Another and still larger district lies on the further side of the valley to the north and east of Ste Engrace itself. It is the great mass of wood, mainly beech, which stretches all over the hills between this last Basque valley and the Val d’Aspe, next to the east, which is the frontier valley of Béarn. These woods have no common name, they are intersected by clear spaces, notably round the higher peaks of the forest, but they make a district of their own stretching eastward and westward from Lourdios to Licq, northward and southward from the frontier nearly to Lanne, and thus measuring not much less than 10 miles every way, in French territory alone.
There is no forest in which it is easier to lose one’s way than this great stretch of upland. This is especially true in the Souscousse district, due east of Ste Engrace; there is here a labyrinth of complicated valleys, and what seems on the map so easy a passage from the Soule into the Val d’Aspe is in practice nearly impossible to find. To camp in and to explore, this forest is even better than the Tigra; for its summits are higher, and its views more unexpected and remarkable. There are points in it which are more than 6000 feet in height, and the great Pic d’Anie, the first of the really high mountains of the chain, stands high above them, just beyond the southern limit of the trees.
THE BASQUE VALLEYS
II. The Four Valleys (Béarn and Aragon)
Four valleys in the Pyrenees count together in travel upon foot. They are the Val d’Aspe and the Val d’Oussau on the French side, and the valleys of the rivers Aragon and Gallego on the Spanish side.
These four form a unity for the reason that in one place (which is just to the south of the watershed) they are, without too much difficulty, approachable one from another.
Many historical accidents have also served to unite these four valleys. One pair of them made the platform for that great Roman road to which allusion has so often been made in this book, and which ran from the French plains over what is now called the pass of the Somport, right down through Jaca to Saragossa. The parallel pair of valleys just to the east, the Val d’Ossau and the valley of the Gallego, on the Spanish side, though no highway ran along them until quite recently, had a similar historical unity which bound them both together, and bound a pair of them to the two sister valleys upon the west. For the eastern part of what later became the kingdom of Aragon, the county of Sobrarbe, stretched from the valley of the Gallego eastward, and was a natural line of defence southward against the Mahommedans; while the Val d’Ossau to the north of it was reached by an easy pass and must have formed—though we have no exact historical record of it—a good road for the parallel advance of armies.