midst of a field of potatoes. [Illustration] [Illustration: LANDES SHEPHERDS.] CHAPTER IV. THE LANDES--THE BORDEAUX AND TESTE RAILWAY--NINICHE--THE LANDSCAPE OF THE LANDES--THE PEOPLE OF THE LANDES--HOW THEY WALK ON STILTS, AND GAMBLE. Turn to the map of France--to that portion of it which would be traversed by a straight line drawn from Bordeaux to Bayonne--and you will observe that such a line would run through a vast extent of bare-looking country--of that sort, indeed, where "Geographers on pathless downs Place elephants, for want of towns." Roads, you will observe, are few and far between; the names of far-scattered towns will be unfamiliar to you; and, indeed, nine-tenths of this part of the map consists of white paper. The district you are looking at is the Landes, forming now a department by itself, and anciently constituting a portion of Gascony and Guienne. These Landes form one of the strangest and wildest parts of France. Excepting here and there small patches of poor, ill-cultivated land, the whole country is a solitary desert--black with pine-wood, or white with vast plains of drifting sand. By these two great features of the district, occasionally diversified by sweeps of green morass, intersected by canals and lanes of stagnant and often brackish water, the Landes take a goodly slice out of La Belle France. Their sea-line bounds the French side of the Bay of Biscay, stretching from Bayonne to the mouth of the Gironde; and at their point of greatest breadth they run some sixty miles back into the country; thence gradually receding away towards the sea, as though pushed back by the course of the Garonne, until, towards the mouth of the river, they fade away altogether. So much for the _physique_ of the Landes. The inhabitants are every whit as rugged, strange, and uncultivated. As the Landes were four centuries ago, in all essential points, so they are now; as the people were four centuries ago, in all essential points, so they are now. What should the tide of progress or of improvement do in these deserts of pine and sand? The people live on French soil, but cannot be called Frenchmen. They speak a language as unintelligible to a Frenchman as an Englishman; they have none of the national characteristics--little, perhaps, of the national blood. They are saturnine, gloomy, hypochondriac, dismally passing dismal lives in the depths of their black forests, their dreary swamps, and their far-spreading deserts of white, fine sand. Such an odd nook of the world was not to be passed unvisited; besides, I wanted to see the Biscay surf; and accordingly I left Bordeaux for the Landes--not in some miserable cross-country vehicle--not knight-errantwise, on a Bordelais Rosinante--not pilgrim-wise, with a staff and scrip--but in a comfortable railway-carriage.