A DAY IN THE LANDES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2170, 26 September 1895, Page 46

A DAY IN THE LANDES.

The Landes, or wastes, of France do not form a vary attractive, district for tourists, |even French tourists. But they are well 'worth a visit. The people here are umoDg the •snore primitive inhabitants of the country. iFor long they were left to themselves, their Junes, pine forests, marshes, and large silent lakes ; while the rest of the country revelled in railway?, high roads of the best class, and the other blessings and excitements of civilisation. Their favourite— indeed, to some «xtent their enforced— method of locomotion • .was stilts ; and they wore sheepskins, like jthoso other extremely backward people, the ' Saidinian peasants.' Bat nowadays things are a little better With them. It is ed enormous tract of ,country, this native land of theirs. Roughly, •its western ride stretches from the mouth of Ijbhe Gironde to the Spanish frontier, more ; tban 150 miles in length ; and there Are places where its width is as much as 50 miles. Such ■an area exacted a colossal method of amelioration. A hundred years ago this was begun t>y the^planting, first of all, of pines near the coast, to stop the invasion of the sand-duues ; and the improvements then begun have never ended. Roads of a kind now traverse the 1 district at broad intervals, canals have been -cut to draw off the waters which used regularly in winter to form swamps as pestilential as destructive to agricultural enterprise ; and there aro even railways, of a Bad, slow order, a journey on which gives the traveller abundant leisure for taking stock of ■the monotonous landscape within his ken. More than this can hardly be done for the Landes. It is not as if there were a subsoil here that would repay the hard-working 'cultivator. The land ia sandy to the last degree, and what vegetable matter is mixed with the sand is a bar rather than an aid to fertility. One gets a glimpse of the Landes in careering by the rapid* from Bordeaux to .! Spain. Bat it is not enough. There is muoh -beauty in this kaleidoscopic pioture. The green pines in their close ranks look charm- I ing on a hot day, ?.nd their varied undergrowth of pink-purple heather, goree, and ' brambles, with, perhaps, tho added glow of the bracken in its autumnal colours, form a vision of beauty that would extort praitse Erom anyone. But, we repeat, Lhig is the Landes at their be»t. TLe casual traveller would erc'uim, "What a lovely region!" nod, marking the innumerable little earthen pots hitched to the base of the gashes In the trees, might be excused for supposing that It is a wealthy region too. These pots are for the collection of the rosin which is the one industry of the Landos. There must be millions of them in use between Bordeaux

and Bayonne. They and the resin they gather do, in faot, represent a large annual expenditure and receipts. Bat for all that, this in one of tho poorest districts of rich, thrifty France. "There is no monoy here at all," sail a large, mouatacbed lady of Bordeaux to the writer the other day among the pines. She had been visiting her relatives at Cazaaux, and was, she eald, glad to return to the opulent city she had made her home. The thing to do is to get to the coast south of Arcachon— that gay little health and pleasure resort — and, from the snmiuit of one of the sand mountains, contemplate as much of the district as the clearness of the day will allow. Pines and sand for miles and miles ; and the Atlantic chafing against the sandhills, as if it yearned to drive them inland in the old way, without let or hindrance. A healthy, invigorating prospect, bat eomevrhat melancholy in its loneliness 1 Han can get little satisfactory foothold in such a land. And there are some 2000 square miles of it which are about as thinly inhabited as the Sahara. Where it is not eand, it must be pines or nothing. A man may nowhere in Europe lose himself more ©sally — nor perhaps with le6B assurance of speedy rescue — than here, within a fow hours of the fourth city in France. The soft sand is not at all easy for walking, and the tangle ol brambles and heath is in places denee enough for anything. Besides, the occasional weedy waterways which link the great lakes oE the L&ndes together are another opposition to comfortable progress in a set direction. They are straight acd stagnant, and upon the whole repellent : one fanoies, the moment one is in their depths, gome subaqueous power will grapple one's le#« with irresistible force. A futile deathehout, and there will be one lost traveller the lew in the world.— Charles Edwards, in Ohambere's Journal.