of all
ancient Christendom, St. James, the patron saint of Spain, preached the
gospel to the heathen Spaniards. Upon this beach had once stood an
immense commercial city, the proudest in all Spain. This now desolate
bay had once resounded with the voices of myriads, when the keels and
commerce of all the then known world were wafted to Duyo.

"'What is the name of this village?' said I to a woman, as we passed by
five or six ruinous houses at the bend of the bay, ere we entered upon
the peninsula of Finisterra.

"'This is no village,' said the Gallegan--'this is no village, Sir
Cavalier; this is a city--this is Duyo.'

"So much for the glory of the world! These huts were all that the
roaring sea and the tooth of time had left of Duyo, the great city!
Onward now to Finisterra."

He spends little time on such declamatory description, but it is
essential to the whole effect. This particular piece is followed by the
difficulty of a long ascent, by a sleep of exhaustion on a rude and dirty
bed, by Borrow's arrest as the Pretender, Don Carlos, in disguise, by an
escape from immediate execution into the hands of an Alcalde who read
"Jeremy Bentham" day and night; all this in one short chapter.

Equally essential is the type of landscape represented by the solitary
ruined fort in the monotonous waste between Estremoz and Elvas, which he
climbed to over stones that cut his feet:

"Being about to leave the place, I heard a strange cry behind a part of
the wall which I had not visited; and hastening thither, I found a
miserable object in rags seated upon a stone. It was a maniac--a man
about thirty years of age, and I believe deaf and dumb. There he sat,
gibbering and mowing, and distorting his wild features into various
dreadful appearances. There wanted nothing but this object to render the
scene complete; banditti amongst such melancholy desolation would have
been by no means so much in keeping. But the manaic on his stone, in the
rear of the wind-beaten ruin overlooking the blasted heath, above which
scowled the leaden heaven, presented such a picture of gloom and misery
as I believe neither painter nor poet ever conceived in the saddest of
their musings. This is not the first instance in which it has been my
lot to verify the wisdom of the saying that truth is sometimes wilder
than fiction."

At Oropesa he heard from the barber-surgeon of the mysterious Guadarrama
mountains, and of the valley that lay undisc