Читать книгу The Desert World - Arthur Mangin - Страница 6

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O those whose imaginations have been kindled by glowing pictures of the African Sahara and the Arabian wilderness, it will be, perhaps, a matter of surprise to learn that even fertile and civilized Europe includes within her boundaries regions which are scarcely less cheerless or desolate, though, happily, of far inferior extent.

Thus, it would be possible for a Frenchman whom the engagements of business, the pressure of limited means, or the ties of home, prevented from undertaking any distant voyages, to obtain a vivid conception of the great Deserts of the World without crossing the confines of his own country.

In France, so richly cultivated, so laborious, and so blessed by genial Nature, there are, nevertheless, a few districts where her sons may wholly forget—may almost disbelieve in the existence of—her cities stirring with the “hum of men,” her vineyards and her gardens, her grassy pastures, her prolific meadows, her well-ordered highways, and those “iron roads” which are the incessant channels of such restless energy, movement, and vigorous life.

Bare and desolate enough, and as yet unconquered by advancing civilization, are the mountains of France: among its gigantic ranges of the Jura, the Vosges, and the Cevennes,[2] the traveller may still ascend precipitous rocks, may hearken to the deafening roar of foamy torrents, may contemplate with astonished gaze the masses of stone upheaved in some convulsion of the ancient world, may listen to the hoarse cry of the eagle, a s

“Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ringed with the azure world he stands.”

In the Alps, profaned as they now-a-days are by noisy tourists; in the Pyrenees, whither Alpine clubs have not yet extended their encroachments, he who ascends some 8000 or 9000 feet may still wander among ice and snow which the sun’s rays never loosen, and gather in his mind’s eye a picture of the colossal peaks of Asia and the New World, of the virgin summits of the Himalaya and the Cordilleras. There you may follow with entranced vision the swooping wing of the lammergeyer; or trace the nimble feet of the shy chamois; or, like Manfred, muse and wonder, while

“The sunbow’s rays still arch

The torrent with the many hues of heaven,

And roll the sheeted silver’s waving column

O’er the crag’s headlong perpendicular.”

Mayhap, if favoured by Fortune, you may even find yourself face to face, in the abrupt bend of some obscure ravine, with a bear, which, calm and unsuspicious, looks on as you pass by, as if he were ignorant of men, and had never heard the ringing echoes of the hunter’s rifle.

A PYRENEAN LANDSCAPE.

It is less easy—in France, at least—to discover the old shadowy, leafy, almost impervious forest. The most celebrated—that of Fontainebleau—despite its enormous trees, its rudely broken surface, its stags and roebucks reserved for imperial sport, despite its few adders and problematical vipers, is now little better than a rendezvous for amateur artists and listless idlers. Its well-kept avenues resound with rapid wheels, and you can scarcely stir a step without finding the associations of the place interrupted by the stalls of vendors of cakes or the apparatus of itinerant gamblers. This profanation is surely to be regretted, for the Forest exhibits many landscapes of surpassing interest, as the rocks of Franchart, the glens of Apremont, and, above all, that Sahara in miniature, the sands of Arbonne. Nor would one willingly forget the historical memories which immortalize the famous palace where Francis I. received his after-time conqueror, Charles V.; where the wayward and half-insane Christina of Sweden listened with cruel delight to the groans of the murdered Monaldeschi; where Madame Du Barry lavished her shameless graces; where Pope Pius VII. lingered through two years of gilded captivity; and where Napoleon bade farewell to his dreams of universal empire.[3]

Among the uncultivated regions of France we may mention the marshes of the Bresse, of Forez, of the Sologne, of Upper Brittany, and of Picardy. The greater portion of these marshes, owing to the peat which forms their bed, is vigorously and not unsuccessfully worked. They are traversed by trenches dug at right angles, and on whose border are placed the turf-cutter’s little hut, and the furnace in which the peat is baked. Their lagoons, and the canals which connect them, swarm with flat-bottomed boats. Man, in a word, has taken possession of them; braving the unhealthy vapours which enfeeble his frame and shorten his life, he builds his squalid abode on the rising ground left uncovered by the waters. The largest of these peat-bogs are those of Montoir and the Grand Brière, near Savenay, in the department of the Loire Inférieure. They occupy a considerable area of a vast desolate plain, where a few lean sheep crop an insufficient food from the scanty herbage, and whose sole product is turf. “This country,” says Jules Janin,[4] “has no other harvest, no other wealth than its peat; neither fruit, nor flowers, nor corn, nor pastures, nor repose, nor well-being; the earth is wild, the sky one of iron. It is a region of stagnant waters, pestiferous exhalations, decrepit men, famished animals.”

The swampy levels of Montoir form the natural vestibule to the Armorican Peninsula, which of all the French provinces has the longest and the most vigorously withstood the advance of civilization, its ideas, and its modern institutions, and has the most rigidly preserved its primitive character. There are many nooks and corners in Brittany scarcely changed in outward aspect or inner life since the remote days when it was a valued appanage of the English crown. They seem to have been plunged in a sleep of centuries, from which the shrill whistle of the steam-engine is only just awakening them. The country is undulating and broken; in the central districts it assumes quite a mountainous character. It is true that its heights are only of moderate elevation, the loftiest not exceeding 2000 feet; but they are barren, rude, and sombre in appearance. The coast is picturesque enough to delight the most zealous artist, bordered with high and abrupt cliffs, and lined, as it were, with a beach where the waters of the Channel ever break in floods of spray and foam, and where masses of rock lie scattered of immense size and the most fantastic forms.

Geologically speaking, Brittany may be regarded as a prolongation of our English mountains, to which, like all the north-west coast of France, they were anciently united. In some remote era a vast convulsion opened in the solid land a chasm through which the oceans poured their meeting waters, and separated our beloved island from the European continent; the sole condition under which, perhaps, it was possible for the English people to have accomplished their destiny. Anchored amid the protecting seas, we are able to regard from afar, like a watchman from a tower, the convulsions that sweep across the face of Europe. Like the watchman, we cannot refuse to be moved by the spectacle, by the stir and the tumult; but it is only considerations of duty that can induce us to descend from our security, and mingle in the fray.

Brittany belongs to what geologists call the primitive and intermediary formations. It is divided into three belts or longitudinal trenches: those of the north and south consist of primitive rocks, granite and porphyry; the central appertains to a more recent formation, to the group of intermediary or secondary rocks, composed in the main of schists and mica-schists, quartz, and gneiss. Schist prevails over a considerable area, and is prolonged to the very extremity of the peninsula. These hard, compact, impervious rocks, are entirely bare in many places; elsewhere, and over a great extent, they are covered but by a thin layer of clayey and sandy earth, where the sudden slopes of the soil do not allow the rains to settle.

Here are the plains, often of considerable dimensions, which, bristling with rocks, and broken up by ravines, water-courses, and marshes, constitute the Landes of Brittany. True deserts these, relieved at distant points by an isolated hut, or by a wandering herd of swine, lean cows, and meagre-looking horses, which obtain a scanty subsistence from the heathery soil, sown here and there with tufts of furze, broom, and fern.

Under a sky of almost continual sombreness, like that which impends over the pottery districts of England, these landes present a sufficiently sinister and uninviting aspect. The traveller, as he crosses their sepulchral wastes, will hardly marvel that they were anciently a chosen seat of Druidical worship. Like Dartmoor, they would seem to have offered a peculiarly fitting arena for the rites and ceremonies of a creed which we know to have been mysterious in character and sanguinary in spirit. They are covered with its gray memorials: the masses of granite of different shapes known as Maen hirs, or “long stones,” and peulvens, which appear to have been employed as sepulchral monuments; dolmens, or “table-stones;” and cromlechs (crom, bowed or bending, and lech, a stone), which antiquaries are now agreed to regard as the remains of the ancient cemeteries or burial places. At Camae, near Quiberon Bay, may be seen a truly remarkable example of the Parallelitha, or avenues of upright stones, forming five parallel rows, which extend for miles over the dreary moorland. What were their uses it is impossible to determine, for there seems little ground to believe, as some writers would have us believe, that they were “serpent temples,” where the old Ophite worship was celebrated. We can only gaze at them in wonder: mile upon mile of gray lichen-stained stones, some twenty feet high, laboriously fashioned and raised in their present places by the hand of man some twenty centuries agone.[5]

On these very dolmens, where the priests of the Tentates were wont to immolate their human victims to their unknown god, the mediæval sorcerers and sorceresses celebrated the Black Mass, or Mass of Satan, in terrible burlesque of the Roman Catholic sacrament, concocted their abominable philtres, and performed their dreary incantations. Alas for human nature! In every age it is a prey to the wildest credulity. Even in the present day more than one superstition hovers around the monuments of the Celtic epoch. The Bretons believe them haunted by demons called poulpiquets, who love to make sport of the passing stranger, but will sometimes give both counsel and encouragement to those who know how to address them in the prescribed formulas; who, like the Ladye in the “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” at their bidding can bow

“The viewless forms of air.”

For, in the Breton mind, the superstitions of Druidism have not been wholly uprooted by the teachings of Christianity, still less by those of science and reason. Many a dark and dismal legend flourishes in the lonely recesses of the landes.[6]

CELTIC MEMORIALS IN BRITTANY.

Brittany, like England, has its Cornouaille, or Cornwall, and it is here, particularly in North Cornwall, that we see it under its most desolate aspect, with its chains of black treeless hills covered with heath and furze; with its deserts of broom and fern, its ruins scattered along the winding roads, its attenuated herds wandering at their will across the moors, and its savage, ignorant, and scanty population. The Bretons of Cornwall, according to a French writer, are elevated but a little above the true savage life. Those who dwell upon the coast live on the products of their fishing, except when the fortunate occurrence of a wreck provides them with temporary abundance. At bottom, they possess the qualities and defects of characters strongly tempered, but absolutely uncultivated. They are as hard and bare as their own granite rocks. Persevering, courageous, resolute, they make excellent sailors, the best which France can find; the sea is for them a second country. Progress, which they do not understand, inspires them with a sort of terror, a gloomy mistrust. When the railway surveyors first intruded upon their solitudes, these rigid conservatives assailed them with volleys of stones, and when the railroads were laid down flung beams across the lines to overthrow the hissing, whirring trains which threatened to disturb their prescriptive barbarism. They asked but to be let alone—to be suffered to live as their forefathers lived—to be spared the ingenuities, successes, vices, and virtues of the New World. But modern civilization, like Thor’s hammer, or Siegfried’s magic sword Balmung, will break down the last barriers raised by ignorance and superstition. It will shed its light upon the wilds and wastes of Brittany, and compel their inhabitants in the course of years to acknowledge its value and accept its benefits.