I began by saying that this wide basin of land, with its strong people and its isolated traditions, though it was so little known to-day, would soon be too well known.  So it will be, and the reason is this, that the very low pass at one end of it will soon be crossed by a railway.  It is the only low pass in the Pyrenees, and it is so gradual and even (upon the Spanish side) that the railway will everywhere be above ground.  Within perhaps five years it will be for the Pyrenees what the Brenner is for the Alps, and when that is done any one who has read this may go and see for himself whether it is not true that from that plain at evening the frontier ridge of Andorra seems to be the highest thing in the world.

CARCASSONNE

Carcassonne differs from other monumental towns in this:  that it preserves exactly the aspect of many centuries up to a certain moment, and from that moment has “set,” and has suffered no further change.  You see and touch, as you walk along its ramparts, all the generations from that crisis in the fifth century when the public power was finally despaired of—­and after which each group of the Western Empire began to see to its own preservation—­down to that last achievement of the thirteenth, when medieval civilisation had reached its full flower and was ready for the decline that followed the death of St. Louis and the extinction of the German phantasy of empire.

No other town can present so vivid and clean-cut a fossil of the seven hundred years into which poured and melted all the dissolution of antiquity, and out of which was formed or chrystallised the highly specialised diversity of our modern Europe.

In the fascination of extreme age many English sites are richer; Winchester and Canterbury may be quoted from among a hundred.  In the superimposition of age upon age of human history, Arles and Rome are far more surprising.  In historic continuity most European towns surpass it, from Paris, whose public justice, worship, and market have kept to the same site for quite sixteen centuries, to London, of which the city at least preserves upon three sides the Roman limit.  But no town can of its nature give as does Carcassonne this overwhelming impression of survival or resurrection.

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The attitude and position of Carcassonne enforce its character.  Up above the river, but a little set back from the valley, right against the dawn as you come to it from Toulouse through the morning, stands a long, steep, and isolated rock, the whole summit of which from the sharp cliff on the north to that other on the south is doubled in height by what seems one vast wall—­and more than twenty towers.  Indeed, it is at such a time, in early morning, and best in winter when the frost defines and chisels every outline, that Carcassonne should be drawn.  You then see it in a band of dark blue-grey, all even in texture, serrated and battlemented and towered, with the metallic shining of the dawn behind it.