A tour through the Pyrenees . r fathers would have said that it is a good deal. St. |ean-de-Luz is a little old city with narrowstreets, to-day silent and decaying; its marinersonce fought the Normans for the; king of b^ngland;thirty or forty ships went out every year for thewhale-fishery. Now-a-days the harbor is empty ;lliis terrible P)iscayan sea has thrice broken downils dike. Against this roaring surge, heaped up all Chap. III. BIARRrrZ.—SAINT-JEAN-DE-LUZ. 45 the way from America, no work of man holds water was engulfed in the channel and camelike a race-horse high as the quays, l
A tour through the Pyrenees . r fathers would have said that it is a good deal. St. |ean-de-Luz is a little old city with narrowstreets, to-day silent and decaying; its marinersonce fought the Normans for the; king of b^ngland;thirty or forty ships went out every year for thewhale-fishery. Now-a-days the harbor is empty ;lliis terrible P)iscayan sea has thrice broken downils dike. Against this roaring surge, heaped up all Chap. III. BIARRrrZ.—SAINT-JEAN-DE-LUZ. 45 the way from America, no work of man holds water was engulfed in the channel and camelike a race-horse high as the quays, lashing thebridges, shaking its crests, grooving its wave;then it thundered heavily into the basins, some-times with leaps so abrupt that it fell over the para-pets like a mill-dam, and flooded the lower part ofthe houses. One poor boat danced in a corner atthe end of a rope ; no seamen, no rigging, no cord-age ; such is this celebrated harbor. They say,however, that half a league away, there are five orsix barks in a From the dike the tumult of the high tide wasvisible. A massive wall of black clouds girt thehorizon ; the sun blazed through a crevice like afire through the mouth of a furnace, and overflowed 46 THE COAST. Book 1. upon the billow its conflagration of ferruginousflames. The sea leaped like a maniac at the en-trance of the harbor, smitten by a band of invisiblerocks, and joined with its white line the two hornsof the coast. The waves came up fifteen feet highagainst the beach, then, undermined by the fallingwater, fell head foremost, desperate, with frightfulhowling; they returned however to the assault,and mounted each minute higher, leaving on thebeach their carpet of snowy foam, and fleeing withthe slight shivering of a swarm of ants foragingamong dry leaves. Finally one of them came wet-tinor the feet of the men who were watchincr fromthe top of the dike. Happily, it was the last; thecity is twenty feet below, and would be only amass of ruins if some
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