Across The Bidassoa
I came out of London‘s mirk and mist and the clouds of the Channel and the rollers of the Bay to find sunshine in the Gironde, though the east wind was cool in Bordeaux‘s big river. And then even in Bordeaux I discovered that fog was over-common； brief sunshine yielded to thick mist, and the city of wine was little less depressing than English Manchester. But though I spent a night there I was bound south and hoped for better things close by the border of Spain. And truly I found them, though the way there through the Landes is as melancholy as any great city of sad inhabitants.
The desolation of the Landes is an ordered, a commercial desolation. Once the whole surface of the district bore nothing but a scanty herbage. The soil is sand and an iron cement, or "hard-pan," below the sand. Here uncounted millions of slender sea-pines cover the plain； they stand in serried rows, as regular as a hop-garden, gloomy and without the sweet wildness of nature. And every

......
全部内容，请购买此书。