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.