The Pyrenees

by Hilaire Belloc

As to the blanket—No more than any of the inhabitants can you go through these hills without a blanket. It is often of the greatest use in the changes of weather during the day, it is absolutely necessary at night. Were you to take it from England, you would certainly take one that would be too heavy, or if you took a light one, one that would be too cold. The people of the Pyrenees who have thought out these things slowly for thousands of years, have ended with the right formula. They have a thin, close, narrow blanket, which just protects a man and protects him as much by its double fold with the air between as by its texture. Get one of a neutral colour, a sort of dark slate grey is the commonest, and pay from 30 to 50 francs for it.

With these five things, a pannikin from England, a gourd, a sack, sandals, and a blanket, you are equipped. You cannot take less, you need not take more, and if you take more you will certainly repent it.

I have said nothing about tents. The tent like twenty other luxuries is taken for granted in England. I have heard of people roughing it in various mountains who took with them not only a tent, but an india-rubber bath, a Norwegian kitchen, and for all I know, collars as well. But many a man who will have had the sense to get rid of his luxuries when he begins scrambling, will be reluctant to give up the tent, for it seems necessary to be at least dry. Now the arguments against having a tent have always seemed to me final, so far at least as the Pyrenees were concerned.

You are dealing here with a great expanse of mountain in which weather is very variable, but in which you do not have snow or prolonged furious weather during the months you are likely to travel in. This argument is enforced by the peculiar structure of the mountains. Everywhere in the Pyrenees you can find either rock shelter—and you find this much more frequently than in any other part of the world I have ever seen—or dense forests, or, on the bare upland sweeps of grass, those stone cabins of the shepherds, upon the shelter of which the inhabitants largely depend. These, of course, are not very near one to another, but they are always marked on the 1/100,000 French map, under the title of Cabanes. The owners, when they have owners, never mind one’s using them, and the only drawback about them is that sometimes you make certain of using one particularly far from mankind, and discover it to be all in ruins. One way with another I have never known three nights upon the Pyrenees which could not be passed in succession without a tent, if the rules which I shall give for camping were properly observed; and that is the experience also of those who have spent their whole lives in these mountains.

Next, let it be remarked that a tent is a great hindrance, it is either very light—in which case it is always fairly useless—or it is heavy, in which case there is an end to your free going. As will be seen later, when I speak of the way of settling for the night, there need never be occasion for such a shelter, which, moreover, in high winds is more troublesome than an animal or a child.

If your equipment consist in no more than a gourd, pannikin, blanket, sack, and sandals, what is your provision to be?

You must never make your provision for less than forty-eight hours, and it is better to make it for sixty. However modest is your plan, always allow for two nights on the mountain and for the better part of the third day as well. Remember that you will start in the early morning from the shelter of a roof, that you will therefore have a whole day before you dependent upon your own resources, that if you are making anything of an effort you will certainly camp the first night, but if the weather goes wrong or you miss your way or come upon any accident, you may very well have to spend the second night out, and if you do this, the chances are in favour of a long tramp and scramble on the third day before you reach human beings again. All this will be clearer to the reader when I come to speak of the accidents of weather in these hills, but I may here mention as an example of the truth of what I say that two companions and myself were once held for exactly twenty-four hours in a space of not much more than a square mile, and almost within earshot of a high road and a village, and that yet it was merely a piece of good luck towards evening—a fog lifting just at the right place for a few moments—that saved us from spending a second night out of doors. In work of this kind the chief part of strategy is to secure your retreat, but you cannot make even one day’s excursion without your retreat involving at least another day and perhaps two. Therefore, inconvenient though it be, you must have ample provision.

The first element of this provision is bread, and you will do well to allow a pound and half per man per day. Those are the rations of the French army and they are wise ones. If each man of a party carries a four-pound loaf, you have just enough, but not too much for accidents. A man must have bread, he can do without meat, and at a pinch he can do without wine, but I know by experience that he cannot depend upon any form of concentrated food to take the place of the solid wheaten stuff of Europe. Half a pound of bread and a pint of wine is a meal that will carry one for miles, and nothing can take their place. For meat, you will carry what the French call Saucisson, and the Spaniards, Salpichon. You will soon hate it, even if you do not, as is most likely, hate it from the bottom of your heart on the first day, but there is nothing else so compact and useful. It is salt pig and garlic rolled into a tight hard sausage which you may cut into thin slices with a knife, and it is wonderfully sustaining. If you like to carry other meat do so, but you can live on salpichon and it means less weight than meat in any other form.

These two, bread and saucisson, are the essentials of provision, but other provision hardly less essential should be added to them, and the first of these extras is Maggi. Maggi is a sort of concentrated beef essence, sold both in France and in England, and to be got anywhere in the French towns, but you will do well to make quite certain by laying in a good stock of it in some large town, such as Bordeaux or Toulouse or Paris itself, on your way south: I have known the grocers of a Pyrenean town to be out of it. The essence is packed in little oblong capsules which you buy by the dozen, at about 2d. a capsule, and you will do well to start with three or four dozen a man. They keep indefinitely, they weigh next to nothing, and the great advantage of them will be seen in what follows. You can, with two capsules to a quart of water, make in a few moments a hot and comforting soup which quite doubles the nourishment of your bread; with three capsules to a quart of water you have a very strong soup, which will bring a man round a corner of extreme fatigue. It is a food which can be prepared in a moment under almost any conditions, and one which is invaluable when you find yourself lost, especially if you are cut off by thick weather, or in any other way exhausted. It may seem an insignificant detail to tell the reader how to prepare so simple a meal, nevertheless I will do so. It took me a little time to learn, and he may as well be saved the trouble. Each little cylinder of extract is contained in two gelatine caps which fit together, you pull these off, you drop the essence into a little water while it is warming, but it will not melt of itself, you must crush it and mix it thoroughly with the water, and then add more water, still stirring till you have full measure. It needs no salt in the proportions I have given.

Further, you will do well to fill the little curved receptacle in the pannikin with methylated spirit, and to carry an extra provision of this in your sack. A pint is enough for many days, and very often you have no occasion to use it at all, but you may be caught in some wet place, or in a rocky piece where there is no wood, or in one way or another have a difficulty in making a fire; and even where you have plenty of wood, a drop or two of the methylated spirit makes you certain of the fire catching even in wet weather; of that I shall speak when I come to camping. By the way, take plenty of English matches and of two kinds, fusees and others, and if you are carrying a sack and not a waterproof knapsack, wrap your matches in a little square of india-rubber cloth, for if there is one thing that imperils a man more than another, it is to be caught in the hills without the means of making a fire.