A doubly fatiguing trudge, unbroken by any further episodical visions of desert steeds, but enlivened by the fast increasing thunder of the surf, at length brought us to its foam. Winding through a succession of sand valleys, we climbed a steepish bank, sinking to our knees at every step, and from this last ridge beheld a long, gentle slope, as perfectly smooth as though the sand had been smoothed by a ruler—fining away down to the white creaming sheets of water which swept, with the loud peculiar hiss of the agitated sea, far up and down the level banks. The full force of the great heaving swells was expended in breakers, roaring half a mile from the land; and from their uttermost verge to the tangled heaps of seaweed washed high and dry upon the beach, was a vast belt of foaming water, extending away on either hand in a perfectly straight line as far as the eye could reach, and dividing the shipless expanse of water from the houseless expanse of land. The scene was very solemn. There was not even a seabird overhead—not an insect crawling or humming along the ungrateful sand. Only the grand organ of the surf made its incessant music, and the sharp thin rustle of the moving sand came fitfully upon the ear. I sat down and listened to it, and as I sat, the continually shifting sand gradually rose around me, as the waters rose round the chateau of Chatel-morant. Had I stayed there long enough, only my head would have been visible, like the head of the sphinx.
I dined that day at the hotel, tete-à-tete with a young priest, who was returning to Bordeaux from a visit to his brother, one of the officers of the Preventitive Service, whose lonely barracks are almost the only human habitations which break the weary wilderness stretching from the Adour to the Gironde. One would have thought that there could be but little smuggling on such a coast; but the Duaniers are always autorités, and the waves of the Gulf of Gascony could not, of course, break on French ground without autorités to help them. With respect to the priest, however, he had one of the finest heads and the most perfectly chiselled features I ever saw. The pale high brow—the keen bright eyes, with remarkably long eye-lashes—the tenuity of the cartilage of the nose, and the perfect delicacy of the mouth—all told of intellect in no common development; while the meek sweetness of the noble face had something in it perfectly heavenly. Fling in imagination an aureole round that head, and you had the head of a youthful martyr, or a saint canonized for early virtues. There was devotion and aspiration in every line of the countenance—a meek, mild gentleness, beautifully in keeping with every word he uttered, and every movement he made. I was the more struck with all this, inasmuch as there is not an uglier, meaner, nor, I will add, dirtier, set of worthy folks in all the world, than the priests of France. Nine times out of ten, they are big-jowled, coarse, animal-looking men, with mottled faces, and skins which do not take kindly to the razor. The arrangements about the neck show a decided scarcity of linen, and a still greater lack of soap and water. They are seldom or never gentlemen, their figures are ungainly, their motions uncouth, and—barring, of course, their scholastic and theological knowledge—I found the majority with whom I conversed stupid, illiterate, and unintelligent. Now, the young priest at Teste was the reverse of all this. With manners as polished as those of any courtly abbé of the courtly old regime, there was a perfect atmosphere of frankness and quiet good-humour about my companion, and his conversation was delightfully easy, animated, and graceful. I do not know if my friend belonged to the College of Jesus; but, if he did, he was cut out for the performance of its highest and subtlest diplomacy.
We talked of the strange part of the world I was visiting, and I found he knew the people and the country well. I mentioned the submerged chateau and its legend, and he replied that it was an undoubted fact, that both chateaux and villages had been overwhelmed—both by the inbursting of the sea, and by great gales blowing vast hills of sand down into the existing lakes, and so forcing them out of their ancient beds. The sand, indeed, he said, was more dangerous than the water. Often and often the coast-guard stations had to be dug out after a gale; and he believed that, on one occasion, a small church near the mouth of the Gironde had been overwhelmed to such a height that only a few feet of the spire and the weathercock were left apparent. The story put me forcibly in mind of the remarkably heavy fall of snow experienced by my old friend, Baron Munchausen; but, for all that, I see no reason why it should not be literally correct. The pines, the priest informed me, were the saving of the country, by fixing the unstable soil, and the Government had engineers busily engaged in laying out plantations all along the coast—the object being to get the trees down to high-water mark. I mentioned the superstitions of the people.
"Alas!" said the priest, "What you have heard is perfectly true. We are improving a little, perhaps. The boys and girls we get to come to school are taught to laugh at the notion of their old grandmothers being witches, and in another generation or two there will be a great change."
"And how do your witches work?" I asked. "As ours in England used to do—by spell and charm?"
"Precisely. They are said to make clay figures of their victims, and to stick pins in them, or bake them in a fire; and then they have rhymes and cabalistical incantations, and are greatly skilled in the magic power of herbs. The worst of it is, that a year seldom passes without an outrage on some poor old woman. A lout, who thinks himself bewitched by such a person, will attack her and beat her; and occasionally a bullet has been fired at night through the cottage-window."
"The Landes people have, or had, other queer notions, as well as the witch ones?"
"Oh, yes! They long held out against potatoes, which, they said, gave them apoplexy, and they have only lately begun to milk their cows."