THE ENTRY INTO SPAIN

Of all the provinces of Christendom, Spain possesses most intensely that kind of unity and personality which come from a defined boundary. Things only are because they are one, and a city is most a city when it is sharply defined by a wall.

Now the Peninsula, although since the old imperial times so many accidents have come to divide it within, to make of its Western District a separate nation, to give Catalonia in the north-east a separate tradition, and to mark all the tableland and the Andalusian garden of the south with the scars of alien advance and retreat, has this geographical unity forever: it stands like a peninsular city cut off at its isthmus by a wall, a wall running from sea to sea; and that wall is the very high even line of the Pyrenees. You have no choice but to come to Spain by sea or across that strict boundary of the hills—save at one doubtful exception, the Cerdagne. The note of your entry always, unless you come by one of those ports of hers which are so charged with memories, is the passing of a wall.

The roads by which you may so enter Spain are few. They may be compared to gates. There are the sea roads at either end, the high broad shelf of the Cerdagne, but in the main central part, more than a day’s journey from either sea, there are three such passages only: Roncesvalles, the Somport—both Roman—and the new Sallent, which is close to, and not much more than a doubling of, the Somport. It is striking indeed to see upon the map, to experience with the senses in travel, the permanence of such a boundary in our time when half the energy of man is spent in multiplying communications. The great mountains run for twice the length of the Scotch border with no passage through for wheels. It is as though the Alps were thus shut over the whole line of Piedmont, with no St. Bernard, no Mont Cénis, no Mont Genèvre: as if the whole of the Swiss and Tyrolese frontier were blocked from the St. Bernard to Lake Garda.

I have entered Spain by many entries in the last twenty years: by Barcelona, coming from Africa and the Balearics; by Cadiz, coming in a little coastwise boat from Laraiche, in Morocco; by the Bay of Santander; by Coruña and by Vigo. More often by the mountain roads—all of them—and again by the easy but high cols, such as the Bonaigo, which have no roads but tracks.

Whenever I so enter, whether by sea or by land, I find rising in me the same emotions as were provoked by my first glimpse of a new habit in houses and in men and of a new culture, unique in Europe, which came to me in that first voyage from Africa when I was young. But most strongly does one feel the contrast and change—the interest of exploration, the appetite for the discovery of new things, and the weight of the past—most strongly does one feel all those things when one passes into that proud, separate, and reserved world, not even by a path, nor by any entry commonly used, but alone, through some chance high notch of the ridge, where, not without difficulty but without peril, the mountains may be crossed and an approach made to Aragon through one of her innumerable parched valleys.

I remember one such entry, also many years ago—it was in 1907—when I had worked my way over a cleft on the skyline from which one could scramble down at last on to the Gallego.

There are many such opportunities—there are hundreds—in the curious formation of the Pyrenees; and though they can only be used for a short part of the year, between the snow and the snow (when the snow has fallen one must keep to known tracks, and even then _deep_ snow may render them impassable), yet they give to the traveller in these mountains an opportunity which he will find nowhere else in Europe: which is the opportunity for personal and lonely discovery. For though that wall is high and even as is no other of our mountain ranges, with very few regular passes, yet there are no glaciers—unless one counts a small attempt at one on the Maladetta. There are no vast fields of snow; there are few precipitous formations so long that it is difficult to turn them. Indeed, it has been complained that these splendid hills give little sport to the climber. And that is as it should be—mountains were not made for the amusement but for the religion of man; and to look to mountains for a game is like going to sea with a Bermuda rig.

At any rate, such are those hills, and such is the best entry into Spain; to take, alone, any one of the many French valleys: to scramble up the steeps at the end, to pick one’s way over the further side, going down where it may be just possible to go down without falling, and to make a passage of one’s own in two days and a night from a road to a road, from a main stream upon the north to one of the Ebro rivers, muddy water rolling past burned banks under another and a more dangerous sun.

Such was that entry which I still so vividly remember, although it came long after I had enjoyed many others, by sea and by land.

I had left the last village and the end of a road which had grown vague and was at last no more than a few cobbles covered with grass. It had dwindled into a path following the little stream, until that path also was lost in the meadowland of the height, and there was nothing more to guide me but the thin tumble of water and the shape of the ridge upon the skyline beyond, 3000 feet above me. The evening fell, with a great moon, and the night made the sound of the water louder, as it always does. There was a little wind in the trees which hung upon either side of the vale. Before midnight it had died down, and I had then to come to the tarn which, in so many of these places, is the head of the water, with nothing but dry, steep rocks above it, up to the edge of the main ridge. These rocks, with the moon sailing beyond them to the south, were marble dark and looked not like what they were but like a precipice. I thought I would await daylight before I attempted them, and I lay down by the shore of the tarn to sleep.

The night was warm, even at that height, for it was early August, and the bare surfaces of these upland stones retain the heat of the day. I woke with the first dawn. Soon it was light enough to see what the task was before me—simple enough, but tedious. There was no track and nothing to indicate where, upon the further side of the high circular ridge above me, I should find my best chance of getting down the Spanish side. What I had to do was to make for the lowest point of that ridge, or what seemed to be the lowest point (for all was much the same height), toiling painfully up a very steep surface, now loose, now firm, and finding ways round occasional steeps of rock. The business was long, though it was no very great height—no higher I dare say than the eastern face of Snowdon above its lake. Before I had reached the summit the sun had risen, and as I set foot upon the narrow, topmost ridge, I saw its disc between the confused peaks to the east: and there, below me, lay Aragon. The name alone is enough to fill a man with delight and to magnify him with the story of twelve hundred years.

It was up the torrent of Aragon that the swarm of the Mohammedans rode when they swept into Gaul. It was down from that first beckoning of water that the first of the counter-attacks began, forcing its way down, march by march, generation by generation, till, a thousand years ago, the Christians held Jaca and Huesca a lifetime later; Huesca, the town of St. Lawrence, the martyr; the town from which, for good or for evil, we of Christendom got our institution of Parliament: King and Clergy, Lords and Commons, all complete.

That thunderous little torrent of Aragon spread its name greatly outwards till Saragossa was taken; then the dark, awful range above the Castle of Job beyond; till, in battle after battle, after advances and retreats innumerable, alliance and counter-alliance between the Christian lords of rough keeps and the Moorish chiefs of the valleys, the tide came to an end on the heights of the sources of the Tagus, and the whole kingdom was formed.

More than Castille, more than Leon, does that advance of Aragon stand for me as the type of reconquest and as the beginning of those ceaseless adventures which are now the secret of the Spanish blood.

Once the Pyrenean foothills were left behind, the green, but burnt green, of their scanty trees and thin grasses was left behind as well, and the armoured men riding southward went over land in places so utterly bare that they recall the slopes of Aurès, where it stands above the Sahara, or those wastelands of the west, to which national pride alone prevents the Americans from applying the title of desert. The Reconquistadores went over a burning land; and this it was which lay now below me, far away, its glare not yet too violent under the early sun, as I stood upon the height of the main range, looking southward to where, so very far below, a deep trench marked the beginnings of the Gallego. Away to the west, beyond a barren high scar (which was red, sharply coloured, taking the full light from the east), lay that other deep trench, still in darkness, down which roared the torrent Aragon itself, the presiding spirit of all I saw, with that huge peak Garganta towering up into the light.

In the landscape below me and stretching so infinitely away (for between the shoulders of the foothills could just be caught the treeless plains) was the immensity of the past and the grave, profound appeal of Spain.

How often had I known that call! And yet, as I say, in that night and morning passage of the hills, I felt it more strongly than ever before. I was to see those villages which seemed part of the brown earth, and each of which has been called impertinently a museum, but should be called, reverently, a shrine. I was once more to stand astonished at the amazing pillars of sandstone as high as mountains which take the traveller aback as he turns the corner of the valley at Riglos. I was to come upon the first of the great churches which continue and grow to this day, and are the centres of this people, having in their plan, in the details of their ornament, in the uncompromising national seclusion of the Coro—like an inner mystery everywhere—the impress of something which is still of Europe and yet more individually itself than anything else of the West. For though it is a jest only that Africa begins with the Pyrenees, it is true that there begins with the Pyrenees a place sharply different from ours, in some things older, in others younger, having suffered crucifixion, having re-arisen, subjected to every vicissitude of fortune and misfortune, of glory and of humiliation, of satisfaction and regret; but, above all, enduring and fed with an inward fire. Spain.

It is difficult to understand that degree of baseness and insufficiency into which men can fall, men of the north, that degree of stupidity bred from a vulgar pride which remains unaffected by the sight of such things, by their memories, and by conjecture on their future.

Ignorance plays a great part, perhaps, in such folly, for ignorance will always take the tangent to the curve; will think that what it superficially touches for the moment is all there is to perceive, and that from such a farthing basis the coming fate of a people may be judged.

Indeed, this Spain, which I was now coming into once more, is, to the full mind, much more a provocative for musing upon future chances and the perpetual eddy of change in history than it is for brooding upon the known past—full of tragedy, of splendour, and of burden as that past may be.

No man coming into Spain but should think long and deeply, not only upon the fall, but upon the rise, of power; and especially upon the many kinds of power and upon the vastness and complexity of those forces which move and intertwine like the eddies in the rush of the torrent Aragon, to weave and unweave, in spite of human will, the destinies of a nation.