The tower of Lassujolle kept me company for a whole afternoon while I wandered along these turning roads; it has a Serbian or German feel, a strange high bulgy dome. Lost behind trees, seen through the chance opening of the valley, it played hide-and-seek with me for hours.
I have seen so few people by this stage in the journey that I am coming to understand the landscape better than I understand its inhabitants. It is difficult to communicate; I am not here long enough to get to know the people, I see their lives only in rapid snapshots, as passing by I see someone digging a garden, or wiping a child's snotty nose; and most people are indoors in this weather, for it is cold unless you have business to be about.
At last, the Pyrenees. At the highest point of the rolling, dipping road into Nogaro, I looked south and saw in the clouds the shape of mountains; but it was perhaps only clouds formed into peaks, thin strata of crinkled vapours, mirgae. But from the high ground again, the next day, I realised it was real. One mountain stood out, almost an equilateral triangle, a little like the sleeping lion of Penyghent with its head in its paws. The shade of the mountains is not a stage in the imperceptible lightening of shades of grey wooded hills towards the horizon, the classical diminution of tone, but it is a sudden new palette of tone and hue, and on the edges of the arêtes I saw the glimmer of crystal white in the sun; crystal, or snow. After so many days of rolling Gascony, the swell increasing, summoning itself up here like a wave about to break, a new landscape; so defined, so distant, like an infinitely removed flat in a child's paper theatre; or like the breaking of that wave, like foam, spume, the joy of surrender.
This was the first day that the sun set not like a weary, heavy ball of intensity, sinking second by second, perceptibly, but in a haze of pastel wiped across the sky, inexpertly as if by a clunsy palette knife. I mistrusted my watch; the dying day was less light than it should have been, with an absence of luminosity, rather than a definite approach of darkness, as if the world was behind misted glass, covered with a thin film of greyness. Perhaps it was the presence of the mountain; the lately come snow, the coldness of the air. Something was changed. The weather, like the distant view, stirred something in me; I felt expectant, close to tears, yearning, almost as if I had been about to fly (leaving behind the weight of weary feet, of physical being, entrusting my frailty to the soft empyrean and the swooning stoop of the falcon) - and at the same time, I was in awe, afeared; that great fang of a mountain demanded love, even worship, sucking everything out of me; love even unto death. It was a little death just to look at it, and shiver.
Partly, also, I am in awe of the map, which instead of the country of little black dots and discontinuities and roads of different colours to which I have been used, from Saint-Jean onwards shows me a mass of brown contours and green forest, a block, a continuity unbroken by the hastily scribbled gestures of man.
By now I had descended into Aire-sur-l'Adour, a scrubby little town with old promenades and cafés and amusement parlours, like an English seaside resort whose heyday is long gone. But up on the hill above the town, the Mas St-Quitterie, is the church of Sainte-Quitterie, with its façade burnt orange where Montgomery fired it in an attempt at destruction. Blind trefoil arches build arcade on arcade; the tympanum shows the story of the fall, and the purgatory that awaits; not, like Conques, showing the Judgment and Christ in splendour and the certainty of a statuesque, theocratic world, but the human chaos and weakness that creates the world of sin and death and judgment.
The church is built on the side of a hill, so that crypt slides gradually into the new ground level as we proceed east. The chancel arcades, miraculously preserved by the superimposition of stalls and plaster, display the art of a sure chisel, clear cutting, a feeling of intense activity. Billets and quatrefoil florets, interlaces, sinuous and without Celtic intricacy or Saxon discipline, a sheer exuberance of vines in which hidden birds peck at grapes - a natural efflorescence.
Below it is hidden the mystery; two flanking apses, and in the crypt, not only the sarcophagus of the saint, but another of those misty green mysterious sources, with a thin layer of dust just perceptible on the still meniscus; and behind it, dark, confined, a cell for the lunatics who hoped for a cure from the saint. The acoustic hums to the sound of the voice, but does not echo; one's ears, indeed the whole body vibrates to the sound.
So close to the Romans, there is still something of the temple of Mars about this church; the shade of Mithras haunts the shadows; the sacred well dares the believer to look into it, and find a deeper and more dangerous faith.
The sarcophagus too is half-pagan; Jonah is swallowed by Typhon, the Roman and the Jewish meet. It is a very old testament work; prophecy is the archetype, with Daniel and Jonah, abandoned to lions and seamonsters. No good shepherd here, but a world dominated by dark powers.
The Pyrenees crept closer. At sunset they glowed the dull purple of heather. A new mountain claims attention, steep, shaped like a flat hand, fingers thrust into the sky. The land between seems flat; theatre scenery still.