for all I know, begins to go off. But neither the exact moment at which it fails nor the length of its decline is yet fixed, for all "Mails" date from the seventeenth century at earliest, and the time when most were constructed was that of Charles II's youth and Louis XIV's maturity—or am I wrong? Were these two men not much of an age?
I am far from books; I am up in the Pyrenees. Let me consider dates and reconstruct my formula. I take it that Charles II was more than a boy when Worcester was fought and when he drank that glass of ale at Hotighton, at the "George and Dragon" there, and crept along tinder the Downs to Bramber and so to Shoreham, where he took ship and was free. I take it, therefore, that when he came back in 1660 he must have been in the thirties, more or less, but how far in the thirties I dare not affirm.
Now, in 1659, the year before Charles II came back, Mazarin signed the treaty with Spain. At that time Louis XIV must have been quite a young man. Again, he died about thirty years after Charles II, and he was seventy something when he died.
I am increasingly certain that Charles II was older than Louis XIV. … I affirm it. I feel no hesitation. …
Lord! How dependent is mortal man upon books of reference! An editor or a minister of the Crown with books of reference at his elbow will seem more learned than Erasmus himself in the wilds. But let any man who reads this (and I am certain five out of six have books of reference by them as they read), I say, let any man who reads this ask himself whether he would rather be where he is, in London, on this August day (for it is August), or where I am, which is up in Los Altos, the very high Pyrenees, far from every sort of derivative and secondary thing and close to all things primary?
I will describe this place. It is a forest of beech and pine; it grows upon a mountain-side so steep that only here and there is there a ledge on which to camp. Great precipices of limestone diversify the wood and show through the trees, tall and white beyond them. One has to pick one's way very carefully along the steep from one night's camp to another, and often one spends whole hours seeking up and down to turn a face of rock one cannot cross.
It seems dead silent. There are few birds, and even at dawn one only hears a twittering here and there. Swirls of cloud form and pass beneath one in the gorge and hurry up the opposing face of the ravine; they add to this impression of silence: and the awful height of the pines and the utter remoteness from men in some way enhance it. Yet, though it seems dead silent, it is not really so, and if you were suddenly put here from the midst of London, you would be confused by the noise which we who know the place continually forget—and that is the waterfalls.
All the way down the gorge for miles, sawing its cut in sheer surfaces through the rock, crashes a violent stream, and all the valley is full of its thunder. But it is so continuous, so sedulous, that it becomes part of oneself. One does not lose it at night as one falls asleep, nor does one recover it in the morning, when dreams are disturbed by a little stir of life in the undergrowth and one opens one's eyes to see above one the bronze of the dawn.
It possesses one, does this noise of the torrent, and when, after many days in such a wood, I pick my way back by marks I know to a ford, and thence to an old shelter long abandoned, and thence to the faint beginnings of a path, and thence to the high road and so to men; when I come down into the plains I shall miss the torrent and feel ill at ease, hardly knowing what I miss, and I shall recall Los Altos, the high places, and remember nothing but their loneliness and silence.
I shall saunter in one of the towns of the plain, St. Girons or another, along the riverside and under the lime trees … which reminds me of "Mails"! Little pen, little fountain pen, little vagulous, blandulous pen, companion and friend, whither have you led me, and why cannot you learn the plodding of your trade?
THE PYRENEAN HIVE
Shut in between two of the greatest hills in Europe—hills almost as high as Etna, and covering with their huge bases half a county of land—there lies, in the Spanish Pyrenees, a little town. It has been mentioned in books very rarely, and visited perhaps more rarely. Of three men whom in my life I have heard speak its name, two only had written of it, and but one had seen it. Yet to see it is to learn a hundred things.
There is no road to it. No wheeled thing has ever been seen in its streets. The crest of the Pyrenees (which are here both precipitous and extremely high) is not a ridge nor an edge, but a great wall of slabs, as it were, leaning up against the sky. Through a crack in this wall, between two of these huge slabs, the mountaineers for many thousand years have wormed their way across the hills, but the height and the extreme steepness of the last four thousand feet have kept that passage isolated and ill-known. Upon the French side the path has recently been renewed; within a few yards upon the southern slope it dwindles and almost disappears.
As one so passes from the one country to the other, it is for all the world like the shutting of a door between oneself and the world. For some reason or other the impression of a civilisation active to the point of distress follows one all up the pass from the French railway to the summit of the range; but when that summit is passed the new and brilliant sun upon the enormous glaciers before one, the absence of human signs and of water, impress one suddenly with silence.
From that point one scrambles down and down for hours into a deserted valley—all noon and afternoon and evening: on the first flats a rude path, at last appears. A river begins to flow; great waterfalls pour across one's way, and for miles upon miles one limps along and down the valley across sharp boulders such as mules go best on, and often along the bed of a stream, until at nightfall—if one has started early and has put energy into one's going, and if it is a long summer day—then at nightfall one first sees cultivated fields—patches of oats not half an acre large hanging upon the sides of the ravine wherever a little shelf of soil has formed.
So went the Two Men upon an August evening, till they came in the half-light upon something which might have been rocks or might have been ruins—grey lumps against the moon: they were the houses of a little town. A sort of gulf, winding like a river gorge, and narrower than a column of men, was the street that brought us in. But just as we feared that we should have to grope our way to find companionship we saw that great surprise of modern mountain villages (but not of our own England)—a little row of electric lamps hanging from walls of an incalculable age.
Here, in this heap of mountain stones, and led by this last of inventions, we heard at last the sound of music, and knew that we were near an inn. The Moors called (and call) an inn Fundouk; the Spaniards call it Fonda. To this Fonda, therefore, we went, and as we went the sound of music grew louder, till we came to a door of oak studded with gigantic nails and swung upon hinges which, by their careful workmanship and the nature of their grotesques, were certainly of the Renaissance. Indeed, the whole of this strange hive of mountain men was a mixture—ignorance, sharp modernity, utter reclusion: barbaric, Christian; ruinous and enduring things. The more recent houses had for the most part their dates marked above their doors. There were some of the sixteenth century, and many of the seventeenth, but the rest were far older, and bore no marks at all. There was but one house of our own time, and as for the church, it was fortified with narrow windows made for arrows.
Not only did the Moors call an inn a Fundouk, but also they lived (and live) not on the ground floor, but on the first floor of their houses: so after them the Spaniards. We came in from the street through those great oaken doors, not into a room, but into a sort of barn, with a floor of beaten earth; from this a stair (every banister of which was separately carved in a dark-wood) led up to the storey upon which the inn was held. There was no hour for the meal. Some were beginning to eat, some had ended. When we asked for food it was prepared, but an hour was taken to prepare it, and it was very vile; the wine also was a wine that tasted
