The valleys of the Pyrenees were foci where the energy of Europe concentrated in the perpetual and repeated charges of raids of Northern men, mounted and armed, beating back Islam. The mule-tracks and the huddled hamlets of those valleys first saw knighthood, and they were the school of war in which Europe re-arose in the Dark Ages until she awoke at last to the Crusades. In those valleys the greatest of our epics was forged, the first of our true Parliaments met-commons, lords, and priests at Jaca under a king who was king of nothing as yet beyond the narrow Torrent Gorge of the Aragon. It was the Pyrenees that kept the Ibe

GATHERING FIREWOOD

rian Peninsula apart during the spiritual storm of the sixteenth century. It was the Pyrenees that, more than any other natural feature, or than any other inanimate thing, interrupted the scheme of Napoleon.

To-day we assist at the beginning of a transformation. New roads are piercing where for so many centuries no wheels could pass. High on that Aragon torrent I heard year after year the blasting of the tunnel that will re-open such a scheme of ways as had been lost since the Romans. Something is passing that has hitherto been capital in all our fortunes, and something the departure of which may change Europe

in the future much more than those engineers or their másters dream.

The Pyrenees, thus distinguished as a wall of walls among mountains, rise as you come close upon their edges from the north in a clear spring.

Where other mountains have foothills, the first heights of the Pyrenees stand up sharply, as a rule, from thick, flat, river meadows running parallel to them at their feet; the bastion outermost heights lift abruptly, half as tall as the greater peaks behind; and all along the file of giants stand in good dressing like ranks upon parade above the plains.

I have so seen them in a summer evening when the sun at his setting had crept round northward of their line. His light shone level, and the reddened headlands so exactly set seemed like the toostrict shores of an inaccessible country that falls to a calm and deep sea from awful inland regions.

But as you come near to this seemingly unbroken face you perceive that other strong feature in the chain which I have seen nowhere else, unless it be in their nearest parallel, the Californian

Sierras.

This feature

may, I think, be called the valley gates.

Here and there in the Alps (and even in the Apennines) you will find something of the kind. Two great cliffs will form the edges of a gap that cuts right down to the plain and admits a valley floor, through the front, into the rear of the mountains. Such is the once - famous entry to the Grésivaudan which leads up to Grenoble, the portal through which Hannibal passed (as I believe) when he challenged the Alps and forced the barriers of Italy. But in the Pyre

nees this sight is not a rare nor an exceptional one. It is the introduction to each of the great valleys; and you come on each so definitely and at so precise a moment there is so clear a mark before which you are still in the plains, after which you have been taken by the mountains-that you seem to be meeting a person and to be asking for a

name.

In or near such gates (I am talking of the northern Gallic escarpment of the range) you will find in valley after valley a further natural feature peculiar to the Pyrenees, arresting the eye and provoking the historical curiosity of every man that comes on it for the first time. This natural feature consists in an isolated rock or rocky hill standing well out from the great mountains upon either side, and, if it be fortified by men, blocking the issue from the valley-indeed, from a time beyond all records, men have fortified these holders of the gates. The whole region of Foix, with its glory of the later Middle Ages and of the Renaissance, takes its name from such a rock where for centuries the castle stood defending the issue of the goldrolling river "Aurigera"-the Ariège. Boldly out in front of the main pass where the Romans built their great road through the heart of the mountains you have Oloron so standing.

DEEP GORGES BESET THE MOUNTAINEER

Right in the narrow entry of the gorges that lead to Gavarnie you have the rock of Lourdes. And so it is all up and down the chain. What guess the geologians may have made at this formation I do not know. Nor is it of any great value, for they will change their guess three or four times in the next fifty years. But I know what it is in landscape: as perplexing and sharp a thing as there is in Europe that there should be in valley after valley this fortified rock forbidding an entry to the

hills, and, round about each, perfectly flat meadows, so that each stands individual and alone.

When a man has entered one of these gates and passed one of these ancient fortresses, he will, after following the road through the gorge which is the

IN THE VALLÉE D'OUEIL

issue of the torrent, come, behind the gates of the valley, into yet another feature of the Pyrenees, a feature as characteristic of them as the two I have already mentioned. This third feature of their scenery is the broadening out of the valley into what looks like, and may have been in remote ages, the level floor of a lake. These inclosed arenas upon

which the steep slopes, wooded and cascading one above the other, look down from every side, are not only typical of Pyrenean scenery, but, like most things in the Pyrenees, are typical also of their history and of their part in the formation of Europe. For these inclosed and

hidden fertile places within the hills, nourishing each its five or seven villages, have maintained probably through the Roman time, certainly through the Middle Ages (and, what is more remarkable, furtively in our own day), a sort of independent democracy.

One, indeed, the Valley of Andorra, with its ramifications, can assert its independence upon the map and in the language of diplomacy. This blessed little republic (when it is touched at last, its peril may well be a symbol of impending evil for Europe) is suspended politically between France and Spain. It makes its own laws, or rather observes its own customs, and portrays all that was ever said for or against political freedom. It is the happiest community of men I have ever known.

But apart from this fortunate, and secluded place, every one of those defended and cut-off groups of villages in the amphitheaters of the hills has, in spite of modern central governments, a life of its own. It observes its own customs in land tenure, it voluntarily subserves a life not guaranteed by the great capital of the state, but by a local loyalty. So it is with the finest of them all, of which Bedous is the capital, and there, I think, the quiet traveler will best observe the unconquerable spirit of these heights. The French Republic, the Empire before it, and before that the Monarchy, have called the circle of Bedous for now four hundred years a mere division of French land. But live within it only for a few days and