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10

C’EST LE PARADIS

In 2007 another solo trip to the Pyrenees to research routes for the guidebook gave an excuse to explore one or two areas I’d not visited before. Being alone is a luxury, for you can indulge yourself in long days of activity or hours of reverie without the need to consider anyone else. If you set your own agenda, but keep your options open, it’s interesting to see how each day unfolds.

Spain was well into summer, but on the other side of the mountain, in the remote Ariège region of France, a memory of winter lingered, with snow banked high on the hillsides and ice floes in the lakes. After a long morning’s approach I’d spent an hour dreaming by one such lake, its depths confused by layers of old ice still clinging to the shoreline, where spring was a reluctant visitor. Then I descended for ten minutes to discover a cascade erupting from a cleft of rock, draining the lake and crashing twenty metres below in a turmoil of spray. An exposed mattress of heather was too tempting to ignore, so I gave in and sprawled there, just out of range, to capture the essence of the scene – the fury of sound, the constant beat of water on rock, rainbows tossed like a bride’s bouquet into the air.

Later I dragged myself away and wound down the mountain for two hundred metres or more among dwarf pine and juniper into a glacial basin glistening with streams and pools, where spring had arrived with its bounty of goodness, vitality and promise. Water ran everywhere, and when the path disappeared a line of cairns, created in a drier season than this, directed a way across and mocked any attempt to retain dry feet. But wet feet didn’t matter, for such was the beauty of that basin that every sense was enticed into activity. Tiny islands of granite emerged from the water. Domes of grass, alpenrose and bilberry created archipelagos of colour. Meadowlands two metres wide were covered in gentian, spring anemone, soldanella and sweet-smelling daphne, while marsh marigolds bobbed their gold medallion heads along the edge of every rushing stream. Birds flitted from rock to rock, marmots whistled, and the distant boom of cascades echoed throughout the valley.

Perched upon a rock amidst all this water, absorbing the miracle of rebirth and bewitched by the abundant goodness all around me, I knew yet again the gift of sheer happiness. There was nowhere else I’d rather be. Life’s cup was full and overflowing.

Then my solitude was disturbed by a neatly dressed couple (they had to be French) making a beeline towards me, splashing calf-deep through the streams without concern. Stopping a few paces away the man spread his arms wide and, with eyes blazing, gasped: ‘C’est le paradis!’

And I couldn’t argue with that.