24 DESERTS OF SOUTHERN FRANCE. 



CHAPTER II 



THE LANDES OF GASCON Y.. 



THE Breton " Cornwall " has been called by a popular French 

 writer, "the Arabia Petrea of Brittany." But we might, perhaps, 

 with greater justice apply to this sombre region, peopled as it is with 

 fantastic visions, the name of "Land of Fear," which the Arabs 

 bestow on the Great Desert. Less vivid, it may be, but graver 

 and more profound is the impression produced by the Landes and 

 Dunes of Gascony. These deserts of the south, which Michelet terms 

 " the vestibule and threshold of the Ocean," appeal less powerfully to 

 the imagination. They are haunted by no historical memories, no 

 traditions or marvellous legends in which man has rudely embodied 

 his dim conceptions of the mysteries of nature ; they are crowded 

 with no monuments of antiquity to revive the shadows of the heroes 

 and priests of ancient Gaul ; and when these are wanting, what shall 

 supply their place ? But ample scope exists for the assiduous 

 labours of the naturalist, who here may see at work those unresting 

 forces which have inspired every revolution of the globe's surface ; 

 who may contemplate here the phenomena that occur with the same 

 regularity as in the days when man had not been fashioned after his 

 Maker's image 



" Him framing like himself, all shining bright ; 

 A little living sun, son of the living light." * 



These despoiled plains, these inhospitable wilds, alternately dry and 

 marshy; these sullen pools, these mountains of shifting sand, speak 

 forcibly to his mind of their past history, which is not one of the least 

 curious episodes of the history of the physical world. 



The department which borrows its name from the Landes of 

 Gascony is divided by the Adour into two wholly dissimilar parts. 

 * P. Fletcher, " The Purple Island," canto i. 45. 



