IV.
This valley is everywhere refreshed and made, fertile by running water. On the road to Pierrefitte two swift streams prattle under the shade of the flowering hedges: no travelling companion could be gayer. On both sides, from every meadow, flow streamlets that cross each other, separate, come together, and finally together spring into the Gave. In this way the peasants water all their crops; a field has five or six lines of streams which run hemmed in by beds of slate. The bounding troop tosses itself in the sunlight, like a madcap band of boys just let loose from school. The turf that they nourish is of an incomparable freshness and vigor; the herbage grows thick along the brink, bathes its feet in the water, or lies under the rush of the little waves, and its ribbons tremble in a pearly reflection under the ripples of silver. You cannot walk ten steps without stumbling upon a waterfall; swollen and boiling cascades pour down upon great blocks of stone; transparent sheets stretch themselves over the rocky shelves; threadlike streaks of foam wind from the verge to the very valley; springs ooze out alongside the hanging grasses and fall drop by drop; on the right rolls the Gave, and drowns all these murmurs with its great monotonous voice. The beautiful blue iris thrives along the marshy slopes; woods and Crops climb very high among the rocks. The valley smiles, encircled with verdure; but on the horizon the embattled peaks, the serrate crests and black escarpments of the notched mountains rise into the blue sky, beneath their mantle of snow.
[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
Back of Luz is a bare, rounded eminence, called Saint-Pierre, crowned by a fragment of gray ruin, and commanding a view of the whole valley. When the sky has been overcast, I have spent here entire hours without a moment of weariness: beneath its cloudy Curtain the air is moderately warm. Sudden patches of sunlight stripe the Gave, or illumine the harvests hung midway on the mountain slope. The swallows, with shrill cries, wheel high in the creeping vapors; the sound of the Gave comes up, softened by distance into a harmony that is almost aerial. The wind breathes, and dies away; a troop of little flowers flutters at the passage of its wing; the buttercups are drawn up in line; frail little pinks bury in the herbage their rosy-purple stars; slender-stemmed grasses nod over the broad slaty patches; the air is filled with the fragrance of thyme. Are they not happy, these solitary plants, watered by the dew, fanned by the breezes?
[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
This height is a desert; no one comes to tread them down; they grow after their own sweet will, in clefts of the rock, by families, useless and free, flooded by the loveliest sunlight. And man, the slave of necessity, begs and calculates under penalty of his life! Three children, all in rags, came upon the scene: “What are you looking for here?”
“Butterflies.”
“What for?”
“To sell.”
The youngest had a sort of tumor on his forehead. “Please, sir, a sou for the little one who is ill.”
