VI.
The harvests, pale in the north, here wave with a reflex of reddish gold. A warmer sun makes the vigorous verdure shine more richly; the stalks of maize spring from the earth like discharges of rockets, and their strong, wrinkled leaves fall over in plumes; such burning rays are needed to urge the sap through those gross fibres and gild the massy spike.
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Toward Gan, the hills, over which undulates the road, draw nearer together, and you travel on through little green valleys, planted with ash and alder in clusters, according to the caprices of the slopes, and with their feet bathed in living water; a pellucid stream borders the road, with waters sombre and hurried under the cover of the trees, and then, by fits and starts, brilliant and blue as the sky. Four times in the course of a league it encounters a mill, leaps and foams, then resumes its course, hurried and stealthy; during two leagues we have its company, half hid among the trees that it nourishes, and breathing the freshness it exhales. In these gorges, water is the mother of all life and the nurse of all beauty.
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At Louvie the valley of Ossau opens up between two mountains covered with brushwood, bald in places, spotted with moss and heather from which the rocks peep out like bones, while the flanks start forth in grayish embossments or bend in dark crevices. The plain of the harvests and meadows buries itself in the anfractuosities as if in creeks; its contour folds itself about each new mass; it essays to scale the lower ridges, and stops, vanquished by the barren rock. We go through three or four hamlets whitened by dust, whose roofs shine with a dull color like tarnished lead. Then the horizon is shut off; Mount Gourzy, robed in forests, bars the route; beyond and above, like a second barrier, the peak of the Ger lifts its bald head, silvered with snows. The carriage slowly scales an acclivity which winds upon the flank of the mountain; at the turn of a rock, in the shelter of a small gorge, may be seen Eaux Bonnes.
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