A Book of the Pyrenees

by S. Baring-Gould

The whole of Aquitaine, from the Loire to the Pyrenees, the whole of Western Spain and Portugal, was once occupied by the Iberians, of whom the Basques are the shrunken residue. All Eastern France and Eastern Spain were overflowed by the Celts. The Romans recognized that Spain was in the possession of two races totally distinct, ethnographically and linguistically, and they termed the population of the peninsula Celtiberians.

When the Romans arrived on the scene they carried one main causeway from Arles to Narbonne, and thence to Toulouse, and from Toulouse to Dax. From this, roads branched to the south and crossed the Pyrenees into Spain by three gaps, natural doorways—one to the east, the easiest of all, by Le Perthus, where Pompey set up a trophy; one by Somport leading from Iluro (Oloron) to Saragossa; a third by Roncevaux to Pampeluna.

By the first of these ports Hannibal crossed from Spain on his way to Italy; by it also poured the Saracens to devastate the fields of Gaul. By Roncevaux Charles the Great passed to menace the Saracen power, and on his return met there with disaster at the hands of the Basques, which has been immortalized in song.

East and west were debatable lands. Navarre sat astride on the ridge, with a foot in Spain and the other in Gascony. To the east was Roussillon, that pertained to the kings of Aragon, till ceded definitely to France in 1659.

NATIVES OF ROUSSILLON

But to revert to the geological structure of the Pyrenees. The central chain is, as already said, composed of crystalline rocks, granite, and micaceous schist, whereas the northern chain exhibits the upturned beds of superincumbent deposits, and on the Spanish side the limestone lies on the granite. In the department of Haute Garonne the chains are soldered together by a transverse bar of mountain.

J. H. Michon, author of Le Maudit, says well:—

“These mountains reveal to me almost the entire history of the successive periods in the terrestrial crust. I have but to follow the torrent of the Arbouste, and mount to the Lac de Seculéjo, and push farther to the Pic d’Espingo, to find myself on the crest of the ridge dividing France from Spain. Often at these altitudes, reaching to 3000 metres above the sea, the prodigious force which has rent the terrestrial crust in a fault of eighty leagues in breadth, which has upheaved, as in the Marboré, enormous masses of limestone that once formed the basin of seas succeeding each other at different epochs—often has this phenomenon filled me with amazement. There in the Marboré lie the beds, retaining their horizontality, as though the aqueous deposits had been formed at this great elevation.

“But more commonly the central chain presents to our view masses of granite of astounding thickness. What a terrible cataclysm must that have been which thus reft and upset the globe, changing an extensive plain long submerged into a gigantic wall of granite shielded right and left with encasing masses of sedimentary formations which the upheaved granite has split and displaced in all directions.”

To the north of the Pyrenees lies a deep trough extending from the Bay of Biscay to the Corbières that links the Pyrenees to the Cevennes, and which at the present day forms the watershed between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. This gulf was gradually silted up by the torrents from the Pyrenees. Masses of rubble may be seen backing and capping isolated hills of sandstone, and forming long ridges, as that of the Park at Pau. The drift was from east to west. All the low hills are crowned with rolled stones. The boulders vary in size in proportion to the distance they have travelled. At Pamiers, Tarbes, and Pau they are of the size of a child’s head, but farther north dwindle to pebbles and gravel, and finally we enter on a region of clay and sand, which heavy rains convert into quagmires. Indeed, those of Armagnac, between the Garonne and the Upper Adour, have hardly their equal in France. These are not glacier deposits, for the stones and pebbles have been rolled, and the clay or mud is the chewed or mumbled remains of boulders. At a later period the entire basin thus choked was lifted high above its original level.