From here you see Néouvielle in the north-east. How this wall of fire worked in lifting itself amidst this upturned sea, the imagination of man will never conceive. The liquid mass of granite formed a paste among the rocks; the lower layers were changed into slate beneath the fiery blast; the level grounds rose up, and were overturned. The subterranean stream rose with an effort so abrupt, that they were stuck to its flanks in layers almost perpendicular. “It was congealed in torment, and its agitation is still painted in its petrified waves.”
How much time rolled away between this revolution and the next? Monuments are wanting; the centuries have left no traces. There is a page torn out in the history of the earth. Our ignorance like our knowledge overwhelms us. We see one infinity, and from it we divine another which we do not see.
At last the ocean changed its bed, perhaps from the uplifting of America; from the south-west came a sea to burst upon the chain. The shock fell upon the dark embattled barrier that you see towards Gavarnie. There was a frightful destruction of marine animals: Their corpses have formed the shelly banks that you cross in mounting to la Brèche; several layers of la Brèche, of the Taillon and of Mont Perdu, are fields still fetid with death. The rolling sea, tearing up its bed, drifted it against the wall of rocks, piled it against the sides, heaped it upon the summits, set mountain upon mountain, covered the immense rock, and oscillated in furious currents in its ravaged basin.
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I seemed to see on the horizon the oozy surface coming higher than the summits, lifting its waves against the sky, eddying in the valleys, and howling above the drowned mountains like a tempest.
That sea was bringing half of the Pyrenees; its raging waters overlaid the primitive declivity with calcareous strata, tilted and torn; upon these the quieted waters deposited the high horizontal layers. Yonder, in the south-west, the Vignemale is covered with them. In order to raise up the summits, generations of marine creatures were born and died silent and inert populations which swarmed in the warm ooze, and watched through their green waves the rays of the blue-tinged sun. They have perished along with their sepulchre; the storms have torn open the banks where they had buried themselves, and these shreds of their wreck scarce tell how many myriads of centuries this shrouded world has seen pass away.
One day at last, the great mountains which form the horizon on the south were seen to grow, Troumousse, the Vignemale, Mont Perdu, and all the summits that surround Gèdres. The soil had burst open a second time. A wave of new granite arose, laden with the ancient granite, and with the prodigious mass of the limestones; the alluvia rose to more than ten thousand feet; the ancient summits of pure granite were surpassed; the beds of shells were lifted into the clouds, and the upheaved tops found themselves forever above the seas.