the Gave[12] de Pau.

[12] _Gave_ is the generic name among the Pyrenees for a mountain stream
or torrent.



From Bayonne, the train at first traverses an edge of a singular region.
It is a part of the _Landes_. This great savanna, which flattens the
entire space from Bordeaux to Bayonne, was crossed in coming southward
from Bordeaux, and now as we strike eastward and inland we but briefly
skirt its southerly portion. A sandy, marshy waste, infertile,
unhealthful and poor, it lies in utter contrast with the fields and
slopes of neighboring provinces. It is anomalous, incongruous,--

"A bare strand
Of hillocks heaped with ever-shifting sand,
Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,
Such as from earth's embrace the salt ooze breeds."

Its inhabitants are meagre and stunted; it scants them both in food and
drink. Its miserliness is deep-set: artesian wells sunk a thousand feet
through its dull grey sands bring up only a brackish yellow water; a
precarious rye and barley grow grudgingly.

The low stretches of furze and heath and fern are fringed only by
mournful horizons of pines or broken by long files of gashed and wounded
firs. This extensive tree-growth, however, which is comparatively
recent, has at least lessened one terror of the Landes: sand-storms and
snow-storms, which once swept across the wastes, have been shorn of