The lack of moisture on the central Spanish slope, by the way, is not a little aided by the curious formation of the frontier of Navarre, and the separation between the Basques and the Aragonese; this consists in a long ridge of high land, the upper part of which is known as the Sierra Longa, which runs south and a little west from the Pic d’Anie. The effect of this lack of moisture and excess of heat upon the central Spanish side is not only felt on the heights of the mountain, but also and more particularly when one approaches the Plains. These in France are northern in type, full of greenery, and amply watered. In Spain, on the contrary, they are quite arid, and if one comes in to Huesca by train upon a September evening, and looks out the next morning over the flats that run up to the Sierra de Guara, one has all the impressions of a desert, though these lands are heavy corn-bearing lands in the summer.
Finally, the third, or eastern, section of the hills is Mediterranean in character throughout. The Canigou is much more heavily watered than the Sierra del Cadi, its corresponding Spanish height. But the olives on the lower slopes, the carpet of vineyards on the flats, the presence everywhere of bright insects, the quality of the light and the aridity of everything which does not happen to be planted with trees, give to this eastern corner of the Pyrenees the same aspect that you may notice on the Mediterranean hills of Southern France, Liguria, or Algeria or the Balearic Islands, for all these landscapes are of one kind, and binding them all together is not only their burnt red look, but also that tideless intense blue of the Mediterranean, the hot white towns, and everywhere the lateen sail upon the coasts.
These differences of climate also determine the seasons in which the mountains may best be visited, for the Basque district is at your service (especially in its western part) from the spring to the late autumn of the year; the central valleys can be everywhere travelled in only from late June to mid-September; the eastern end, again, from the Segre and beyond it, is open to you from spring to autumn.
II
THE POLITICAL CHARACTER OF THE PYRENEES
The Political character of the Pyrenees corresponds to the Physical character which has been described. The high crest is the bond and division, from the beginning, between two societies which are connected by such common social habits as mountains impose—which therefore fall under similar local customs, which have a common jealousy of the civilized power on the plains below them, and which support each other in a tacit way against the stranger, yet which, from the beginning, have different governments and (especially in the high central part) deal with different corporate traditions—to the north the Béarnese, to the south Aragon. The easier passes to the west and the east of the chain permit a more or less homogeneous community to straddle across either end of the mountains, and to hold upon both slopes the sea roads that pass along the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The people thus astraddle of the eastern end have come to be called the Catalans. That astraddle of the western, a highly distinct group of men with language, traditions, and physical characteristics wholly their own, has always been known by some title closely resembling their modern name of Basques.
The foundation, therefore, upon which Pyrenean History is built, or (to use another metaphor), the germ from which it has developed and which explains its course, is a tripartite division of the inhabitants, corresponding, as I shall presently show, to the physical features of the chain: an eastern or Catalan, a western or Basque, and a central group whose characteristic it is to subdivide according to the deep valleys into which it is separated, but which falls into two main societies, the one north of the chain which becomes the group of French counties whose typical government is Béarn, the other south of the chain, which assumes at last for its title “The Kingdom of Aragon.”
The first matter to be noticed with regard to this tripartite division is the exactitude of its boundaries. One might imagine that the language, the habits, and the clear characteristics of any group would merge easily into those of its neighbours upon either side. This is not the case. The Basque type—much the most particular—ceases abruptly upon the watershed between the Gave d’Oloron and the Gave d’Aspe to the north of the range, upon the watershed between the Veral and the Esca to the south of it. The Catalans, with a dialect, mind, and dress wholly their own, are found to the north from the sea up to the Col de Puymorens, and everywhere east of the Carlitte mountains; in the Ariège valley and just over these heights, and on the further side of that Col, they are changed. To the south of the range they extend everywhere from the sea to the valley of the Ribagorza. Cross westward from that Catalan valley to the Esera. There, after hours of scrambling, down by the rocks and deserted tarns, you may towards evening find a man; that man will show the slow gestures, the silence, and the elaborate courtesy of Aragon.