In the presence of this frightful disease, destroying every semblance of fair humanity, one can see some reason also for the belief in witchcraft and diabolism once so intense in the Pyrenees. If the body and mind of an "innocent" can thus come to part with the last vestige of its holy lineage, the soul of a "wicked" might with good reason seem to be capable of growing into full fellowship with the devil himself. So late as 1824, not far from this spot, they nearly burned an old woman for alleged sorcery; and in 1862, one was actually so burned, in the town of Tarbes, a few leagues away. This superstition of witchcraft has here been strong in all eras, but it is at last becoming extinct; cretinism, as anachronous and as horrible,—a fact, not a superstition,—remains unaccounted for and unlessened.
III.
By four o'clock, we are at the base of the Col d'Aspin and commence on the long curves that lead to its top. The valley behind extends as we rise; new breaks and depressions appear, branching off right and left on all sides. After a half hour, peaks begin to peep over the hills at our rear; they come up one by one into sight, each whiter and sharper than the last, until the southern line is a serrate row of them, gradually lifted wholly above the nearer hills. The promised panorama is truly taking shape. We near at length the crest of the col. The Pic du Midi de Bigorre will loom up beyond it, unclouded to-day, the drivers assure us, and we watch for a glimpse at last of that mythical peak, which we have skirted in cloud from Barèges to Bigorre and never yet once seen. We are just below the top of the col; twenty feet farther will place the carriages on the summit, when lo a huge rounded dome begins to rise slowly up beyond the edge, and as we advance lifts itself into the full form of the long sought Pic,—ten miles away to the west, yet looming out as clearly as if but across the valley. It stands alone against the horizon; there is no summit near to rival it; the sides are dark and steep and almost snowless; the summit is looking down upon Gavarnie,—upon Pau,—upon the wide march of the plains of France,—as upon us on the Col d'Aspin, eying us with its stony Pyrenean stare.
Behind, the southern view is now in its entirety. The full line of the Arreau and Luchon depressions is traceable, and of all their tributaries as well; the giant humps of the hills marshaled to form their walls. The separate pinnacles beyond them are countless. The chief array is compacted directly south, a fraise of bristles numbering the white Crabioules, the Pic des Posets, the Monts Maudits,—and at the left the summits of the Maladetta, a "citadel of silver" in a sky of gold, its glaciers fierce against the late afternoon sun.
At the right above the col is a wider point of view; we ascend for some twenty minutes over the pastures to the top, led by a herd-boy. The view now sweeps a new quarter of the horizon,—that of the northeast; and the full plain of Toulouse is spread at our feet, shading off in the far distance into a faint hazy transparence where a few soft clouds seal it to the line of the sky.
"Not vainly did the early Persian make
His altar the high places and the peak
Of earth-o'ergazing mountains."
The Dark Ages were strangely dark in one respect: they had forgotten the admiration for Nature. Save as to unaccustomed manifestations,—quakes and comets and like portents,—they seem to have noticed little of her higher or more unfamiliar moods. The sensation of the sublime was not in their range of emotions; it is distinctively a modern growth. Froissart traveled through this region on his way to Orthez; the Pyrenees peaks were in sight before him, day after day, near and distant; and they shone upon him for weeks from the hills about Gaston's castle. Not once does he mention their presence to admire it. Scarcely once do other writers of his or neighboring centuries notice even their existence, except as hunting-grounds or boundary-lines; "le spectacle des Alpes ne dit rien à Racine, et l'aspect des glaciers fait froid à Montaigne." All the historian's of the time of Henry IV speak of his having been born in "a country harsh and frightful,"—"un pays aspre et affreux." Even the early troubadours and trouvères, poets and rhapsodists, loving to admire and enlarge and extol, are silent concerning the mountains. Despourrins, the poet of the Pyrenees, sang of love and lyric inspiration; but he rarely looked up to seek the higher inspiration of their hills and snows. It is inexplicable that the power of the sublime should have been withheld from the age of romance and poetry and nearness to nature, and bestowed in growing measure upon our commercial and unenthusiastic era. It is not all wholly prosaic, after all, this nineteenth century of ours, when it has so ardently this high emotion, scorned by its intenser predecessors.
As we descend to the carriages, facing another tall Pic which shoots up from the farther side of the col, the sun has neared the clouds in the west; it strikes the far-off Maladetta glaciers with a light no longer white, but rose-tinted; the snows glow softly under it like fields of tremulous flame; the mountains gleam almost as something supernal, as we take a final gaze before turning away down the valley.