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