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6

THE LAST GREEN VALLEY

In the central High Pyrenees the Ésera valley had a rare perfection that called me back many times. By going early in the season we had both the mountains and the valley to ourselves; there was an air of untouched purity that was too good to last. But in the late summer of 1975 reality had invaded…

Snow lay most of the way down into the valley, becoming soft, shallow and patchy as we lost height. Where it was melting, tan-coloured grass was speckled with tiny soldanellas. Streams gurgled and a breeze carried the sound of a cascade we could not see. Below the last patch of snow two fat salamanders waddled across our path as though on sore feet, their vivid orange and black markings defying any attempt at camouflage.

We found a terrace of dry ground on which our tent would not only give a view of the Maladeta but would enable us to see downvalley to the peaks of Literole. Behind it ran a clear stream, in the midst of which lay a flat rock on which I would sit and dream or draw water for cooking. From the tent a small defile focused attention onto a lower terrace where, that very first day, I watched an izard (the Pyrenean chamois) drinking from the same stream – our stream.

Within moments of our arrival Keith had gone hunting for pine tufts. A stand of low-growing conifers stood a short distance from our terrace; there was also a riot of juniper that smelled sweetly when crushed, and clumps of alpenrose waiting to erupt into bloom. But it was pine he was after. He returned with an armful of tufts taken from winter-damaged trees; these he spread on the ground before pitching the tent over them, so when we settled to sleep at night we had a soft mattress beneath the groundsheet, and the fragrance of pine was disturbed each time one of us turned over.

When mosquitoes visited at dusk, he’d erect a tripod of tent pegs at the open door. From the tripod he suspended another tuft, under which he lit a stub of candle; not too close, but near enough to singe it, sending a wisp of smoke rising in the doorway to keep the mozzies at bay, and at the same time adding to the fresh smell of pine inside the tent.

For two weeks we had the valley to ourselves. Not just the valley, but the mountains that walled it. We’d climb all day and see no-one, returning late in the afternoon to discover new flowers emerging from the grass around the tent; there were trumpet gentians, primulas, two types of orchid and a scattering of dog’s tooth violets. We’d walk for hours through open meadows of flowers; the tiniest of blue butterflies would drift around us; we’d hear marmots calling fresh from hibernation, and watch as a small herd of izard loped across a snowslip. Alpenrose buds now opened, and our tent was surrounded by colour. The valley became a valley of flowers, a valley of rare perfection. And for two unforgettable weeks it was our own private playground.

We got to know the mountains through personal discovery. The only English-language guidebook had been published in 1862, so we made our own way and our own mistakes. If we reached the summit we aimed for, we’d celebrate. If we failed, well…if we’d had a good day we’d celebrate anyway. There was no-one to impress or condemn us; there were no paths, no cairns, no signposts. Nature had full dominion.

Day by day the valley was being transformed by nature. On one occasion we set out to climb a peak on the frontier ridge. Just below its crags we came upon a pool in a scoop of grass, rock and snow. Around its edge tadpoles twitched, but the water was clear enough to turn distant mountains on their heads. When we’d descended into the valley a few days earlier it must have been hidden beneath a cover of ice and snow, and we would have walked straight across it. But when we came back this way at the end of our fortnight’s tenancy the pool had disappeared, leaving just a black tidemark. In those two weeks the valley had gone from winter through spring and into full summer.

There was no forgetting such a valley. At home I’d wake at night and immediately be transported there; I’d smell the pine and the flowers and imagine the orange glow of daybreak spreading across the mountains. So next year we were back, and nothing had changed. We went at the same time and again saw no-one. It was just the two of us, with the marmots and flowers and the occasional stray izard drinking from our stream. Or us drinking from his. We made new climbs and repeated others we’d enjoyed the year before, and every day was special.

But the magic was destined not to last. We tried again the following June, but failed to make it over the mountains, kept at bay by an endless succession of storm and avalanche. So I went back in September, when success would be guaranteed – this time with my wife and daughters, for I longed to share with them the secrets of this valley of flowers.

We made a devious approach. Not for us a direct crossing of the frontier ridge; we would come to the valley by stealth, through Spain. So we took our time, drifted from valley to valley, checking out massifs to climb and explore in the years ahead, savouring countless pleasures of the High Pyrenees, gradually working our way closer, drawn by memories and a deeply satisfying air of anticipation.

There was a road pushing north from Benasque. It had been there many years before on my first ever visit to these mountains, but it didn’t go far – only to the dammed lake and no farther. A track replaced the road and led us northward.

In 1897 Harold Spender came down the valley of the Ésera from its source among the glaciers. In his account of the journey he mentioned this track: ‘We passed the baths of Venasque…and a little below came across some Spanish workmen employed on a road in a desultory fashion. Whether that road will ever be finished is a matter that must rest on the knees of the gods.’

Now, as we came to the Baños de Benasque – Spender’s baths of Venasque – I saw that the gods had made their decision. Below, on the broad river plain, a contractor’s vehicle belched clouds of diesel smoke.

Dusk was drawing in by the time we turned the bend into the upper sanctuary, and we were still on the bulldozed track that had not been there 18 months before. It led deeper into the valley with an urgency I feared. A concrete ford had been created through the river, and where vehicles had used it their skidding tyres had ripped the vegetation on both banks. A once-sacred meadowland was scarred with dried mud and the imprints of wheels, not animals. Dwarf rhododendrons had been desecrated, and rainbow swirls of oil coloured puddles in the track.

A sense of foreboding hung over me, and with every step I slipped deeper into a pool of dejection.

Fifty metres from the site of the idyllic terrace on which Keith and I had camped, the rough track finally came to a halt. Three cars were parked there; two Spanish, one French. Cardboard boxes lay strewn among the shrubbery, rotting after a shower of rain. Wine bottles had been smashed against a rock. Toilet paper fluttered from the branches of a pine tree, and tin cans were rusting in the stream.

‘Urban motorised man’, wrote Fernando Barrientos Fernandez, ‘has no responsible conservationist regard for nature.’

I walked sadly up to that special terrace to discover a metal workman’s hut positioned exactly where we’d had our tent in those cherished times of mountain beauty. Innocent days, they were. But now the site was desecrated, the valley’s innocence betrayed.

It was too late to think of leaving, so we pitched our tent without enthusiasm as darkness swallowed the ugly intrusions. Up on the Maladeta’s slopes a shepherd’s campfire glowed like a beacon. The glaciers were barely perceived, yet a shadowy profile against distant snows announced that the mountains still remained. But in the night I awoke from a disturbed sleep as a wind came from the west. It found a sheet of polythene and sent it flapping against the tent’s guys.

‘Where’, I wondered, ‘will the izard go to drink now?’

A version of this story appeared in The Great Outdoors for September 1978 and was subsequently reprinted in the 1981 anthology The Winding Trail, published by Diadem.