made our own way and our own mistakes. If we reached the summit we aimed for, we’d celebrate. If we failed, well…if we’d had a good day we’d celebrate anyway. There was no-one to impress or condemn us; there were no paths, no cairns, no signposts. Nature had full dominion.
Day by day the valley was being transformed by nature. On one occasion we set out to climb a peak on the frontier ridge. Just below its crags we came upon a pool in a scoop of grass, rock and snow. Around its edge tadpoles twitched, but the water was clear enough to turn distant mountains on their heads. When we’d descended into the valley a few days earlier it must have been hidden beneath a cover of ice and snow, and we would have walked straight across it. But when we came back this way at the end of our fortnight’s tenancy the pool had disappeared, leaving just a black tidemark. In those two weeks the valley had gone from winter through spring and into full summer.
There was no forgetting such a valley. At home I’d wake at night and immediately be transported there; I’d smell the pine and the flowers and imagine the orange glow of daybreak spreading across the mountains. So next year we were back, and nothing had changed. We went at the same time and again saw no-one. It was just the two of us, with the marmots and flowers and the occasional stray izard drinking from our stream. Or us drinking from his. We made new climbs and repeated others we’d enjoyed the year before, and every day was special.
But the magic was destined not to last. We tried again the following June, but failed to make it over the mountains, kept at bay by an endless succession of storm and avalanche. So I went back in September, when success would be guaranteed – this time with my wife and daughters, for I longed to share with them the secrets of this valley of flowers.
We made a devious approach. Not for us a direct crossing of the frontier ridge; we would come to the valley by stealth, through Spain. So we took our time, drifted from valley to valley, checking out massifs to climb and explore in the years ahead, savouring countless pleasures of the High Pyrenees, gradually working our way closer, drawn by memories and a deeply satisfying air of anticipation.
There was a road pushing north from Benasque. It had been there many years before on my first ever visit to these mountains, but it didn’t go far – only to the dammed lake and no farther. A track replaced the road and led us northward.
In 1897 Harold Spender came down the valley of the Ésera from its source among the glaciers. In his account of the journey he mentioned this track: ‘We passed the baths of Venasque…and a little below came across some Spanish workmen employed on a road in a desultory fashion. Whether that road will ever be finished is a matter that must rest on the knees of the gods.’
Now, as we came to the Baños de Benasque – Spender’s baths of Venasque – I saw that the gods had made their decision. Below, on the broad river plain, a contractor’s vehicle belched clouds of diesel smoke.
Dusk was drawing in by the time we turned the bend into the upper sanctuary, and we were still on the bulldozed track that had not been there 18 months before. It led deeper into the valley with an urgency I feared. A concrete ford had been created through the river, and where vehicles had used it their skidding tyres had ripped the vegetation on both banks. A once-sacred meadowland was scarred with dried mud and the imprints of wheels, not animals. Dwarf rhododendrons had been desecrated, and rainbow swirls of oil coloured puddles in the track.
A sense of foreboding hung over me, and with every step I slipped deeper into a pool of dejection.
Fifty metres from the site of the idyllic terrace on which Keith and I had camped, the rough track finally came to a halt. Three cars were parked there; two Spanish, one French. Cardboard boxes lay strewn among the shrubbery, rotting after a shower of rain. Wine bottles had been smashed against a rock. Toilet paper fluttered from the branches of a pine tree, and tin cans were rusting in the stream.
‘Urban motorised man’, wrote Fernando Barrientos Fernandez, ‘has no responsible conservationist regard for nature.’
I walked sadly up to that special terrace to discover a metal workman’s hut positioned exactly where we’d had our tent in those cherished times of mountain beauty. Innocent days, they were. But now the site was desecrated, the valley’s innocence betrayed.
It was too late to think of leaving, so we pitched our tent without enthusiasm as darkness swallowed the ugly intrusions. Up on the Maladeta’s slopes a shepherd’s campfire glowed like a beacon. The glaciers were barely perceived, yet a shadowy profile against distant snows announced that the mountains still remained. But in the night I awoke from a disturbed sleep as a wind came from the west. It found a sheet of polythene and sent it flapping against the tent’s guys.
‘Where’, I wondered, ‘will the izard go to drink now?’
A version of this story appeared in The Great Outdoors for September 1978 and was subsequently reprinted in the 1981 anthology The Winding Trail, published by Diadem.
7
IT WAS THE NIGHTINGALE
In the summer of 2000 I was alone in the mountains, drifting from France to Spain and back again – climbing, walking, checking routes for a new edition of my guidebook. In high places there would be the croaking of choughs, a tuneless sound that was nonetheless an integral part of the mountain scene. Yet one evening, down in a valley, a much sweeter sound romanced my senses…
Driven from the mountains by a storm that washed the hills and threatened to drown valleys I came to an empty campsite below a plug of rock, upon which was crouched a tiny, cracked Spanish village – a dozen houses crowded among cobbled alleys, a church and a view of the High Pyrenees brooding under an evil sky. Although the storm rattled as I pitched my tent, the site was safe from flooding. The rain eased while I cooked and ate my meal, and only a light drizzle was spattering the flysheet when I drifted into sleep.
Suddenly I awoke to a sound made in heaven. Behind the tent a nightingale warbled and trilled its liquid song; a song that had no end, no sign of ending, it rose and fell and rose again and again, tossing notes to unseen stars as the hours moved toward midnight and beyond. I crawled out in a vain attempt to see the source, but all was dark save for the distant flash of lightning behind black, shapeless mountains. The nightingale cared nothing for that far-off storm, but sang as though all of life depended on it.
Next day the storm was forgotten, and the sun scorched a cloudless sky as I scrambled past waterfalls born of yesterday’s deluge and looked on peaks dusted with overnight snow that would melt by midday. Then, as evening drew in, I was seduced back to the nightingale camp and stretched out on the grass beside my tent as darkness fell. It was then that the nightingale returned and in an instant his melodies rippled through the valley.
Hour upon hour I lay, reluctant to sleep. The moon-free night was filled with beauty, and shortly after midnight the solo became a duet as a second nightingale copied the song from a tree across the way – note for note, phrase for phrase it echoed the melody in perfect pitch. Nightingales in stereo, sufficient to melt the coldest heart, the birds were romancing one another, and their love duet filled the night with what seemed like audible honey.
Eventually I drifted into a light sleep. When I woke again around 4am they were still at it! But now they were growing weary, the pause between each new melody a little more prolonged than the last. Yet still they sang until the very first stain of sunrise stretched across the eastern hills. Only then did the birds give their throats a rest. And I…well, I gave up on sleep and headed for the mountains once more.
8
TRAGEDY ON JEAN-PIERRE
Mike and I were brought up in neighbouring villages, started climbing together in north Wales, and several years later shared a rope in the Atlas Mountains. He had a natural talent on rock, and for a while we planned to open a climbing school in Snowdonia, but our lives took different directions and inevitably that dream faded. However, in 1977 the opportunity came to share a rope once more, so we headed for the Pyrenees with an ambitious list of routes, but from Day One things did not go according to plan.
Afternoon