We are not among those who have ideas only between books, stimulated by books—our habit is to think outdoors, walking, jumping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or right by the sea where even the paths become thoughtful.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science1
At 2,969 feet (905 meters), the Pyrenean mountain known as La Rhune in French and Larrun in Basque is not, in theory, a particularly formidable physical challenge compared with the 10,000-foot (3,000-meter) peaks that proliferate in the Central Pyrenees. Its shaven, cone-like peak straddles the French-Spanish border at the point where the Atlantic Pyrenees begin to rise from the flat coastal strip, giving onto Navarre to the south and the French Basque province of Labourd to the north. For hikers undertaking the trans-Pyrenean trail from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, La Rhune is a mere stepping-stone to the higher mountains farther west. It can easily be walked up and down in half a day, and French and Spanish families regularly do this most weekends.
Thousands of day-trippers also take the funicular railway, the Petit Train de La Rhune, which leads up to the summit from the Col de Saint-Ignace on the French side. Some go for a meal in the café-restaurant on the summit, to take some exercise, and to enjoy a mountain view. Others are attracted by La Rhune’s esoteric history as a sacred mountain. Its slopes are littered with Neolithic dolmens, and the summit was once associated with magic, sorcery, and akelarres—the Basque term for witches’ sabbaths—in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As late as the eighteenth century, a monk lived permanently on the summit to keep the forces of darkness at bay.
Nowadays the constant stream of visitors makes such a vigil redundant. I hiked up the sacred mountain with my wife and daughter in August 2015, on the hottest day of what was then the hottest summer on record. Despite La Rhune’s relatively modest height, the steep gradient and the scorching heat made the climb much harder than I had expected. We were soon wilting as we trudged slowly up the stony path beneath a flawless blue sky, past beige Pyrenean cattle and little groups of short-legged wild Pottok ponies. La Rhune was once covered in forest, but most of its trees have long since been stripped to clear the way for pastureland or provide wood for the French and Spanish navies. A few isolated vestiges still remain, and about halfway up the mountain we stopped to have lunch in a copse of tall pines. A handful of Pottoks were also taking shelter there, standing stock-still with that stolid patience and innocence that Walt Whitman once observed in animals.
On seeing us eat, some of them ambled slowly toward us and nuzzled hopefully at our rucksacks. It has not been long since these beautiful animals were hunted to near extinction in order to make salami, and their luminous brown eyes were difficult to refuse. As we shared some of our picnic with them, I looked back down toward the sea and the blue sky and I felt one of those moments of euphoria that I have often felt in the Pyrenees—a sense of having momentarily stepped out of the turbulent waters of twenty-first-century history and reconnected with a mountain world that was timelessly serene and benignly reassuring. The sensation was so pleasant that I was reluctant to step back out into the heat to continue our plodding progress toward the summit.
Soon the path grew significantly steeper, and we were surrounded by dozens of hikers walking up the curved track or clambering more directly over the slabs of rock that lay half-buried in the earth like giant stepping-stones. By the time we reached the summit, my daughter and I were red-faced and dehydrated, and we gorged on sugary soft drinks in the overcrowded visitors’ complex while we waited for my wife to join us. Whatever La Rhune had been in the past, there was nothing sacred about the complex of restaurants, cafés, and souvenir shops that covered the summit. Below the picnicking families and walkers we could see the funicular, crawling caterpillar-like up and around the sharp stony ridge above La Petite Rhune—the Lesser Rhune—and the darker blue of the Atlantic down below to the west. To our east, the razor-backed peaks of the Pyrenees disappeared in a blue haze that led all the way to the Mediterranean some 270 miles (435 kilometers) away.
From where we were standing we could see the town of Hendaye on the French-Spanish border. It was here in 1659 that the French and Spanish first ministers signed the Treaty of the Pyrenees, which formalized the political border between the two states. Following the line of the coast northward I could see the seaside resort of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, where the sinister French lawyer Pierre de Lancre established his headquarters in 1609 and presided over one of the most lethal witch hunts in European history. Beyond it lay Bayonne, where Napoléon forced the naïve and foolish Spanish king Charles IV to abdicate in 1808 and placed his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne—an act of imperial overreach that ignited one of the most terrible wars in Spanish history.
That war came to an end in the autumn of 1813, when the French were driven out of Spain by a Spanish/British/Portuguese army under the command of Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, in the campaign known as the Battle of the Pyrenees. On November 8, 1813, Wellington had looked down from the same summit where we were standing at the French soldiers building ramparts on La Petite Rhune in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the peninsular army from crossing the Nivelle River. “Those fellows think themselves invulnerable, but I will beat them out, and with great ease,” Wellington confidently declared to his skeptical officers. Two days later, British troops stormed the French positions on La Rhune and broke the French defensive line along a 17-mile (27-kilometer) front stretching from the Atlantic to the Roncesvalles Pass in Navarre.
History was present whichever way I looked down from La Rhune. From the summit I could see the coastal road where I had driven in 1995 with a radio producer on my way to Bayonne to record a radio documentary about the death squads hired by the Spanish government to assassinate members of the Basque separatist organization ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna) in southern France. Just before the border my producer and I had stopped on that same road and walked off to find the place where the socialist government’s mercenaries had once concealed a trunk containing passports, guns, and money. At that time I paid little attention to the mountains overlooking the highway. Now, twenty years later, I had come to La Rhune not simply to look at the view, but to write a book about the Pyrenees and their history.
That decision deserves further explanation. La Rhune was not my first visit to the Pyrenees. In the 1990s I lived in Barcelona and often drove or took the train to Pyrenean towns and villages such as Ribes de Freser, Camprodon, Olot, or Beget, to the Vall de Núria, near the French-Spanish border, or farther afield to the Aigüestortes National Park and the majestic Ordesa Canyon in Aragon. Sometimes I went to walk or drive around or spend a weekend in the mountains, but at that time I never imagined writing about the Pyrenees. In the summer of 2014, I found myself in Ordesa for a second time, to research a historical detective novel set in the sixteenth-century Pyrenees. I had not been to the Pyrenees for many years, and whether it was my age or the long absence, it seemed to me that summer that I had not fully appreciated them before, and I was constantly stirred by their beauty and grandeur.
The fascination of these mountains was not due just to the stunning natural scenery that was visible everywhere we looked. That did not surprise me. But as we walked and drove past the castles, Romanesque churches, watchtowers, walled medieval towns, and villages that had already begun to feature in my novel, I was con stantly reminded of the rich and complex streams of history that had passed through the Pyrenees, and it occurred to me for the first time that this history was worth writing about in a nonfiction book as well.
I was aware that this history had not been told, in English, at least. The history of the Pyrenees tends to reveal itself in a piecemeal and fragmentary way, as an adjunct to the histories of the two great states on either side of them, or as a picturesque embellishment in guidebooks for walkers, climbers, and tourists. But as far as I knew there was no book in the English language that looked at the history and culture of the Pyrenees as a distinctive subject in their own right. My desire to write such a book was not simply intended to fill a gap, however. For many years I have wanted to write a book about a landscape and place and to explore the interplay between the real and the imagined that make up what the Latins called the genius loci—the spirit of a place.
That summer it seemed suddenly obvious to me that the subject of such a book was right in front of my eyes. As Simon Schama has written, all landscapes are “landscapes of the mind,” which are defined not just by their physical components, but also by what is thought, remembered, and written about them.2 The genius loci of the Pyrenees is indelibly bound up with their historical role as a frontier zone between states, cultures, and civilizations. The dominant image of the Pyrenees as a frontière sauvage—a savage frontier—is as much a construct of the mind as it is of geography and geopolitics, and it has often obscured and distorted the actual place of the Pyrenees in European and world history. Books about mountains tend to revolve around very similar themes: climbers and climbing, tales of endurance and survival and the conquest of iconic summits—beauty, danger, and physical ordeals that most readers would prefer to contemplate from a safe distance rather than experience for themselves. I have also been one of those readers, but these were not the subjects that attracted me to the Pyrenees. Pyrenean history is not just a history of summits and alpine exploration. It is also the history of wars; of clandestine crossings by refugees and dissidents; of state and civilizational conflict; of the movement of ideas and artistic forms; and of the shifting images and expectations projected onto a mountain landscape that has been imagined as many different things in the course of its long history of human settlement.
These contradictions between the “real” and imagined Pyrenees, between the Pyrenees as border and borderland, were all intrinsically interesting to me as a writer. But if I was honest with myself, I also had a more personal emotional interest in writing such a book. Sei Shonagon, the eleventh-century Japanese courtier and author of The Pillow Book, once compiled a list of “things that quicken the heart.” My own such list would definitely include mountains. Some of the happiest and most memorable moments of my life have been spent walking in hills and high mountains.
Robert MacFarlane has written compellingly of mountain climbers who are “half in love with oblivion.”3 That was never part of their appeal for me. I don’t climb, and I prefer to avoid exposed paths, abysses, and precipitous drops. But I do love mountains. I love their silence, a silence that is unlike any other silence in the world. I love their physical difficulty, their drama, their beauty, and their fabulous otherworldliness. I love clambering over boulders, crossing mountain streams, walking above a sea of clouds in a world of rock and stone, followed by cool descents through mountain forests at the end of a hard day’s hike. I love to have mountains towering over me and I also love to look down from them—though not from too close to the edge. I love the fellowship of the mountains and the conversations with the people who walk in them or live in them.
As far as their relationship to oblivion is concerned, mountains have always instilled a very different response in me. In his essay “On the Fear of Death,” William Hazlitt once suggested that dying might seem less terrifying if we dwelt less on our “posthumous existence” and more on the “pre-existent state” that preceded our entry into the world by millions of years.4 Mountain landscapes are particularly vivid reminders of that “pre-existent state.” Forged millions of years before human beings even arrived on earth, they constitute a testament to human inconsequentiality and temporality that I have always found humbling, reassuring, and endlessly exhilarating. “I call these to witness, who have scaled some of the heights of the globe,” wrote the great Pyrenean scientist and explorer Louis-François Ramond de Carbonnières, “is there a single person who did not find himself regenerated; who did not feel with surprise, that he had left at the feet of the mountains, his weakness, his infirmities, his cares, his troubles, in a word, the weaker part of his being, and the ulcerated portion of his heart?”5
I have never returned from any mountain walk, no matter how difficult, without feeling lighter and more intensely alive than when I set out. In the last few years I have led hiking groups in England and Europe, and I have become increasingly conscious, moving into my sixties, that there will come a time when I will no longer be able to be in mountains, and that one day I will find myself like the seventeenth-century Japanese poet and traveler Matsuo Bashō, “grown old and infirm with hoary frost upon his eyebrows,” and no longer able to walk the high trails.6 So writing about the Pyrenees was not just a chance to write a book: it was also an opportunity to be in the mountains once again and to combine these seemingly contradictory activities, writing and walking, that have become central to my life.
I could not write as Victor Hugo once did, literally scribbling notes as he walked in the Pyrenees. But I could attempt the kind of book that Nietzsche once imagined, removed from the “closed ceilings, cramped spaces,” of the library and the writer’s study.7 Because if I was going to write about the history of the Pyrenees, it was logical that I should walk in them as much as possible and try to see and experience what others had seen and experienced. All these different motives and aspirations have made this book possible.
What follows is not a guidebook or a walking companion or a comprehensive history, but a personal exploration of those aspects of Pyrenean history and culture that interest me. In these pages, readers will find walks, mountains, and summits, but they will also find artists and poets; spa towns and concentration camps; shepherds, medieval monks, and feudal lords; the music of Pau Casals (usually known in English as Pablo Casals); the writings of George Sand and Baudelaire; bears and bear festivals; crusaders, witches, and inquisitors; anarchist guerrillas and refugees. In following their footsteps and mine, I hope that readers will gain a better understanding and appreciation of one of the great European landscapes, that they will come to feel the sense of privilege, enchantment, and gratitude that I have often felt on La Rhune and in so many other parts of these astonishing mountains.