So far as our papers were concerned, the Spanish N.C.O. knew his job and did it with a soldierly, if somewhat trying, precision. Pong was diligently compared with the tale of his triptyque. Our faces were respectively compared with the unflattering vignettes pasted upon our passports. The visas were deliberately inspected. Our certificates were unfolded and scrutinised. Our travelling pass was digested. To our great relief, however, he let the luggage go. We had no contraband, but we were two hours late, and to displace and replace securely a trunk and a dressing-case upon the back of a coupé takes several minutes and necessitates considerable exertion of a very unpleasant kind. Finally, having purchased a local permit for five pesetas, we were suffered to proceed.
We were now at the mouth of a gorge and the pass was before us. Had the gorge been a rift in the range, a road had been cut by the side of the torrent, and our way, if tortuous, had been as flat as your hand. But the gorge was a cul de sac—a beautiful blind alley, with mountains' flanks for walls. So the road had been made to scale one side of the alley—to make its winding way as best it could, turning and twisting and doubling upon itself, up to a windy saddle which we could hardly see.
I gave the car its head, and we went at a wicked hill as a bull at a gate.
Almost immediately the scenery became superb.
With every yard the walls of the gorge were drawing further apart, slowly revealing themselves in all their glory. Forests and waterfalls, precipices and greenswards, grey lichened crags and sun-bathed terraces, up, above all, an exquisite vesture of snow, flawless and dazzling—these stood for beauty. All the wonder of height, the towering proportions of the place, the bewildering pitch of the sky—these stood for grandeur. An infinite serenity, an imperturbable peace, a silence which the faint gush of springs served to enrich—these stood for majesty. Nature has throne-rooms about the world, and this was one of them.
I started the engine again—for we had instinctively stopped—and Pong thrust on.
Up, up, up we toiled, through the hanging village of Valcarlos, past a long string of jingling mules, under stupendous porches of the living rock, round hair-pin bends, by woods and coppices, over grey bridges—wet and shining and all stuck with ferns—now looking forward to the snow-bound ridge, now facing back to find the frontier village shrunk to a white huddle of dots, the torrent to a winking thread of silver, and our late road to a slender straggling ribbon, absurdly foreign, ridiculously remote.
On we stormed, higher and higher, past boulders and poor trees wrung with the wind, and presently up and into and over the snow, while slowly, foot by foot, depth dragged height down to nothing.
For the third time it occurred to me that the engine was unwarrantably hot, and, after a moment's consideration, I took out the clutch and brought the car to a standstill.
"What is it?" said Daphne.