IV.
Above Luchon is a mountain called Super-Bagnères. At the outset I run across the Fountain of Love; it is a hut of planks where beer is sold.
A winding staircase, crossed by springs, then steep pathways in a black forest of firs lead you in two hours to the pastures on the summit. The mountain is about five thousand feet high. These pastures are great undulating hills, ranged in rows, carpeted with short turf and thickset, fragrant thyme; here and there in crowds are broad tufts of a sort of wild iris, the flower of which fades in the month of August.
[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
You reach there fatigued, and on the grass of the highest point you may sleep in the sunlight with the utmost pleasure in life. Clouds of winded ants eddied in the warm rays. In a hollow beneath us we heard the bleating of sheep and of goats. A quarter of a league off, on the back of the mountain, a pool of water was glittering like burnished steel. Here, as on Mount Bergonz and the Pic du Midi, you look on an amphitheatre of mountains. These have not the heroic severity of the primal granite, black rocks clothed with luminous air and white snow. On one side alone, toward the Crabioules mountains, the naked and jagged rocks were silvered with a girdle of glaciers. Everywhere else, the slopes were without escarpment, the forms softened, the angles dulled and rounded. But, although less wild, the amphitheatre of the mountains was imposing. The idea of the simple and imperishable entered with an entire dominion into the subdued mind. Peaceful sensations cradled the soul in their mighty undulations. It harmonized itself with these huge and immovable creatures. It was like a concert of three or four notes indefinitely prolonged and sung by deep voices.
The day was declining, clouds dimmed the chilled sky. The woods, the fields, the mossy moors, the rocks of the slopes, took various hues in the waning light. But this opposition of hues, obliterated by distance and the greatness of the masses, melted into a green and grayish shade, of a melancholy and tender effect, like that of a vast wilderness half stocked with verdure. The shadows of the clouds travelled slowly, darkening the tawny summits. All was in harmony, the monotonous sound of the wind, the calm march of the clouds, the waning of the day, the tempered colors, the softened lines.
[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
Here it is the second age of nature. The earth conceals the rocks, the mosses clothe the earth, the rounded undulations of the upheaved soil resemble the tired waves an hour after the tempest. Luchon is not far from the plains; its mountains are the last billows of the subterranean storm which lifted the Pyrenees; distance has diminished their violence, tempered their grandeur, and softened their steeps.
Toward evening we descended into the hollow where the goats were passing. A spring was running there, caught in the hollowed trunks of trees which answered for watering-troughs to the herds. It is a delicious pleasure after a day’s tramp to bathe hands and lips in the cold fountain. Its sound on this solitary plateau was charming. The water trickled through the wood, among the stones, and everywhere that it glided over the blackened earth the sun covered it with splendor. Lines of reeds marked its track to the brink of the pool. Herdsman and animals had gone down; it was the sole inhabitant of this abandoned field. Was it not singular to meet with a marsh at the height of five thousand feet?