r a good hour in
the express, and for any time you like in the ordinary trains. During at
least three months in the year, its isolation is peculiarly relieved and
marked by the snow, which lies above an even line all along its vast
bulk. It is also one of those mountains in which one can recognise the
curious regularity of the "belts" which text-books talk of. There are
great forests at the base of it, just above the hot Mediterranean
plain; the beech comes higher than the olive, the pines last of all;
after them the pastures and the rocks. In the end of February a man
climbs up from a spring that is as southern as Africa to a winter that
is as northern as the highlands of Scotland, and all the while he feels
that he is climbing nothing confused or vague, but one individual peak
which is the genius of the whole countryside.

This countryside is the Roussillon, a lordship as united as the
Cerdagne; it speaks one language, shows one type of face, and is
approached by but a small group of roads, and each road passes through a
mountain gap. For centuries it went with Barcelona. It needed the
Revolution to make it French, and it is full of Spanish memories to this
day.

For the Roussillon depends upon the Canigou just as the Bay of Syracuse
depends upon Etna, or that of Naples upon Vesuvius, and its familiar
presence has sunk into the patriotism of the Roussillon people, as those
more famous mountains have into the art and legends of their neighbours.
There are I know not how many monographs upon the Canigou, but not one
has been translated, I would wager, into any foreign language.

Yet it is the mountain which very many men who have hardly heard its
name have been looking for all their lives. It gives as good camping as
is to be had in the whole of the Pyrenees. I believe there is fishing,
and perhaps one can shoot. Properly speaking, there is no climbing in
it; at least, one can walk up it all the way if one chooses the right
path, but there is everything else men look for when they escape from
cities. It is so big that you would never learn it in any number of
camps, and the change of its impressions is perpetual. From the summit
the view has two interests--of colour and of the past. You have below
you a plain like an inlaid work of chosen stones: the whole field is an
arrangement of different culture and of bright rocks and sand; and below
you, also, in a curve, is all that coast which at the close of the Roman
Empir