the Treaty of the Pyrenees was in act of negotiation someone said diplomatically and casually to the French negotiators, “The Val d’Aran of course you regard as Spanish,” and they, knowing no more of these mountains than of the mountains of the moon, said, “Of course.” The true reason is rather that the gate in the mountains cuts off this upper valley from the lower gorges of the river much more than the low, easy, and grassy saddle of the Bonaigo cuts it off from the Spanish valley of Eneou just to the east of it: and though the Val d’Aran may be geographically or rather hydrographically French, it is topographically Spanish, which is as though one were to say that Almighty God made it so.

Another exception and a big one to the rule that the frontier follows the watershed, is, of course, to be found in the French Cerdagne. The true watershed here is coincident with the frontier as far as the Pic de la Cabanette in latitude 42° 35′ 30″. The watershed then goes on over the Port de Saldeu, along the crest of the Port d’Embalire to the Pic Nègre, and there it turns to the east along the ridge across the saddle of which goes the high road over the Col called Puymorens. It follows that ridge, _not_ to the summit of the Carlitte, but to a lower peak called the Madides, three miles to the north-east, runs along two miles of a high rocky ledge to the Pic de la Madge and then there follows a difficult sort of hydrographical No Man’s Land, the centre of which is the great marsh of Pouillouse, nor can you tell exactly where the watershed is for some miles in the forest below that marsh, for the same damp flat ground sends water into the valley of the Tet and into the valley of the Segre. Three miles to the south-west, however, it is clearly defined again in a low rounded lump of wooded land, it passes over the flat Col de la Perche and then follows the crest still going south-west up to the Pic d’Eyne, where again it becomes the frontier, and the frontier it remains until it reaches the Mediterranean.

From the Pic de la Cabanette, all the way to the Pic d’Eyne, France and Mazarin politically took in by the Treaty of the Pyrenees a belt to the south of the watershed and extending down to a conventional line which left Bourg-Madame French and Puigcerdá Spanish; an exception in this is a small strip beyond the Pic de la Cabanette, on the left bank of the Ariège, which, though geographically French, was given to Andorra, so that Andorra might smuggle more comfortably over the passes.

The causes of this annexation of the French Cerdagne by Mazarin are clear enough when one remembers that the Roussillon (which is geographically French) passed to France by the same treaty. There is no way from the valley of the Ariège into the Roussillon except by going round this corner of the Cerdagne, at least no practicable carriage way; the only other way is the difficult and high short cut described later in this book. If the frontier be carefully noted, it will be seen that it is designed merely to preserve a right of passage over this road. Jurisdiction was only claimed by France over the villages, and Llivia, being a town, stands in an island of Spanish territory in the midst of the French Cerdagne, as will be seen later when I speak of this district in detail.

Such is the present political aspect of the Pyrenees, with Toulouse for their great French town in the plains, 60 miles away to the north, Saragossa for their great Spanish town in the plains, 100 miles away to the south, a string of towns just at their feet (Bayonne, Pau, Tarbes, St. Girons, etc.) on the northern side; on the south a rarer and less connected group (Pamplona, Huesca, Barbastro, Lerida, etc.); and against the Mediterranean the district of Gerona, shut in by the Sierra del Cadi (with its outposts) and the Alberes upon the Spanish side, the town of Gerona its capital; the Roussillon, with Perpignan for its capital, shut in between the Alberes and the Corbieres on the French side.

III

MAPS

One of the first ideas that come to a man when he thinks of wandering about an unknown bit of country is that it will be more fun if he does not take a map. There are places of which this is true: you discover for yourself, and it is more exciting. But it is not true of the Pyrenees. So little is it true of the Pyrenees that those who have no maps, that is, the local peasantry, never traverse a country until they know it well, and when they get into new country learn all they can from its inhabitants, get themselves accompanied if possible, and keep to a path. You will find that the hunters who know the mountains are always local men. The Pyrenees are built in such a fashion and on such a scale that you not only can, but must, lose yourself in the course of any long wandering unless you have some sort of guide to your hand. There is only one kind of travel off the road which you can possibly undertake without a map, and that will be pottering about one small district with a porter, a friend, or a mule to carry a tent and plenty of provisions; but if you are attempting several crossings of the ridges, and especially if you are attempting such a task on foot, a map is absolutely necessary to you.

Whatever kind of map you take with you into the hills, you must also take with you a small compass, and that is why I mention that toy later in talking of equipment. You are perpetually asking yourself, as you compare the map with the landscape, which peak is which, and it is often essential to get the right one on the right bearings. Nothing is easier than to mistake one part of a ridge for another.

If you are in bad weather or in the dark or enclosed, the compass gives you a general direction, as for instance upon the track I describe later in the great wood going to Formiguères, and the compass further tells you at what point your valley begins to turn in a certain direction. Now a bend of this sort is very often the only indication you have for the exact place in which to branch off for a port, or to look for a cabane. Remember the variation, which is on the average for this range about 14 degrees, that is, the true north is 14 degrees to the right of the direction the needle points to.

A map or maps, then, you must determine to take, and it next remains to examine what sort of maps are available for the whole range.

There are but three of the greater countries in the whole world (to my knowledge, at least) which have sufficient and numerous maps, these are England, France, and Germany. I can imagine what reproach and criticism such a statement may bring from those who know the admirable work done in India, and the special but laborious surveys of Italy and of the United States. But I do say (as far as my travels extend) that maps valuable for the purposes of a man on foot and covering a whole country are confined to these three among the greater states. To tell the truth, there is but one large country that possesses perfect ones, and that is our own. Nowhere else in the world (to my knowledge, at least) has a complete survey of every detail of the soil been made, as it has been made under the Crown of the United Kingdom. And if foreigners judge, as they are apt to judge, of our cartography by the excellent one-inch scale map alone, they should remember that we also possess the six-inch, and in some cases the twenty-five inch to supplement it. Neither France nor Germany can boast of such a survey.

Now let me abandon this digression and discuss what maps are valuable in the Pyrenees.

First, upon the Spanish side, there is nothing. Every one who tries to get a good cartographical indication of the approaches to the Pyrenees upon the Spanish side is baffled. Outside of my own experience, I have heard of many attempts and they have all failed. There is indeed a legend of a wonderful military map in Madrid or elsewhere, but I have never seen it, nor have I ever seen anyone who has seen it. There is a good contour map extending outwards from Madrid in various sections, but it does not get anywhere near the Pyrenees. There is a geological map of Spain upon which some people fall back in despair, but it tells you very little about Spain except the geology. It is on an extremely large scale, 1/400,000 if I remember right, and it is horrible to have to use it even for the most general purposes of travel.

There is a large general map of Spain, drawn in Germany, which is equally useless for the pedestrian; it comprises the whole country within a space that could easily be hung over the chimney-piece of a small room.

In a word, there is no map of Spain for the foot traveller upon the Spanish side. Everything of that kind which exists so far is (I again qualify the statement by adding “to my knowledge”) of French workmanship.

It is therefore the French maps which the traveller must consider, and I will detail these in their order with their respective advantages.

It must first be remarked that these maps are to be regarded as official and unofficial; the official ones should be divided into those proceeding from the French War Office and those proceeding from the French Home Office. The importance of this will appear in a moment.

Of the unofficial maps (which are very numerous) the most important by far is that published and printed by Schrader, and this is important only because it gives contours (at rather large intervals, it is true) on the Spanish side as well as upon the French.

The map can be ordered of Messrs. Sifton & Praed, The Map House, St. James’s Street, and costs (pre-war) twelve shillings for the six sheets. Its value consists in giving the traveller details of all the difficult central bit between Sallent and the Encantados. The French contours, as will immediately appear, are easily obtainable elsewhere; but to know the Spanish side, the difficulties of the way between Panticosa (for instance) and Bielsa, Schrader’s map is a great advantage; it is final on the heights, the steepness, and the changes in direction of the way.

The official maps consist _first_ of the War Office maps, the scale of which is 1/80,000 and 1/320,000.

The first thing to appreciate with regard to the French maps, is that all of them, whether from the Home Office or from the War Office (and in a country such as France the work of these two departments is very different), are based upon the 1/80,000 survey. It was this survey, undertaken by the General Staff in the course of the nineteenth century, which formed the basis of every other map that Frenchmen use. Certain of its early details were slightly inaccurate, as the heights of the Pelvoux group in Savoy, which Mr. Whymper, when he climbed those mountains, corrected. It is, however, the best monument of cartography left by the nineteenth century. Nothing has since appeared to rival it in any country upon the same scale. We must except of course the highly detailed large-scale survey of special districts, which may happen to be, by a political accident, autonomous and wealthy. Belgium has a far better map, upon which indeed all modern work upon the Belgian battlefields is based. Switzerland also has a better map. But no such large area as that of the French Republic has upon so small a scale (much less than one inch to the mile), so complete a record of every track, wood, habitation, height, and watercourse.

The 1/320,000 is merely a reduction of this map; it is of service to people who motor or bicycle, to anyone who uses the high road, and who wishes to be able occasionally to wander into by-paths; but for little local details and difficulties it should not be consulted. It is useful advice to anyone who desires to know the Pyrenees that he should consult before leaving home a map of the whole range upon the 1/320,000 scale, but travel in the hills with the 1/80,000 scale.

The disadvantage, however, of the military map, accurate though it is, and full of detail though it is, lies in two points inseparable from the early conditions under which it was produced; the first of these is the use of one colour, that of printers’ ink, so that the line marking a stream, a wall, or a path are similar; the second derives from this, and is the confusion of so many small details, all in _one_ colour and in black. There are no contour lines. The hatching, though bold, does not give exact heights, save where such heights are marked in figures, and what with the lines marking the paths in mountainous districts, the water-courses, the roads, the marks indicating the rocks, habitations, etc., the 1/80,000 map tends (though it still remains the best map for a very careful student, e.g., for a soldier on manœuvres) to be somewhat crowded and confused.

An appreciation of the demerits of these maps, and perhaps a certain rivalry between the two departments, led the French Home Office to undertake an Ordnance Map of its own. This map is in various scales, of which the sheets showing the Pyrenees—the only ones that concern us—are in 1/100,000 and 1/200,000. Let me explain the general qualities of both and the advantages and disadvantages attaching to either of these.

Both are in colours, giving water-courses and lakes in blue, woods in green, roads in red, etc., and that is an enormous and immediate simplification upon the old-fashioned black map.

Both are brought up to date with more care than the military map; both are less crowded with detail, and both indicate such civilian necessities as the telephone, telegraph, post-office, etc. On the other hand, neither contains hatching—the only true way of representing a country-side to the eye—and neither give that minute and exact multiplicity of markings which it is the boast of the military map to afford. The civil map is more practical, the military map more full of duty and more accurate.

It must finally be remembered that the scale of the civil maps, even of 1/100,000 is so small as to impede the setting down of details such as we have on a one-inch Ordnance Map. It is three to four times smaller superficially than our official map in England. Nevertheless, for reasons that I shall presently show, it is on the whole the best map to carry in the Pyrenees.

The 1/200,000 map is but a reproduction on a smaller scale of the 1/100,000 map. It has the great advantage of contour lines, but the scale is so small and the contours so pressed together, that, though it is invaluable for giving a general and plastic impression of the chain (to look down on a general map of the Pyrenees on this scale is like looking down on a model of the French side of the range), it is of little use for telling one, as a contour map should tell one, exactly how much higher this spot is than that other spot. When you are climbing and you wish to identify your position, you have usually to estimate comparative heights on a delicate scale and at a short distance, for which the 1/200,000 map is of very little use to you.

One way of using the contours of the 1/200,000 which is laborious, but not without value, is to trace the _deeper_ contour lines in some particular district, which you are specially studying. These deeper contour lines stand out much more clearly than the intermediate faint ones, which, as I have said, are too numerous for a mountain district. They can be followed clearly even in the dark shading of a steep ridge, and are set every hundred metres apart. When such a tracing has been made, neglecting the finer intermediate lines, you have a good working relief plan of the mountain you propose to deal with.

Of all the area open to the climber and the man on foot in the Pyrenees, that upon the Spanish side of the frontier is the larger and wilder, and this for two reasons. First, because property and its attendant limitations is more developed upon the northern slope, so that the vast areas common to all, are, if anything, vaster upon the southern side, and secondly, that the formation of the range between the ramparts above the Ebro and the main chain, covers a larger space than that between the main chain and the French plains. Yet, as I have just said, it is on the Spanish side that proper maps are lacking, and one must do the best one can to supplement them by the French extensions.

A common plan guides all the French maps in their delineation of territory south of the frontier. Colours, contour lines, hatching, and every detail are omitted. Heights are given in certain cases (but those are rarer of course than on the French side). The names of towns and, in some cases, their telegraphic and postal communications are marked, but upon the whole the Spanish side upon the French maps has far less detail than is accorded for the territory to which the maps directly relate.

However, let me explain the various advantages and disadvantages, for use upon the Spanish side, of the four types of French maps I have mentioned.

The 1/320,000 of the Ministry of War may be neglected; whatever use it has upon the French side, it is negligible upon the Spanish.

The 1/80,000 map of the Ministry of War marks the main water-courses upon the Spanish side, the main peaks, and the main important ports and cols, with their heights, but it does not afford any indication of the shape of the country. It is a bare white space of paper with but few lines traversing it, one or two names, and one or two numbers on each sheet.

On the whole it is better not to use the French military maps for the Spanish side; here it is the maps of the Ministry of the Interior which must chiefly be relied upon. Of these the 1/100,000 map is the best. It is true that the colours, which are so valuable in the differentiation of the French side, are absent upon the Spanish, save in the case of water-courses, which are marked in blue upon either slope of the range. There is no indication of woods upon the Spanish side, as there is upon the French, and as this indication is useful for purposes of camping, the loss of it on the south side is often felt. Moreover, the absence of colour upon the Spanish side often makes one misinterpret the nature of the mountains upon these maps, giving to the whole a bare look, since the rocky and bare spaces on the French side are similarly left uncovered. On the other hand, the 1/100,000 French map does afford upon the Spanish side a very large number of detailed points of information. I will enumerate them in their order.

1. The general shape of the country is indicated by shading, the light being supposed to come (as is the case throughout this series of maps) from the north-west.

2. Steep rocks and cliffs, the presence of which should always be indicated to the traveller, are carefully marked upon either side of the frontier.

3. Paths, the importance of which the reader will presently appreciate, are clearly marked, with all details, as exactly as on the French side.

4. Every habitation is marked, and in the case of villages and towns, the number of inhabitants, the postal and other facilities.

5. Most of the heights are marked, though not so many as on the northern slope, but at any rate the height of every important port, col, and peak appears. In general, it may be said that there is no map of the Pyrenees, immediately to the south of the frontier, equivalent to those of the districts which happen to fall within the French 1/100,000 survey.

This leads me to the principal drawback connected with the use of the French 1/100,000 map upon the Spanish side, which is, that it only includes such Spanish territory as accidentally happens to fall within each square blocked out in the French survey.

The English reader is acquainted, it may be presumed, with the one-inch Ordnance Map, and he will have remarked, how, if it so happens that a little corner of land escapes the regular series of rectangles into which the one-inch Ordnance Map is divided, that little corner of land will have a map all to itself, though the greater part of the rectangular space so marked may be taken up by the sea. In the same way any little bit of French territory which projects beyond the scheme of rectangles into which the whole survey is divided, has, added to it, an outer part completing the map and extending into Spain; where (as for instance on the sheet called “Gavarnie”) the little piece of French territory so projecting is small in comparison with the whole rectangle, a considerable piece of Spanish territory will be included; but where (as for instance on the sheet called “Bayonne”) the frontier very nearly corresponds with the survey, very little of the Spanish side will be included.

From this it is easy to perceive that the maximum amount of Spanish territory in any one map must be inferior either in width or in length to the full dimensions of each sheet, and that the total distance into Spain, which any one sheet can mark, south of the frontier, is less than the width of any one sheet. Now each sheet of the French 1/100,000 map includes 15 minutes of a degree from north to south, that is, about 17 miles. One may say, therefore, that the amount of Spanish territory shown to the south of the frontier in this excellent survey is always less than one full day’s journey. In many parts it narrows to far less than this. There are not a few parts of the range where even for those who make but short excursions on to the Spanish side, this drawback is of considerable effect. For instance, in the easy and pleasant excursion which takes one from Andorra to Urgel, the 1/100,000 map cuts one short at 42° 30′ below Andorra, and 42° 15′ beyond the main road to Urgel, and no small part of the road lies south or west of this limitation.

The 1/200,000 map somewhat makes up for the deficiency of the 1/100,000 map, but not in a complete manner. The frontier sections of this survey (five in number) show Spanish territory to the extent of some 30 miles in the Basque country, they give but a tiny corner of the extreme east of the territory of Aragon, they give over 30 miles for the greater part of the north of that province, but in Catalonia the belt is restricted to far less. Moreover, the Spanish details afforded are much slighter than in the 1/100,000. There is no indication of the relief of the country, no shading, only the principal water-courses and the principal highways and mule roads are marked. But it is here that the 1/200,000 is useful, if one has the intention of walking for some days upon the Spanish side. Thus the direction from Castellbo in Catalonia to Esterri can be roughly drawn upon the 1/200,000 and will not be discovered so clearly in any other survey.

It now remains to sum up the respective advantages of these four maps for the general purposes of travel, and to give a few comments upon the uses of each.

The 1/320,000 military map will not be of great use to the traveller. It can only show him the main roads if he is motoring or cycling, and present him with a general view of the country for which the clearer 1/200,000 map will serve his purpose better.

The 1/80,000 military map is the best for minute details, and if a man desires to ramble off and explore some special districts of this great range, it is the 1/80,000 map which will be of most use to him, though its value will be supplemented and greatly extended by using it in conjunction with the colour 1/100,000 map of the Ministry of the Interior or Home Office.

This last, as the reader will have seen, is the staple map, upon which every form of travel depends. If no other be purchased, this at least is always indispensable.

It is well here to summarize briefly certain points in the reading of this map, which do not immediately appear on one’s first acquaintance with it.