FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   72   73   74   75   76   77   78   79   80   81   82   83   84   85   86   87   88   89   90   91   92   93   94   95   96  
97   98   99   100   101   102   103   104   105   106   107   108   109   110   111   112   113   114   115   116   117   118   119   120   121   >>   >|  
is as broad as half a county, and is full of towns and fields and men and mules and slow rivulets and corn; so, standing upon either side and looking to the other, you see all together and in the large its mountain boundaries. It is like the sight of the Grampians from beyond Strathmore, but very much more grand. Moreover, as no one has written sufficiently about it to prepare the traveller for what he is to see (and in attempting to do so here I am probably doing wrong, but a man must write down what he has seen), the Cerdagne breaks upon him quite unexpectedly, and his descent into that wealthy plain is the entry into a new world. He may have learnt the mountains by heart, as we had, in many stumbling marches and many nights slept out beneath the trees, and many crossings of the main chain by those precipitous cols which make the ridge of the Pyrenees more like a paling than a mountain crest, but though he should know them thoroughly all the way from the Atlantic for two hundred miles, the Cerdagne will only appear to him the more astonishing. It renews in any man however familiar he may be with great mountains, the impressions of that day when he first saw the distant summits and thought them to be clouds. Apart from all this, the Cerdagne is full of a lively interest, because it preserves far better than any other Pyrenean valley those two Pyrenean things--the memory of European history and the intense local spirit of the Vals. The memory of European history is to be seen in the odd tricks which the frontier plays. It was laid down by the commissioners of Mazarin two hundred and fifty years ago, and instead of following the watershed (which would leave the Cerdagne all Spanish politically as it is Catalan by language and position) it crosses the valley from one side to another, leaving the top end of it and the sources of its rivers under French control. That endless debate as to whether race or government will most affect a people can here be tested, though hardly decided. The villages are Spanish, the hour of meals is Spanish, and the wine is Spanish wine. But the clocks keep time, and the streets are swept, and, oddest of all, the cooking is French cooking. The people are Spanish in that they are slow to serve you or to find you a mount or to show you the way, but they are French in that they are punctual in the hour at which they have promised to do these things; and they are Spanish in the shapes of thei
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   72   73   74   75   76   77   78   79   80   81   82   83   84   85   86   87   88   89   90   91   92   93   94   95   96  
97   98   99   100   101   102   103   104   105   106   107   108   109   110   111   112   113   114   115   116   117   118   119   120   121   >>   >|  



Top keywords:

Spanish

 

Cerdagne

 

French

 

things

 

Pyrenean

 

valley

 

European

 

hundred

 
people
 

history


mountains

 

memory

 
cooking
 
mountain
 

spirit

 

tricks

 

Mazarin

 

commissioners

 

frontier

 

intense


preserves
 

interest

 

lively

 
clouds
 

shapes

 

punctual

 

promised

 

watershed

 

thought

 

endless


control

 

rivers

 

clocks

 
debate
 

decided

 
tested
 

affect

 
villages
 
government
 

oddest


politically
 

Catalan

 
language
 

sources

 

leaving

 

position

 

streets

 

crosses

 
traveller
 

attempting