It is also one of those mountains in which one can recognise the curious regularity of the “belts” which text-books talk of.  There are great forests at the base of it, just above the hot Mediterranean plain; the beech comes higher than the olive, the pines last of all; after them the pastures and the rocks.  In the end of February a man climbs up from a spring that is as southern as Africa to a winter that is as northern as the highlands of Scotland, and all the while he feels that he is climbing nothing confused or vague, but one individual peak which is the genius of the whole countryside.

This countryside is the Roussillon, a lordship as united as the Cerdagne; it speaks one language, shows one type of face, and is approached by but a small group of roads, and each road passes through a mountain gap.  For centuries it went with Barcelona.  It needed the Revolution to make it French, and it is full of Spanish memories to this day.

For the Roussillon depends upon the Canigou just as the Bay of Syracuse depends upon Etna, or that of Naples upon Vesuvius, and its familiar presence has sunk into the patriotism of the Roussillon people, as those more famous mountains have into the art and legends of their neighbours.  There are I know not how many monographs upon the Canigou, but not one has been translated, I would wager, into any foreign language.

Yet it is the mountain which very many men who have hardly heard its name have been looking for all their lives.  It gives as good camping as is to be had in the whole of the Pyrenees.  I believe there is fishing, and perhaps one can shoot.  Properly speaking, there is no climbing in it; at least, one can walk up it all the way if one chooses the right path, but there is everything else men look for when they escape from cities.  It is so big that you would never learn it in any number of camps, and the change of its impressions is perpetual.  From the summit the view has two interests—­of colour and of the past.  You have below you a plain like an inlaid work of chosen stones:  the whole field is an arrangement of different culture and of bright rocks and sand; and below you, also, in a curve, is all that coast which at the close of the Roman Empire was, perhaps, the wealthiest in Europe.  In the extreme north a man might make out upon a clear day the bulk of Narbonne.  Perpignan is close by; the little rock harbour of Venus, Port Vendres, is to the south.  From the plain below one, which has always been crammed with riches, sprang the chief influences of Southern Gaul.  It was here that the family of Charlemagne took its origin, and it was perhaps from here that he saw, through the windows of a palace, that fleet of pirates which moved him to his sad prophecy.  That plain, moreover, will re-arise; it is still rich, and all the Catalan province of Spain below it, of which it is the highway and the approach, must increase in value before Europe from year to year.  The vast development of the