and Africa; drained the Sahara dry; transformed the Mediterranean gulf
into a Mediterranean Sea; and created a "Spanish Peninsula."

How long this fair Peninsula was the undisturbed home of the Iberians
no one knows. Behind the rocky ramparts of the Pyrenees they may have
remained for centuries unconscious of the Aryan torrent which was
flooding Western Europe as far as the British Isles. Nothing has been
discovered by which we may reconstruct this prehistoric people and
(perhaps) civilization. But their physical characteristics we are
enabled to guess; for just as we find in Cornwall, England, lingering
traces of the ancient Britons, so in the mountain fastnesses of
northern Spain linger the _Basques_, who are by many supposed to be
the last survivors of that mysterious primitive race.

The language of the Basques bears no resemblance to any of the
Indo-European, nor indeed to any known tongue. It is so difficult, so
intricate in construction, that only those who learn it in infancy can
ever master it. It is said that, in Basque, "you spell Solomon, and
pronounce it Nebuchadnezzar." Its antiquity is so great that one
legend calls it the "language of the angels," and another says that
_Tubal_ brought it to Spain before the lingual disaster at Babel! And
still another relates that the devil once tried to learn it, but that,
after studying it for seven years and learning only three words, he
gave it up in despair.

A language which, without literature, can so resist change, can so
persist unmodified by another tongue spoken all around and about it,
must have great antiquity; and there is every reason to believe
that the Basque is a survival of the tongue spoken by the primitive
Iberians, before the Kelts began to flow over and around the
Pyrennees; and also that the physical characteristics of this people
are the same as those of their ancient progenitors; small-framed,
dark, with a faint suggestion of the Semitic in their swarthy faces.

We cannot say when it occurred, but at last the powerful, warlike
Kelts had surmounted the barrier and were mingled with this non-Aryan
people, and the resulting race thus formed was known to antiquity as
the _Keltiberians_.

It is probable that the rugged Kelt easily absorbed the race of more
delicate type, and made it, in religion and customs, not unlike the
Keltic Aryan in Gaul. But the physical characteristics of the other
and primitive race are indelibly stamped upon the Spanis