It is as though you were in a bark in the middle of the sea. The mountain-chains clash like billows. The tops are sharp and jagged like the crests of uplifted waves; they come from all sides, athwart each other, piled one above another, bristling, innumerable, and the flood of granite mounts high into the sky at the four corners of the horizon. On the north, the valleys of Luz and Argelès open up in the plain by a bluish vista, shining with a dead splendor resembling two ewers of burnished pewter. On the west the chain of Bareges stretches like a saw as far as the Pic du Midi, a huge, ragged-edged axe, marked with patches of snow; on the east, lines of leaning fir-trees mount to the assault of the summits. In the south an army of embattled peaks, of ridges cut to the quick, squared towers, spires, perpendicular escarpments, lifts itself beneath a mantle of snow; the glaciers glitter between the dark rocks; the black ledges stand out with an extraordinary relief against the deep blue. These rude forms pain the eye; you are oppressively alive to the rigidness of the masses of granite which have burst through the crust of our planet, and the invincible ruggedness of the rock that is lifted above the clouds. This chaos of violently broken lines tells of the effort of forces of which we have no longer any idea. Since then Nature has grown mild; she rounds and softens the forms she moulds; she embroiders in the valleys her leafy robe, and, as an industrious artist, she shapes the delicate foliage of her plants. Here, in her primitive barbarism, she only knew how to cleave the blocks and heap up the rough masses of her Cyclopean constructions. But her monument is sublime, worthy of the heaven it has for a vault and the sun which is its torch.
II.
Geology is a noble science. Upon this summit theories grow lively; the arguments of the books breathe new life into the story of the mountains, and the past appears grander than the present. This country was in the beginning a solitary and boiling sea, then slowly cooled, finally peopled by living creatures and built up by their debris. Thus were formed the ancient limestones, the slates of transition and several of the secondary rocks. What myriads of ages are accumulated in a single phrase! Time is a solitude in which we set up here and there our boundaries; they reveal its immensity, but do not measure it.
This crust cleaves, and a long wave of molten granite heaves itself up, forming the lofty chain of the Gave, of the Nestes, the Garonne, the Mala-detta, Néouvielle.
