The Unexpected and Le Glas Again Exactly a week after the Glas had made its mournful announcement of Lyliane’s death, it tolled again - this time for the victims of the Paris massacre. Francois Holland, the french president, had declared three days of national deuil (mourning) and this was one community’s way of expressing it. It was just after midday when we heard it. The sun was shining. It was hot. Too hot, really, to sit out on the balcony. The same unseasonably warm weather in the capital might explain why, the evening before, diners were relaxing outside on the terraces of the city’s restaurants thus making them more vulnerable to the unexpected attack. Winter, of course, had been to visit us at the end of October, leaving its calling card on the high peaks before melting away to an Indian Summer that just kept on giving.
A Speckled Wood in mid November.
Kathy, with her project of recording the butterflies of the Cirque, has been astonished by the specimens still modelling for a photo-opportunity even in mid-November. Swallowtails, the species we see batting their wings above the highest summits, have gone and won’t be seen again until next summer. But the clouded yellows, the long tailed blues and the speckled woods, though they have theoretically passed their sell-by date, continue to astound. So too the flowers. On walks between 500 and 1000m of altitude we come across myriad resilient blooms surprising and pleasing us with
unexpected colour. We shouldn’t kid ourselves, however - it is not summer. At the Lac de Lhurs we shift from one season to another as we move in and out of the mountain’s shadows and oddly shaped clouds block out, or let pass, the sun’s rays. The temperature falls like a melon into a well sending us rummaging in rucksacks for extra clothing to protect our ourselves, still sweaty from the effort of the ascent, against the insidious chill. Yet, soon after, on reaching the deserted shepherd’s cabane, we tear them off as, once again, we feel the force of the celestial grill. The heat is radiant but is, now, seeping out of the land, draining back into the depths of the earth. The days are shortening,too.
Oddly shaped clouds
Shadows and sunlight at the Lac de Lhurs When we arrived here in September, the sun was setting to the right of the Dec de Lhurs. Now, it leaves our balcony at a quarter to five, disappearing somewhere between Acherito and the Pic de la Chourique. My neighbour tells me that when Winter’s thumb passes hardest on the people of Lescun the couche de soleil will have relocated to the Breche d’Hanas and we will enjoy just six and a half hours of sun between its arrival and its departure. He has obviously studied this. He was born here and so should know what he’s talking about. Lescun is, technically, in the Valley d”Aspe, although it doesn’t quite feel like that. It feels a bit apart and, in the past, valley dwellers have considered Lescun folk as a separate tribe. My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that it’s all about geography. There is no other village so far from the Gave d’Aspe - that natural feature carved out over 250 000 years ago when the last ice age bulldozed its way through the Pyrenees, its melt waters sculpting the V of the river bed. No other village, being so high up in its own wide, hanging basin, is so exposed to the sky. From the South East to the South West, it gets all the light going from the point where the sun surfaces to where it slips below the frontier ridge. The people of Osse-en-Aspe will tell you their village is the sunniest in the Valley. There’s obviously a bit of a competition going on. But they are wrong. It’s Lescun. But then again, perhaps they don’t see us part of the Valley. One place hereabouts which will certainly not be entering the sun-drenched village contest is Cette-Eygun. This particular commune combines two hamlets, one on the valley road while the other, Cette, is established higher up on the Eastern slopes. And walking up to the Col de Peneblanque we were surprised to witness, on a day of uninterrupted blue skies, that Eygun was lost in the shadow of the Pic De Coucourou (nice name!) at 1:30pm. They had enjoyed just two hours of sunlight and I
couldn’t help wondering what it would look like in mid winter. I doubt wether the sun will find them at all. And Eygun is not the most enclosed settlement in the valley. As I said, it is no longer Summer and, perhaps, autumn is pretty much over. At altitude the beech trees have dropped their leaves. Walking through high forest now we slip on the copper carpet of dried out foliage. The forest has lost its autumn beauty and appears as a junk yard of rusted out heaps. It’s dull. That is until it is lit up; then a subtle canopy of crimson buds is revealed as a purple haze lingering over the forest. Some trees, though, cling onto their leaves, particularly lower down. The silver birch are dotted with yellow, like a pointillist oils, and the poplars and the hazels cling on to their own ethereal lemon clouds. Then, unexpectedly, high above Cette, we come across Beeches and Birches and oaks are dressed in green. And, frankly, we have no idea why. Eygun: mid November, 1:30pm In Lescun, at one point last week, it was as if a selective silence had fallen over everyone - a silence that also came from not understanding why. On Friday night, before turning in, I picked up some news on the internet. Something was happening in Paris, but there was little detail. By Saturday morning I was able to access the Guardian online and the horror began to unfold. It was so shocking that I, like others, had no words to express my reaction. At 9.45am I had to pick up a friend who had introduced me to a story-telling group. “Have you heard the news?” she asked. “I have family in Paris.” “Are they OK?” “Yes.” And afterwards there was nothing to say. We were numb with shock and incomprehension. By now TV screens were full of politicians declaring merciless responses, states of emergencies, the shutting down of borders and a stream of commitments with little plausible detail. Obviously, they had to be seen to be doing something. Here, however, there was a weird silence, as though breath was held, waiting for something unspecified. I heard no racist or islamophobic sentiments, however; no calls for revenge. By Sunday, the television had had time to put together two-hour-long specials with graphics, time lines, interviews with witnesses. A few heroes had also been found. And people began to talk. An email from a friend who has a house here but lives in Paris: declared - “Horreur et consternation!” In the village bar : “No new news.”
“I thinks we’re stuck with this for years, now.” “Police can’t cope with all the funding cuts - cars that break down… computers that don’t work. We’ve had it!” In the street: “Barbaric. Nothing else to say.” “It has to be troops on the ground…” Everyone, of course, knew that it was likely to happen. After all, the Charlie Hebdo killings occurred earlier this year and there had been a series of events in both France and Belgium, not to mention the callous murder of European tourists in Tunisia. The people I spoke to shared my own sense of being caught between the the predictability of the attack and shock at the unexpected, inhuman scale of the brutality. Here, for the last week, there has been one other topic of conversation, far more prosaic, but on a day-to-day basis, likely to touch, more immediately, the lives of the inhabitants of this remote village. And I can’t help but recall Auden’s lines from “Musee des Beaux Arts”: About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along… Amidst all else that has happened, I am, you may have guessed, referring to the weather. The experts have announced a dramatic fall in temperatures and the probability of snow at low levels. Day after day, however, we wake up to blue skies and a landscape that, once it has hauled itself out of the gloom of early morning and staggered out into the sun, has provided the backdrop to our relaxed South-of-France lifestyle. That is, until this morning…
November 21st 2015