II.
Geology is a noble science. Upon this summit theories grow lively; the arguments of the books breathe new life into the story of the mountains, and the past appears grander than the present. This country was in the beginning a solitary and boiling sea, then slowly cooled, finally peopled by living creatures and built up by their debris. Thus were formed the ancient limestones, the slates of transition and several of the secondary rocks. What myriads of ages are accumulated in a single phrase! Time is a solitude in which we set up here and there our boundaries; they reveal its immensity, but do not measure it.
This crust cleaves, and a long wave of molten granite heaves itself up, forming the lofty chain of the Gave, of the Nestes, the Garonne, the Mala-detta, Néouvielle.
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From here you see Néouvielle in the north-east. How this wall of fire worked in lifting itself amidst this upturned sea, the imagination of man will never conceive. The liquid mass of granite formed a paste among the rocks; the lower layers were changed into slate beneath the fiery blast; the level grounds rose up, and were overturned. The subterranean stream rose with an effort so abrupt, that they were stuck to its flanks in layers almost perpendicular. “It was congealed in torment, and its agitation is still painted in its petrified waves.”
How much time rolled away between this revolution and the next? Monuments are wanting; the centuries have left no traces. There is a page torn out in the history of the earth. Our ignorance like our knowledge overwhelms us. We see one infinity, and from it we divine another which we do not see.
At last the ocean changed its bed, perhaps from the uplifting of America; from the south-west came a sea to burst upon the chain. The shock fell upon the dark embattled barrier that you see towards Gavarnie. There was a frightful destruction of marine animals: Their corpses have formed the shelly banks that you cross in mounting to la Brèche; several layers of la Brèche, of the Taillon and of Mont Perdu, are fields still fetid with death. The rolling sea, tearing up its bed, drifted it against the wall of rocks, piled it against the sides, heaped it upon the summits, set mountain upon mountain, covered the immense rock, and oscillated in furious currents in its ravaged basin.
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I seemed to see on the horizon the oozy surface coming higher than the summits, lifting its waves against the sky, eddying in the valleys, and howling above the drowned mountains like a tempest.
That sea was bringing half of the Pyrenees; its raging waters overlaid the primitive declivity with calcareous strata, tilted and torn; upon these the quieted waters deposited the high horizontal layers. Yonder, in the south-west, the Vignemale is covered with them. In order to raise up the summits, generations of marine creatures were born and died silent and inert populations which swarmed in the warm ooze, and watched through their green waves the rays of the blue-tinged sun. They have perished along with their sepulchre; the storms have torn open the banks where they had buried themselves, and these shreds of their wreck scarce tell how many myriads of centuries this shrouded world has seen pass away.
One day at last, the great mountains which form the horizon on the south were seen to grow, Troumousse, the Vignemale, Mont Perdu, and all the summits that surround Gèdres. The soil had burst open a second time. A wave of new granite arose, laden with the ancient granite, and with the prodigious mass of the limestones; the alluvia rose to more than ten thousand feet; the ancient summits of pure granite were surpassed; the beds of shells were lifted into the clouds, and the upheaved tops found themselves forever above the seas.
Two seas have dwelt upon these summits; two streams of burning rock have erected these chains. What will be the next revolution? How long time will man yet last? A contraction of the crust which bears him will cause a wave of lava to gush forth or will displace the level of the seas. We live between two accidents of the soil; our history occupies, with room to spare, a line in the history of the earth; our life depends upon a variation in the heat; our duration is for a moment, and our force a nothing. We resemble the little blue forget-me-nots which you pluck as you go down the slope; their form is delicate, their structure admirable; nature lavishes them and crushes them; she uses all her industry in shaping them, and all her carelessness in destroying them. There is more art in them than in the whole mountain. Have they any ground for pretending that the mountain was made for them?