mist, the red moon rose slowly, enormous.

RONCESVALLES

Sitting one day in Pampeluna, which occupies the plain just below the
southern and Spanish escarpment of the Pyrenees, I and another
remembered with an equal desire that we had all our lives desired to see
Roncesvalles and the place where Roland died. This town (we said) was
that which Charlemagne destroyed upon his march to the Pass, and I, for
my part, desired here, as in every other part of Europe where I had been
able to find his footsteps, to follow them, and so to re-create his
time.

The road leads slantwise through the upper valleys of Navarre, crossing
by passes the various spurs of the mountains, but each pass higher than
the last and less frequented, for each is nearer the main range. As you
leave Pampeluna the road grows more and more deserted, and the country
through which it cuts more wild. The advantages of wealth which are
conferred by the neighbourhood of the capital of Navarre are rapidly
lost as one proceeds; the houses grow rarer, the shrines more ruinous
and more aged, until one comes at last upon the bleak valley which
introduces the final approach to Roncesvalles.

The wealth and order everywhere associated with the Basque blood have
wholly disappeared. This people is not receding--it holds its own, as it
deserves to do; but as there are new fields which it has occupied within
the present century upon the more western hills, so there are others to
the east, and this valley among them, from whence it has disappeared.
The Basque names remain, but the people are no longer of the Basque
type, and the tongue is forgotten.

So gradual is the ascent and so continual the little cols which have to
be surmounted, that a man does not notice how much upward he is being
led towards the crest of the ridge. And when he comes at last upon the
grove from which he sees the plateau of Roncesvalles spread before him,
he wonders that the chain of the Pyrenees (which here lie out along in
cliffs like sharp sunward walls, stretching in a strict perspective to
the distant horizon) should seem so low. The reason that this white wall
of cliffs seems so low is that the traveller is standing upon the last
of a series of great steps which have led him up towards the frontier,
much as the prairie leads one up towards the Rockies in Colorado. When
he has passed through the very pleasant wood which lies directly beneath
the cliffs, and reaches the little villa