And now, before proceeding further, I may be allowed to describe, with some minuteness, the landscape which will greet the traveller in the Landes. Its mere surface-aspect I have already sketched; but general terms go but a small way towards indicating the dreary grandeurs of that solemn wilderness. Over all its gloom and barrenness—over all its "blasted heaths" and monotonous pine-woods, and sodden morasses, and glaring heaps of shifting sand—there is a strong and pervading sense of loneliness, a grandeur and intensity of desolation, which, as it were, clothes the land with a sad, solemn poetry peculiar to itself. Emerging from black forests of fir, the wanderer may find himself upon a plain, flat as a billiard-table, and apparently boundless as the ocean, clad in one unvaried, unbroken robe of dusky heath. Sometimes stripes and ridges, or great ragged patches of sand, glisten in the fervid sunshine; sometimes belts of scraggy young fir-trees appear rising from the horizon on the left, and fading into the horizon on the right. Occasionally a brighter shade of green, with jungles of willows and coarse water-weeds, giant rushes, and marish-mosses, and tangled masses of dank vegetation, will tell of the unfathomable swamp beneath. Dark veins of muddy water will traverse the flat oozy land, sometimes, perhaps, losing themselves in broad shallow lakes, bordered again by the endless sand-banks and stretches of shadowy pine. The dwellings which dot this dreary, yet, in its way, solemnly poetic landscape, are generally mere isolated huts, separated sometimes by many miles, often by many leagues. Round them the wanderer will descry a miserable field or two, planted with a stunted crop of rye, millet, or maize. The cottages are mouldering heaps of sod and unhewn and unmortared stones, clustered round with ragged sheds composed of masses of tangled bushes, pine stakes, and broadleaved reeds, beneath which cluster, when not seeking their miserable forage in the woods, two or three cows, mere skin and bone, and a score or two of the most abject-looking sheep which ever browsed.
Proceeding through the Landes towards the coast, a long chain of lakes and water-courses, running parallel to the ocean, breaks their uniformity. The country becomes a waste of shallow pools, and of land which is parched in summer and submerged in winter. Running in devious arms and windings through moss and moor and pine, these "lakes of the dismal swamp" form labyrinths of gulfs and morasses which only the most experienced shepherds can safely thread. Here and there a village, or rather bourg, will be seen upon their banks, half hidden in the pine-woods; and a roughly-built fishing-punt or two will be observed floating like the canoe of a savage in the woodland lakes. Sometimes, as in the case of the basin of Arcachon, which will be presently described, these waters are arms of the sea; and the retreating tide leaves scores of square miles of putrid swamp. Sometimes they are mere collections of surface-drainage, accumulating without any means of escape to the ocean, and perilous in the extreme to the dwellers on their shores. For, forming the extreme line of coast, there runs, for near two hundred miles, from the Adour to the Garonne, a range of vast hills of white sand, as fine as though it had been sifted for an hour-glass. Every gale changes the shape of these rolling mountains. A strong wind from the land flings millions of tons of sand per hour into the sea, to be washed up again by the surf, flung on the beach, and in the first Biscay gale blown in whirlwinds inland. A winter hurricane again from the west has filled up with sand square miles of shallow lake, driving the displaced waters inland, dispersing them in gleaming lakes among the pine-woods, flooding, and frequently destroying the scattered hamlets of the people, and burying for ever their fields of millet and rye. I shall presently have occasion to touch upon some disasters of this sort. Meantime, having made the aspect of the Landes familiar to the reader, I pursue the thread of my journey.
The novelty of a population upon stilts—men, women, and children, spurning the ground, and living habitually four or five feet higher than the rest of mankind—irresistibly takes the imagination, and I leant anxiously from the carriage to catch the first glimpse of a Landean in his native style. I looked long in vain. We passed hut after hut, but they seemed deserted, except that the lean swine burrowing round the turf walls gave evidence that the pork had proprietors somewhere. At last I was gratified; as the train passed not very quickly along a jungle of bushes and coppice-wood, a black, shaggy figure rose above it, as if he were standing upon the ends of the twigs. The effect was quite eldritch. We saw him but as a vision, but the high conical hat with broad brims, like Mother Red-cap's, the swarthy, bearded face, and the rough, dirty sheep-skin, which hung fleecily from the shoulders of the apparition, haunted me. He was come and gone, and that was all. Presently, however, the natives began to heave in sight in sufficient profusion. There were three gigantic-looking figures stalking together across an expanse of dusky heath. I thought them men, and rather tall ones; but my companions, more accustomed to the sight, said they were boys on comparatively short stilts, herding the sheep, which were scattered like little greyish stones all over the waste. Anon, near a cottage, we saw a woman, in dark, coarse clothes, with shortish petticoats, sauntering almost four feet from the ground, and next beheld at a distance, and on the summit of a sand-ridge, relieved against the sky, three figures, each leaning back, and supported, as it seemed, not only by two daddy long-legs' limbs, but by a third, which appeared to grow out of the small of their backs. The phenomenon was promptly explained by my bloused cicerone, who seemed to feel especial pleasure at my interest in the matter. The third leg was a pole or staff the people carry, with a new moon-shaped crutch at the top, which, applied to the back, serves as a capital prop. With his legs spread out, and his back-stay firmly pitched, the shepherd of the Landes feels as much at home as you would in the easiest of easy chairs.
"He will remain so for hours, without stirring, and without being wearied," said my fellow-passenger. "It is a way of sitting down in the Landes. Why, a shepherd, could stand so, long enough to knit a pair of stockings, ay, and not have an ache in his back. Sometimes they play cards, so, without once coming off their stilts."
"Ay, and cheat! Mon Dieu! how they cheat!" said the Bordeaux gentleman. The native of the Landes reluctantly admitted that was the truth, and the other went on:—
"These fellows here on the stilts are the most confounded gamblers in Europe. Men and women, it's all the same—play, play, play; they would stake their bodies first, and their souls after. Tenez; I once heard of a lot of the fellows playing in a wood till they were all but starved. In the day they played by daylight, and when night came, they kindled a bonfire and played in the glare. They played on and on, in spite of hunger and thirst. They staked their money—not that they had much of that—and their crops—not that they were of great value either—and their pigs, and their sheep, and their Landes ponies, and then their furniture, and then their clothes, and, last of all, their stilts—for a Landes man thinks his stilts the principal part of his wardrobe; and, sacré! monsieur, three of the fellows were ruined out and out, and had to give up their hats, and sheep-skins, and sabots, while the man who was the greatest winner walked home on his own stilts, with the stilts of all his comrades tucked under his arm."
"Gaming is their fault—their great fault," meekly acknowledged the blouse.
"Not at all!" said his antagonist. "Cheating is their great fault. A Landes shepherd would cheat the devil with a greasy pack of cards."