The Pyrenees

by Hilaire Belloc

The details of Pyrenean structure will concern a man travelling on foot more than do these general lines, though the whole aspect of the range must be grasped before one can understand its details. The separate peaks and valleys, the intimate structure of the range is remarkable everywhere for its abruptness. It is this physical feature in the Pyrenees, coupled with the absence of snow, which gives them the highly individual character they bear.

Fantastic outlines are not to be discovered in these hills so frequently as in the Dolomites, nor are wholly isolated hills common, though such few as exist are very striking, but for day after day a man wandering in the Pyrenees sees cliffs more regularly high, a greater succession of rocks more precipitous, and a more permanent succession of connected summits above him than in any other European range.

The absence of snow is a further sharp characteristic in the range. The essential feature of an Alpine landscape is the snow; and it is not only the essential feature of that landscape to the eye, it is the condition which controls the lives of those who inhabit, and of those who visit, the valleys. You can still wander a trifle in Switzerland. Even to-day I have come to villages where foreigners were still thought comic, and an ignorance of the German tongue was still thought amazing. But though you can wander, your wandering is strictly limited. Above a certain line you can go forward only with technical knowledge and in a special way. You are upon ice or snow. All climbing in the Alps depends upon this, and most of travel as well. A man may pass many days for instance in the upper valley of the Rhone, and then pass many days more in the upper valley of the Aar, but to go from one to the other he must take one of two strictly defined paths, unless he is willing to undertake special work requiring technical knowledge and particular aids. The hills between the two valleys are not a field for his exploration; they are a great mass of impassable and unapproachable land, all frozen, and diversified only by very narrow valleys inhabitable nowhere but at their base. No one could lose himself for many days upon the Wetterhorn, the Jungfrau, or the Finsteraarhorn; you can approach these mountains for the glory of the thing, but they are not a country-side. Now in the Pyrenees almost all the surface of the mountains, say 250 miles by 60, is at your disposal. It is this and a local custom of live and let live which make the pleasure of them inexhaustible; and which, combined with certain protective methods of their own, make it certain that the Pyrenees will never be overcome or changed by men. They are too large.

This surface of some 15,000 square miles is diversified in a manner fairly continuous throughout the chain. The valley floors are given up to cultivation in their lower part, their upper parts consist of damp close pastures, and between the two types of level are to be found, as we shall presently see, sharp gates of rock through which the river saws its way in a gorge. Above the valley floor, and at the end of it, where the stream springs out below the watershed (such springs bubbling up suddenly through the porous rock are called Jeous), steep banks of two, three and four thousand feet, broken almost invariably here and there into precipices, forbid the way; and these, in perhaps half their extent, are covered with enormous woods of beech below (mixed often with oak) and of pine above.

When you have climbed up these slopes through the forest or over the naked rock, you come, in the last heights, either to large grassy spaces, which often sweep right over the summit of a lateral ridge, and sometimes extend over both sides, even, of the main watershed (as between the Val d’Aran and Esterri) or else—more commonly—upon a jumble of jagged rocks and smooth, perpendicular or overhanging slabs, which defend the final secrets of the range.

The succession of these features is nearly universal. The only places where they are modified are the two lower ends of the range. There the rocks sink, the hills are rounded, the precipices disappear in the last Basque valleys, while the Alberes at the other extremity of the chain against the Mediterranean are at last mere toothed rocks. All between (with the exception of the Cerdagne, which is a country to itself) is built up in successive bands of valley floor, steep forest, or steep rock, broken with limestone precipices, and finally on the highest ridge sweeps of grass or jagged edges of stone.

It is this character in the last ridge of the Pyrenees that determines the nature of a passage over them, and since a passage from valley to valley is the chief business of the day when one is exploring the range, I will next describe these crossings, for the method of them is very different from that of other mountains, and has largely determined the history and customs of their inhabitants.

In other high mountains you will either find snow above a certain level and covering for most of the year most of the passes, some of the passes for all the year, or, as you go further south, you will commonly find many gaps which long years of weathering have reduced to easy slopes, or you will find great differences in slope between the one and the other side of the range; as, for instance, the difference between the long valleys that lead up eastward into the Californian Sierras, and the sharp escarpment which falls eastward upon the desert side of those heights. In all other ranges that I have seen or read of, save the Pyrenees, there is at least great diversity in the opportunities of crossing, whether natural or artificial. There is great diversity, as a rule, in the natural crossings; some are quite easy ascents and descents on either side (as the Brenner Pass over the Alps); some, though difficult, are notably lower than the average height of the range (as the Mont Genèvre from the Durance into Piedmont); some, these more rare, are deep gorges cleft right through the range (as the Danube gorge through the Carpathians).

Now it is characteristic of the Pyrenees that in the main part of their length no such diversities appear, save that there are two kinds of summit surfaces on the high cols, rock and grass: the grass the rarer.

If anyone looks closely at the Somport, especially noting the line which the old track took before the modern road was made, he will agree that it is a pass which, though steep, had no “edge” to it, so to speak. The grass would take any kind of traffic. The same is true of course of the Cerdagne, the only broad valley across the Pyrenees. But the Somport is well to the west end of the range; the Cerdagne is well to the east end. All the main part between could take no vehicle, and has crossings of a kind which I shall presently describe: sharp, the escalade difficult, the first descent upon the far side, or the last ascent upon the near side, steep.