Presently the old coachman, by a series of feeble gymnastic exertions, dropped himself off the box and came to the carriage-door. ‘Pardon, but would the gentlemen like to see the Museum of Paintings?’ We said we would do anything to oblige so venerable a man; and he took us to the picture gallery. Then we started once more, impressing upon our aged Jehu that the real object of our promenade en voiture was the local Zoo. This time he drove us for nearly three-quarters of an hour, and at last pulled up in a lonely suburb opposite a stone wall, and, landing himself by easy stages to the earth, came hat in hand to the door and begged us to descend.
We descended. He then personally conducted us to a gap in the wall which was boarded up. In one board there was a little hole. ‘Behold, gentlemen,’ he said; ‘if you will give yourselves the trouble to look through that little hole you will see the ground which is being converted into a new public park. It will be finished in two years.’ We looked through and beheld a waste of brick and mortar and plank-strewn ground—and nothing more. ‘But this is not the garden with the animals and the children’s ball!’ I exclaimed, after catching a violent cold in my eye from the wind which blew through the little hole in the hoarding; ‘a truce to practical joking, mon vieux! To the Zoological Gardens at once, or I will swear at you.’ The old man bowed and smiled and grinned, and begged a thousand pardons. He would gladly conduct us to such a place, but he did not know where to find it.
Then I abused him. I told him his conduct was disgraceful—that he had no right to be a coachman in Bordeaux if he did not know the way to its most famous place of public resort. He replied that he had never heard of such a place. Then I called a police-officer, and interrogated him. He, too, knew of no wild animals in Bordeaux, and of no gardens such as I described. We interrogated every passer-by, including a postman. The latter told us that perhaps we meant Paris—there was a garden like that there. In despair we gave up the expedition, and returned in the Lord Mayor’s coach to our hotel.
There we triumphantly produced the local guide-book and read it aloud to the coachman, the concierge, the waiters, and the landlord. It made no impression. One and all declared on their honour, as citizens of Bordeaux, that no such place existed in the town. And they were right. I ascertained the fact by finding an old man who had lived seventy years in Bordeaux, and he told me that when he was a boy there was such a place, but it had disappeared this fifty years. And my guide-book is dated 1885! The editor is a good citizen. He refuses to allow the attractions of his native town to disappear from his pages. He wishes to paint his city to the greatest advantage. He is right from his point of view; but a guide-book which includes exhibitions which have been closed for fifty years—whose very sites have been built over—is not the best companion for a traveller who hires a carriage by the hour in order to drive about and see ‘everything.’
I didn’t trust to that guide-book any more. I quitted Bordeaux on Monday for Bayonne, en route for Biarritz. If you go to Biarritz direct, you must leave by a train at seven in the morning. I don’t love early rising, so I determined to take a later train to Bayonne, from which place you can get on to Biarritz at any time. The distance is 124 miles, and the train does it in seven hours. It was slow, but I did not regret the journey.
CHAPTER II.
IN THE BASQUE COUNTRY.
Bayonne, as all good little girls and boys who take prizes at school for geography and history are aware, is a fortified town commanding the passes of the West Pyrenees, and is a high road to Spain. It was here that the citadel which formed the key to an entrenched camp of Marshal Soult was invested by a portion of the army of the Duke of Wellington in 1814. The whole neighbourhood teems with memories of the halcyon days of the British arms. One comes to many a spot immortalized by a story which makes the Briton’s heart beat faster with patriotic pride. The arms of England may still be seen upon the vault of the cathedral, and in the cemetery lies many a gallant officer and brave soldier of the Coldstream Guards who fell in the sortie of April 14, 1814. It was here—— But for further particulars look up your history. The dead past can bury its dead; my business is with the present.
I had a terrible fright coming from Bordeaux to Bayonne. The railway runs for a portion of the way through the Landes, a vast tract of heaths and ash-coloured sands and brackish streams. The inhabitants of this strange district lead hard and terrible lives. Food is scarce, and, what is worse, they can get very little water that is fit to drink, most of Sir Wilfrid Lawson’s favourite beverage that finds its way to the Landes being salt and nauseous. I reached the Landes after the moon had risen. Owing to a little accident on the line, we were detained at a wayside station for half an hour. I lit a pipe, and strolled outside and made my way down a kind of road that skirted a wild, uncultivated heath. The road was very lonely, and everything looked weird in the moonlight. I was alone, for my companion had sacrificed comfort to a tight boot, and declined to walk. All of a sudden I saw a gigantic shadow thrown on the ground in front of me. I looked up and beheld a man twelve or fourteen feet high stalking towards me with strides that covered ten feet of ground at a time. On, on the giant came at a terrific pace, and the great beads of perspiration broke out upon my brow. He was a wild-looking giant, with long black hair, and a huge sheepskin covered his body. His legs were the longest and the thinnest I had ever seen in my life. I didn’t believe he was human. I made up my mind he was a creature from the fable world, and that I was about to be carried away to his haunt, wherever it may be, and devoured. I thought of Jack and the Beanstalk, and I expected the creature every moment to say, ‘Fee, fo, fum!’ and refer to the fact that the blood of an Englishman had saluted his olfactory organs. Just as I was going to drop on my knees and shriek for mercy, the giant suddenly halted, put a big pole which he carried in his hand behind his back, and stood stock-still in the moonlight, a living, breathing tripod.
I held my breath, and waited for the dénouement. The giant raised his cap, and asked me, in excellent French, if I could tell him what the time was. Then I took a calmer view of him, and suddenly it dawned upon me that my giant was no giant at all, but merely a shepherd of the Landes mounted upon enormous stilts.
I am not the first traveller who has been startled by such an apparition. The inhabitants of this district walk upon stilts from childhood to old age. They would not be able to get over the sandy ground studded with prickly heather in ordinary boots and shoes. They stride over hedges and ditches in this way at a pace which no horse can keep up with, and while they are watching their flocks they stick a long pole in the ground, and, resting their backs against it, stop in this position for hours knitting stockings. The spectacle to the unaccustomed eye is one of the most startling that can be conceived. I told my stilted friend the time, and, wishing him good-night, walked back to the station; but it was a long time before I got over the ‘turn’ which his sudden apparition in the moonlight had given me.