Page:A Motor-Flight Through France.djvu/167

POITIERS TO THE PYRENEES busy agricultural France, the land is breaking southward into hilly waves, and beyond the hills are the Pyrenees.

Yet one's first real sight of them—so masked are they by lesser ranges—is got next day from the terrace at Pau, that astonishing balcony hung above the great amphitheatre of south-western France. Seen thus, with the prosaic English-provincial-looking town at one's back, and the park-like green coteaux intervening beyond the Gave, the austere white peaks, seemingly afloat in heaven (for their base is almost always lost in mist), have a disconcerting look of irrelevance, of disproportion, of being subjected to a kind of indignity of inspection, like caged carnivora in a zoo.

And Pau, on farther acquaintance, utterly refuses to be brought into any sort of credible relation with its great southern horizon; conducts itself, architecturally and socially, like a comfortable little spa in a plain, and rises only by a great deal of hoisting on the part of the imaginative sight-seer to the height of its own dapper brick castle, which it has domesticated into an empty desultory museum, and tethered down with a necklet of turf and flowers. [ 103 ]