overed and unknown for
thousands of years until a hunter found there a tribe of people speaking
a language unknown to anyone else and ignorant of the rest of men. Rough
wild ways intersect the book. Thunder storms overhang it. Immense
caverns echo beneath it. The travellers left behind a mill which "stood
at the bottom of a valley shaded by large trees, and its wheels were
turning with a dismal and monotonous noise," and they emerged, by the
light of "a corner of the moon," on to the wildest heath of the wildest
province of Spain, ignorant of their way, making for a place which the
guide believed not to exist. They passed a defile where the carrier had
been attacked on his last journey by robbers, who burnt the coach by
means of the letters in it, and butchered all except the carrier, who had
formerly been the master of one of the gang: as they passed, the ground
was still saturated with the blood of one of the murdered soldiers and a
dog was gnawing a piece of his skull. Borrow was told of an old viper
catcher caught by the robbers, who plundered and stripped him and then
tied his hands behind him and thrust his head into his sack, "which
contained several of these horrible reptiles alive," and so he ran mad
through the villages until he fell dead. As a background, he had again
and again a scene like that one, whose wild waters and mountains, and the
"Convent of the Precipices" standing out against the summit, reminded him
at once of Salvator Rosa and of Stolberg's lines to a mountain torrent:
"The pine trees are shaken. . . ." Describing the cave at Gibraltar, he
spoke of it as always having been "a den for foul night birds, reptiles,
and beasts of prey," of precipice after precipice, abyss after abyss, in
apparently endless succession, and of an explorer who perished there and
lay "even now rotting in the bowels of the mountain, preyed upon by its
blind and noisome worms."

When he saw a peaceful rich landscape in a bright sunny hour, as at Monte
Moro, he shed tears of rapture, sitting on and on in those reveries
which, as he well knew, only enervate the mind: or he felt that he would
have desired "no better fate than that of a shepherd on the prairies or a
hunter on the hills of Bembibre": or looking through an iron-grated door
at a garden court in Seville he sighed that his fate did not permit him
to reside in such an Eden for the remainder of his days. For as he
delights in the dismal, grand, or wild, so h