i wish i could put before men who have not seen that sight, the abrupt shock which the northern eye receives when it first looks from some rampart of the pyrenees upon the new deserts of spain.

"deserts" is a term at once too violent and too simple. the effect of that amazement is by no means the effect which follows from a similar vision of the sahara from the red-burnt and precipitous rocks of atlas; nor is it the effect which those stretches of white blinding sand give forth when, looking southward toward mexico and the sun, a man shades his eyes to catch a distant mark of human habitation along some rare river of arizona from the cliff edge of a cut tableland.

corn grows in that new spain beneath one: many towns stand founded there; christian[pg 171] churches are established; a human society stands firmly, though sparsely, set in that broad waste of land. but to the northern eye first seeing it—nay, to a northerner well acquainted with it, but returning to the renewal of so strange a vision—it is always a renewed perplexity how corn, how men, how worship, how society (as he has known them) can have found a place there; and that, although he knows that nowhere in europe have the fundamental things of europe been fought for harder and more steadfastly maintained than they have along this naked and burnt valley of the ebro.

i will suppose the traveller to have made his way on foot from the boundaries of the basque country, from the peak of anie, down through the high pyrenean silences to those banks of aragon where the river runs west between parallel ranges, each of which is a bastion of the main pyrenean chain. i will suppose him to have crossed that roll of thick mud which the tumbling aragon is in all these lower reaches, to have climbed the further range (which is[pg 172] called "the mountains of stone," or "the mountains of the rock"), and, coming upon its further southern slope, to see for the first time spread before him that vast extent of uniform dead-brown stretching through an air metallically clear to the tiny peaks far off on the horizon, which mark the springs of the tagus. it is a characteristic of the stretched spanish upland, from within sight of the pyrenees to within sight of the southern sea, that it may thus be grasped in less than half a dozen views, wider than any views in europe; and, partly from the height of that interior land, partly from the iberian aridity of its earth, these views are as sharp in detail, as inhuman in their lack of distant veils and blues, as might be the landscapes of a dead world.

the traveller who should so have passed the high ridge and watershed of the pyrenees, would have come down from the snows of the anie through forests not indeed as plentiful as those of the french side, but still dignified by many[pg 173] and noble trees, and alive with cascading water. while he was yet crossing the awful barriers (one standing out parallel before the next) which guard the mountains on their spainward fall, he would continuously have perceived, though set in dry, unhospitable soil, bushes and clumps of trees; something at times resembling his own northern conception of pasture-land. the herbage upon which he would pitch his camp, the branches he would pick for firewood, still, though sparse and southern, would have reminded him of home.

but when he has come over the furthest of these parallel reaches, and sees at last the whole sweep of the ebro country spread out before him, it is no longer so. his eye detects no trees, save that belt of green which accompanies the course of the river, no glint of water. though human habitation is present in that landscape, it mixes, as it were, with the mud and the dust of the earth from which it rose; and, gazing at a distant clump in the plains beneath him, far off, the traveller asks himself[pg 174] doubtfully whether these hummocks are but small, abrupt, insignificant hills or a nest of the houses of men—things with histories.

for the rest all that immeasurable sweep of yellow-brown bare earth fills up whatever is not sky, and is contained or framed upon its final limit by mountains as severe as its own empty surface. those far and dreadful hills are unrelieved by crag or wood or mist; they are a mere height, naked and unfruitful, running along wall-like and cutting off aragon from the south and the old from the new castile, save where the higher knot of the moncayo stands tragic and enormous against the sky.

this experience of spain, this first discovery of a thing so unexpected and so universally misstated by the pens of travellers and historians, is best seen in autumn sunsets, i think, when behind the mass of the distant mountains an angry sky lights up its unfruitful aspect of desolation, and, though lending it a colour it can never possess in commoner hours and seasons, in no way creates an illusion of fertility or of[pg 175] romance, of yield or of adventure, in that doomed silence.

the vision of which i speak does not, i know, convey this peculiar impression even to all of the few who may have seen it thus—and they are rare. they are rare because men do not now approach the old places of europe in the old way. they come into a spanish town of the north by those insufficient railways of our time. they return back home with no possession of great sights, no more memorable experience than of urban things done less natively, more awkwardly, more slowly than in england. yet even those few, i say, who enter spain from the north, as spain should be entered—over the mountain roads—have not all of them received the impression of which i speak.

i have so received it, i know; i could wish that to the northerner it were the impression most commonly conveyed: a marvel that men should live in such a place: a wonder when the ear catches the sound of a distant bell, that[pg 176] ritual and a creed should have survived there—so absolute is its message of desolation.

with a more familiar acquaintance this impression does not diminish, but increases. especially to one who shall make his way painfully on foot for three long days from the mountains to the mountains again, who shall toil over the great bare plain, who shall cross by some bridge over ebro and look down, it may be, at a trickle of water hardly moving in the midst of a broad, stony bed, or it may be at a turbid spate roaring a furlong broad after the rains—in either case unusable and utterly unfriendly to man; who shall hobble from little village to little village, despairing at the silence of men in that silent land and at their lack of smiles and at the something fixed which watches one from every wall; who shall push on over the slight wheel-tracks which pass for roads—they are not roads—across the infinite, unmarked, undifferenced field; to one who has done all these things, i say, getting the land into his senses hourly, there comes an appreciation of[pg 177] its wilful silence and of its unaccomplished soul. that knowledge fascinates, and bids him return. it is like watching with the sick who were thought dead, who are, in your night of watching, upon the turn of their evil. it is like those hours of the night in which the mind of some troubled sleeper wakened can find neither repose nor variety, but only a perpetual return upon itself—but waits for dawn. behind all this lies, as behind a veil of dryness stretched from the hills to the hills, for those who will discover it, the intense, the rich, the unconquerable spirit of spain.