Upheaved it may have been also,
slowly, from the sea, for recent sea-shells are found as far inland
as Dax; and thus the whole upper end of the Bay of Biscay has
transformed itself during the lapse of, it may be, countless ages,
into a desolate wilderness.
It is at Dax that we leave the main line, and instead of running
north for Bordeaux and the land of clarets, turn south-east to Orthez
and Pau, and the Gaves, and the Pyrenees.
And now we pass through ragged uplands, woody and moorish, with the
long yellow maize-stalks of last year's crop rotting in the swampy
glens. For the 'petite culture,' whatever be its advantages, gives
no capital or power of combined action for draining wet lands; and
the valleys of Gascony and Bearn in the south, as well as great
sheets of the Pas de Calais in the north, are in a waterlogged state,
equally shocking to the eye of a British farmer, and injurious to the
health and to the crops of the peasants.
Soon we strike the Adour, here of the shape and size of a second-
class Scotch salmon-stream, with swirling brown pools beneath grey
crags, which make one long to try in them the virtues of 'Jock
Scott,' 'the Butcher,' or the 'Dusty Miller.
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