When Love Calls

by Stanley John Weyman

At Auch we arrived at night, and found it to be an old-fashioned archiepiscopal city on the summit and southern slope of a precipitous hill. Here we came upon the first traces--a Spanish pedler, a Navarrese bonnet--of that strange borderland between Spain and Western France in which three languages and a dozen patois, French, Spanish, Basque, the Langue d'Oc, the Langue d'Or, and Gascon and Provençal and the tongue of Andorra, and I know not what others, are fighting for the mastery: where two great nations now peaceably march, dividing between them the wild country where the kingdom of Navarre once sat enthroned on hills with the free Basque communities about her. It is a country rich in memories of independence, of strife; of brigandage, of romance; of the free life of the hunter; a land of snow-clad peaks and deep valleys, and rolling, wooded hills full of creatures elsewhere extinct, bears, and izards, and, shall I add, Basques. Here are Roncesvalles and the Bidassoa, Fontarabia and Orthez, San Sebastian and the Isle of Peacocks. Moor and Paladin, Scot and Spaniard, Charlemagne and Wellington, have all passed this way and left deep foot-prints.

And Auch stands on the verge of this strange country; an old city, but full of energy and with no trace of decay. From the river, flights of wide steps with spacious landings, gay with flowers and fountains, climb the southern face of the hill, which the best road-maker would find impracticable. At the head of these steps and commanding extensive prospects stands the cathedral, a beacon to all the country between it and the skirts of the mountains. The building is fine, but its pride lies in the wood carvings of the unrivalled choir. My guide, an ex-soldier, also pointed out with pride some cymbals presented to the cathedral by the first Napoleon: trophies, so he told me, of the Egyptian campaign.

We wandered out in the afternoon to the brow of a ridge of hills lying on the far side of the river, and throwing ourselves down upon some heather and bracken--it was a warm and sunny but not very clear day--began to cast speculative glances towards Spain. But while we thought that we were looking southwards our eyes were really turned too much to the east. And presently we discovered this in a strange way. For glancing by chance towards the skyline on our right, we saw, first, a brown autumnal landscape of woods and hills, and beyond this a long, gray cloud, the horizon, as we thought; and above that--ah! what was it we saw above that? A line of silvery peaks, gleaming in a gray, sheeny atmosphere of their own, so pure, so soft, so far above this world of ours, that as the words "The Pyrenees!" broke the first moments of astonished silence, we felt that for once the thing long looked for had passed our expectations! Our hearts fastened upon the distance. The pleasant landscape spread out before us lost its charms. It was homely, it was flat, it was commonplace, it was of the earth earthy, beside the serene beauty of the snowy crests and untrodden wastes that shone and sparkled in that far distance, and anon grew cold and dim as the veil of cloud was drawn before them even while we watched.

When they were gone, we felt that nothing save the mountains would now satisfy us. We had a craving for them, such as I have sometimes felt for the sea. A sudden conviction that we were wasting our time in a world of small things, while the wonders of the hills lay close at hand, overwhelmed us. We hurried homewards, talking of peaks, and glaciers, and passes, of Cauteret and Gavarnie, Mont Perdu and the Pic du Midi; and packed in the same state of pleasant excitement. The next morning saw us passing through the same country, rich in autumn tints, in leafy bottoms, and rippling streams, which we had seen stretched out before us. And the evening saw us stand on the famous Place Royale, hard by the castle where Henry of Navarre was born, feasting our eyes on the cold, bright tints of the great mountains, seen sharp and clear above the Jurance hills, and listening to the rushing waters of the Gave. Our Garonne pilgrimage was over.