The finishing charm of Luchon is its nearness to the great peaks.  Ice and snow are but scantily in sight from the valley itself, but a short rise upon any of the surrounding hills shows summits and glacier fields on all sides but the north, and more ambitious trips quickly place one among them.  The range culminates in this region; from east and west it has been gradually rising to a centre, and south from Luchon it finds its climax, attaining in the bulky system of the Maladetta to its full stature of over eleven thousand feet.  This mountain mass is the lion of the Pyrenees.  It lies in Spanish territory, on the other side of an intervening chain; but from a noted port in the crest of the latter, three hours from the town, the eye sweeps it from base to brow, and its ascent is made from the Luchon valley as headquarters.

There is a peculiar attraction in the proximity of the highest mountain of a range.  But if Luchon in this resembles Chamouni, in all other respects it holds its parallel with Interlaken.  Here, as there, other groups of important peaks are scattered within reach of attack; explorations on the higher glaciers are facile; the Vallee du Lys is its Lauterbrunnen, the Port de Venasque its Wengern Alp.  Within reach of the idler majority, there is a walk, a drive, or a point of view for each day of the month.  The roads now pierce every adjoining valley, and paths climb up to all the summits that fence them in.

VII.

A day or two pass uneventfully over us as we linger under the trees at Luchon, and then we shake off the spell, to look for its mountain neighbors.  One of the peaks from which the panorama of the Maladetta chain can be best seen is the Pic d’Entecade, a noted point for an object-lesson of the mountains’ relief.  Some of us accordingly resolve to ascend it.  We have at last begun to recognize the truth of a truism,—­that of early rising among the mountains.  Always given in all “Advice to Pedestrians,” in all “Physicians’ Holidays,” in all hand-books and guides, it had worn off into a commonplace, founded chiefly, it seemed, on a priori health-saws and on repetition.  But there is reason, we find, in this worthy acquaintance, and a reason quite apart from health-saws, for it is a weather reason.  The great proportion of these Pyrenean days, barring the rainy ones, run a uniform career:  gold in the morning, silver at noon, gold again at night.  The early mornings are brilliantly cloudless; by nine or ten o’clock the horizon whitens,—­it is the dreaded brouillard; faint cloud-balls are taking shape; they roll lightly in, bounding like soap-bubbles along the peaks, finally clinging softly about them; and by noon, though the zenith holds still its rich southern blue, the circle of the hills is broken, the higher summits thickly hung with misty gauze.  In the late afternoon, the breeze dislodges the intruders, and softly polishes the rock and ice of the peaks until at dusk they are free again from even a shred of vapor.