It is an extraordinary fact, that between the Valley d'Ossau and the Valley de Baréges an entire change takes place in the population. I never saw a handsomer race than the people at the Eaux Bonnes, and the Eaux Chaudes. At Cauterets beauty had forsaken the fair sex: the men were well-formed and good-looking, but the women quite the reverse; and at St. Sauveur, Luz, and Baréges, men, women, and children were all ugly together. A few days after our arrival at St. Sauveur we went over to Baréges, which is but at a little distance, and on our road met all the goblin shapes of fairy tales completely realized, and a great many more far too disgusting for description.
In this neighbourhood there are a great many people afflicted with the goitre. Nor had I any idea of its effects till I saw it here. This monstrous appendage to each side of the neck is horrid in itself, but those afflicted with it to any great degree, lose entirely the hue of health, become squalid and emaciated, and very frequently end in idiocy. There is no describing their appearance; and one can scarcely wonder at the treatment the ignorant mountaineers used to show them of old, considering them cursed of God, and driving them from all human intercourse.
The Cretins, or idiots, are also very common in the Pyrenees, and a large village near Bagneres de Begorre is almost entirely peopled with them, But these wretched beings are not at all held in the same degree of horror as the Caghots, or goitrous, who for many centuries were supposed, even by the physicians of the towns adjacent to the Pyrenees, to be the descendants of persons afflicted with the leprosy of the Greeks. It appears, however, to be now ascertained, that this disease proceeds from something suspended in the water of mountainous countries, which, being taken into the system, produces these obstructions of the glands. Knowing very little either of medicine or chemistry, my inquiries of course were limited; but from what I have been able to learn, the malady is confined to particular districts, both in the Alps and Pyrenees, while others in the vicinity are quite free from it. In Derbyshire the same disease is common, while in the mountains of Scotland and Wales I believe it is little known. An analytical comparison of the water of the districts in which this malady prevails might throw great light upon the subject, and be of much service to a portion of mankind, who, though happily not very numerous, are well worthy of compassion on account of their sufferings.
The road to Baréges is not particularly beautiful, and the town itself is hideous. Two rows of ill-built houses, forced into a narrow space between the river and the mountain, crammed full of the sick and the maimed, is what Baréges appears at first sight. Its mineral springs are the strongest in the Pyrenees, and famous for the cure of gun-shot wounds. There is a large hospital for soldiers, who saunter up and down the single street, in which scarcely a whole man is to be met with at once; and yet Baréges is the gayest place in the country; there are nothing but balls and parties every night. In short, it is a great dancing hospital, in which all the world caper on in the best way they can with such limbs as they have got left.
Such is Baréges in the summer; in the winter every one quits it, except a few shepherds and a few bears, who take possession of the empty houses while the snow lasts. Everything at Baréges is made to be carried away--shutters, doors, windows, and even staircases, so that nothing but the skeleton of a town is left when once the migration begins. Two things render it nearly uninhabitable after October--the tremendous overflowings of the river and the avalanches, called here lavanges, which frequently destroy great part of the town. It is not alone that they overwhelm all that they approach, but as they come everything trembles and falls before they touch it, without it be of the most solid construction. Such is the report of the country people, who, in their figurative language, say that all nature fears the lavange; but any effect of the kind must proceed from the pressure of the air by the rapid progress of such an immense mass. Many efforts have been made to guard Baréges from this calamity by means of planting trees on the heights; but, as seldom a year passes without its occurrence, the young trees can afford no obstacle to the avalanche.
GAVARNIE.
Alps frown on alps, or rushing hideous down,
As if old Chaos was again returned,
Wide rend the deep and shake the solid pole.--Thomson.
In returning to St. Sauveur, we saw the mountains, in whose breast it rests, as they ought to be seen to know them in their greatest magnificence. It was about half-past two, and the sun shone in such a manner as to cast a kind of blue airy indistinctness over the whole, hiding all the minuter parts, and leaving them in grand dark masses, marked decidedly upon the bright sunshiny sky. Although we had risen considerably from Luz, the sun was already hidden by the mountains to the south-west, and all the valley was in shadow. As I have before remarked, when the hills are seen covered with fields half-way to the top, scattered all over with trees, or broken into separate masses of rock, the multitude of objects prevents the eye from estimating their height justly; but it is when they are thus thrown together, in one uniformity of shade, that they appear in their true grandeur.
But as I have got upon my hands a long journey to the most splendid of nature's works, I must proceed on my way as quickly as possible. It would be tedious to describe the journey from St. Sauveur to Gedre, as it is little better than a repetition of that from Pierrefitte to Luz on a smaller scale. The passes are narrower, the basins more circumscribed, and the mountains rise higher and more perpendicularly on each side. The road, which soon becomes unfit for a carriage, sometimes sinks to a level with the Gave, and sometimes rises high on the sides of the mountain; and as my horse had a talent for stumbling, together with a peculiar predilection for the edge of the precipice, the insurance upon my neck would have been somewhat hazardous. Of course during a twelve miles' ride through that part of the country, we found a great many spots of peculiar beauty, but if I were to tell all I saw, I should never have done with the long stories of lovely hamlets nested in the wood that overhangs the stream, and marble bridges that carry the road across it, and rugged mountain heads that hide it from the sun.
At Gedre there is a famous grotto which every one talks about a great deal more than it deserves. A deep cleft in the rock overhung with woods, amidst the Gave de Héas to the valley, where it joins the other river. There is a great degree of soft quiet and stillness in the sound of the waterfall, and the deep shade of the wood hanging down and dipping its branches in the clear pools formed at the foot of the rock. The whole is certainly very beautiful, but not meriting the extravagant praises which have been bestowed upon it.