38 TERRIBLE DEVASTATIONS OF THE DUNES. 



must go back some twenty centuries to trace the origin of the Dunes 

 of Gascony. Fourteen or fifteen hundred years ago the coast north 

 of the Adour .was inhabited, and comparatively nourishing. Mimi- 

 zan was then a town and a sea-port, from which were exported the 

 resinous products of the neighbouring forests. The Normans disem- 

 barked there on- several occasions. Under it's walls, in 506, was 

 fought a great battle between the allied Goths and Ostrogoths on the 

 one side, and the Bdarnais, commanded by a bishop of Lescar, on the 

 other. Both town and port to-day are buried under the sands. 

 " Full fathom five" lie church and convent, and the busy street, the 

 noisy mart, and the once peaceful home. The present village has 

 nearly perished : the Dune was not three yards from the church 

 when its progress was recently arrested. Other cities, laid down in 

 old charts of the country, but of which not a trace remains, have in this 

 manner disappeared, and entire forests have been ingulfed, now under 

 the sands of the Dunes, now under the sands and waves of the sea. 



Some parts of the chain have been rendered to a great extent 

 immovable by the vegetation which has gradually covered them, and 

 these have opposed a formidable obstacle to the encroachments of the 

 sands. Yet here and there the barrier has been defied. For example, 

 in the forest of Biscarosse the movable Dunes, actually sweeping over 

 the ancient hills, have not only filled up the valleys, but ingulfed a 

 great number of pines, and raised themselves several yards above the 

 crest of the oldest trees, planted on the summit of the highest hills. 



In whose favour, in this struggle of science against the elements, 

 will the victory eventually be decided ? The question is one which 

 the future alone can resolve.* 



* " Dunes," from dun, a hill. These sand-mounds also extend along the coast of the 

 Netherlands, where they serve to protect the low country from tidal inundation. " In 

 some places," says a traveller, " they look like a series of irregular hills ; and when seen 

 from the top of the steeples, they are so huge as to shut out the view of the sea. The 

 traveller, in visiting them from the fertile plains, all at once ascends into a region of desert 

 b'arrenness. He walks on and on for miles in a wilderness such as might be expected to 

 be seen in Africa, and at last emerges on the sea-shore, where the mode of creation of this 

 singular kind of territory is at once conspicuous.' TT. Chambers, " Tour in Holland." 



