V.
Soon the mountains grow bald, the trees disappear; nothing upon the slopes but a poor brushwood: Bareges is seen. The landscape is hideous. The flank of the mountain is creviced with whitish slides; the narrow and wasted plain disappears beneath the coarse sand; the poor herbage, dry and weighed down, fails at every step; the earth is as if ripped open, and the slough, through its yawning wound, exposes the very entrails; the beds of yellowish limestone are laid bare; one walks on sands and trains of rounded pebbles; the Gave itself half disappears under heaps of grayish stones, and with difficulty gets out of the desert it has made. This broken-up soil is as ugly as it is melancholy; the debris are dirty and mean; they date from yesterday; you feel that the devastation begins anew with every year. Ruins, in order to be beautiful, must be either grand or blackened by time; here, the stones have just been unearthed, they are still soaking in the mud; two miry streamlets creep through the gullies: the place reminds one of an abandoned quarry.
The town of Bareges is as ugly as its avenue; melancholy houses, ill patched up; at some distance apart are long rows of booths and wooden huts, where handkerchiefs and poor ironmongery are sold. It is because the avalanche accumulates every winter in a mountain crevice on the left, and as it slides down carries off a side of the street; these booths are a scar. The cold mists collect here, the wind penetrates and the little town is uninhabitable in winter.
[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
The around is enshrouded un der fifteen feet of snow; all the inhabitants emigrate; seven or eight mountaineers are left here with provisions, to watch over the houses and the furniture. It often happens that these poor people cannot get as far as Luz, and remain imprisoned during several weeks.
The bathing establishment is miserable, the compartments are cellars without air or light; there are only sixteen cabinets, all dilapidated. Invalids are often obliged to bathe at night. The three pools are fed by water which has just served for the bathing-tubs; that for the poor receives the water discharged from the other two. These pools, piscines, are low and dark, a sort of stifling, under-ground prison. One must have pretty good health in order to be cured in them.
[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
The military hospital, banished to the north of the little town, is a melancholy plastered building, whose windows are ranged in rows with military regularity. The invalids, wrapped in a gray cloak too large for them, climb one by one the naked slope, and seat themselves among the stones; they bask whole hours in the sun, and look straight before them with a resigned air. An invalid’s days are so long! These wasted faces resume an air of gayety when a comrade passes; they exchange a jest: even in a hospital, at Bareges even, a Frenchman remains a Frenchman.
You meet poor old men on crutches, invalids, climbing the steep street. Those visages reddened by the inclement air, those pitiful bent or twisted limbs, the swollen or enfeebled flesh, the dull eyes, already dead, are painful to behold. At their age, habituated to misery, they ought to feel only the suffering of the moment, not to trouble themselves about the past, and no longer to care for the future. You need to think that their torpid soul lives on like a machine. They are the ruins of man alongside those of the soil.
The aspect of the west is still more sombre. An enormous mass of blackish and snowy peaks girdles the horizon. They are hung over the valley like an eternal threat. Those spines so rugged, so manifold, so angular, give to the eye the sensation of an invincible hardness. There comes from them a cold wind, that drives heavy clouds towards Bareges; nothing is gay but the two jewelled streamlets which border the street and prattle noisily over the blue pebbles.
