When we reached the crest of this watershed between the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean, we had a noble view of the villages far beneath. Around us was a strange outcrop of white rock, and the descent to Vitoria was barren too: with every mile the scene grew bleaker till the rustling woods of the Basque valleys behind seemed a dream.
Beyond Miranda, the first town of old Castile, the desolate scene appeared in its full awfulness. The plain lay like brown dunes of sand, "as for the grass, it grew as scant as hair in leprosy." It was indeed the haunting landscape of "Childe Roland." Passing over this wide stretch, the train again mounted, this time not to cross another range of hills, but to climb to the great truncated mountain which forms the center of Spain. Three-fourths of the area of this imagined orange-laden land is this tragic central plateau, comprising Old and New Castile, León, and Estremadura. Most of the historic cities are on this bleak upland, almost 3,000 feet above the sea, wind-swept, wintry, and made still colder by the snow mountains that cross it from east to west. Riding for days through the monotonous scene you begin to wonder not that Spain should be poor, but rather that she, an agricultural land, should have made so good a fight against such heavy odds. The guide books that so harshly criticise, saying hers is a land where Nature has lavished her prodigalities of soil and climate yet shiftless man has refused her bounty, seem to forget that only one-fourth of the country is the traditional rich south. The fruitful provinces form but the fringe of the Peninsula.
It was early October when we mounted the Pass of Pancorbo. A fierce wind was blowing. It suddenly blew open the door of our compartment, and flung it back, smashing the glass. It was impossible to draw it to in the fierce gale, and this little incident added to the desolation round us. We looked down through the open door on the white road of the Pass, over which Napoleon's armies poured a hundred years before to plunder Spain with ruthless cruelty, and yet, so hidden is the guidance of things, that seeming disaster waked the country from its long abasement.
Having reached the great central steppes, the same melancholy scene continued. The land was scorched and calcined. Everything was a dull brown. Villages were undistinguishable from the plain, and the churches from the villages; man, his ass, and his dog, were all the same dull tone. Even the brown deserts of Egypt failed to give me as powerful a sensation of the forsaken. The plateau was treeless, except for an occasional wind-threshed poplar, and an isolated moth-eaten poplar can be the final touch of desolation. At times, miles from any village, a solitary figure guided his oxen and plow in a stony field, or silhouetted against the sky a tandem of five or six mules slowly crawled along. Since the villages are far apart, each worker must leave his home long before dawn to reach his distant field, and after sunset plod back patiently to the _aldea_.