V.
Toward the south the river becomes a torrent. Half a league from Luchon it is swallowed up in a deep defile of red rocks, many of which have fallen; the bed is choked with blocks; the two walls of rock close together in the north, and the dammed-up water roars to get out of its prison; but the trees grow in the crevices, and along the wall the white flowers of the bramble hang in locks.
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Very near here, on a round eminence of bare rock, rises the ruin of a Moorish tower, named Cas-tel-Vieil. Its side is bordered with a frightful mountain, black and brown, perfectly bald and resembling a decayed amphitheatre; the layers hang one over another, notched, dislocated, bleeding; the sharp edges and fractures are yellowed with wretched moss, vegetable ulcers that defile with their leprous patches the nudity of the stone. The pieces of this monstrous skeleton hold together only by their mass; it is crannied with deep fissures, bristling with falling blocks, broken to the very base; it is nothing but a ruin dreary and colossal, sitting at the entrance of a valley, like a battered giant.
There was an old beggar-woman there, with naked feet and arms, who was worthy of the mountain. For a dress she had a bundle of rags of every color sewn together, and remained the whole day long crouched in the dust. One might have counted the muscles and tendons of her limbs; the sun had dried her flesh and burned her skin; she resembled the rock against which she was sitting; she was tall, with large, regular features, a brow seamed with wrinkles like the bark of an oak, beneath her grizzled lids a savage black eye, a mat of white hair hanging in the dust. If a sculptor had wished to make a statue of Dryness, the model was there.
The valley narrows and ascends; the Gave rolls between two slopes of great forests, and falls in a constant succession of cascades. The eyes are satiated with freshness and verdure; the trees mount to the very sky, thickset, splendid; the magnificent light falls like a rain on the immense slope; the myriads of plants suck it in, and the mighty sap that gorges them overflows in luxury and vigor.
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On all hands the heat and thewater invigorate and propagate them; they accumulate; enormous beeches hang above the torrent; ferns people the brink; moss hangs in green garlands on the arcades of roots; wild flowers grow by families in the crevices of the beeches; the long branches go with a leap to the further brink; the water glides, boils, leaps from one bank to the other with a tireless violence, and pierces its way by a succession of tempests.
Further on some noble beeches climb the slope, forming an inclined plane of foliage. The sun gives lustre to their rustling tops. The cool shadow spreads its dampness between their columns, over the ribbons of sparse grass, and on strawberries red as coral. From time to time the light falls through an opening, and gushes in cataracts over their flanks which it illuminates; isles of brightness then cleave the dim depths; the topmost leaves move softly their diaphanous shade; the shadow almost disappears, so strong and universal is the splendor. Meanwhile a small hidden spring beads its necklace of crystal among the roots, and great velvet butterflies wheel in the air in broken starts, like falling chestnut-leaves.
At the bottom of a hollow filled with plants, appears the hospice of Bagnères, a heavy house of stone, which serves as a refuge. The mountains open opposite it their amphitheatre of rock, a huge and blasted pit; to crown the whole the clouds have gathered, and dull the rent enclosure which fences off the horizon—enclosure that winds with dreary air, perfectly barren, with the grinning army of its pinnacles, its raw cuts, its murderous steeps; beneath the dome of clouds, wheels a band of screaming crows. This well seems their eyry; wings are needed to escape the hostility of all those bristling points, and of so many yawning gulfs which draw on the passer in order to dash him to atoms.
Soon the road seems brought to an end; wall after wall, the serried rocks obstruct every outlet; still you advance, zigzag, among rounded blocks, along a falling stairway; the wind sweeps down these, howling. No sign of life, no herbage; everywhere the horrible nakedness and the chill of winter. Squat rocks lean beetling over the precipice; others project their heads to meet one another; between them the eye plunges into dark gulfs whose bottom it cannot reach. The violent juttings of all parts advance and rise, piercing the air; down there, at the bottom, they spring forward in lines, climbing over one another, in heaps, bristling against the sky their hedge of pikes. Suddenly in this terrible battalion a cleft is opened; the Maladetta springs up like a great spectre; forests of shivered pines wind about its foot; a girdle of black rocks embosses its arid breast, and the glaciers make it a crown.
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Nothing is dead, and in respect to this our feeble organs deceive us; those mountain skeletons seem to us inert because our eyes are used to the mobile vegetation of the plains; but nature is eternally alive, and its forces struggle together in these sepulchres of granite and snow, as well as in the human hives or the most flourishing forests. Each particle of rock presses or supports its neighbors; their apparent immobility is an equilibrium of forces; everything works and struggles; nothing is calm and nothing uniform. Those blocks that the eye takes to be massive are networks of atoms infinitely removed from each other, drawn by innumerable and contrary attractions, invisible labyrinths where unceasing transformations are wrought out, where ferments the mineral life, as active as other lives, but grander. And ours, what is it, confined within the experience of a few years and the memory of a few centuries? What are we, but a transitory excrescence, formed of a little thickened air, grown by chance in a cleft of the eternal rock? What is our thought, so high in dignity, so little in power? The mineral substance and its forces are the real possessors and the only masters of the world. Pierce below this crust which sustains us as far as that crucible of lava which tolerates us. Here strive and are developed the great forces, the heat and the affinities which have formed the soil, have composed the rocks which support our life, have furnished its cradle for it, and are preparing its tomb. Everything here is transformed and stirs as in the heart of a tree; and our race, nested on a point of the bark, perceives not that silent vegetation which has lifted the trunk, spread the branches, and whose invincible progress brings in turns flowers, fruits and death. Meanwhile a vaster movement bears the planet with its companions around the sun, borne itself toward an unknown goal, in the infinite space wherein eddies the infinite people of the worlds. Who will say that they are not there merely to decorate and fill it? These great rolling masses are the first thought and the broader development of nature; they live by the same right with ourselves, they are sons of the same mother, and we recognize in them our kin and elders.
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But in this family there are ranks. I know I am but an atom; to annihilate me, the least of these stones would suffice; a bone half as thick as my thumb is the wretched cuirass that defends my thought from delirium and death; my entire action and that of all the machines invented within sixty centuries would not avail to scrape one of the leaves of the mineral crust that supports and nurtures me. And yet in this all-powerful nature I count for something. If among her works I am the most fragile, I am also the last; if she confines me within a corner of her expanse, it is in me that she ends. It is in me that she attains the indivisible point where she is concentred and perfected; and this mind through which she knows herself opens to her a new career in reproducing her works, imitating her order, penetrating her work, feeling its magnificence and eternity. In it is opened a second world reflecting the other, reflecting itself also, and, beyond itself and that other, grasping the eternal law which engenders them both. To-morrow I shall die, and I am not capable of displacing any portion of this rock. But during one moment I have thought, and within the limits of that thought nature and the universe were comprehended.
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