CHAPTER III
ACROSS THE MOUNTAINS TO LEON
WE had penetrated the loftiest mountains in Cantabria without any ascent worth mentioning. Consequently it was somewhat disconcerting to discover that the Pass was still to win.
This preliminary canter had merely admitted us into a great cup, the bed of an ancient lake. We had entered it through the outlet, but must leave it over the lip. Within its mountain pale the whole internal area of Castile and Leon consists of a lofty tableland, two thousand feet and upwards above the coast-line. It is vain to sue entry on the level: there can be no dispensation from the climb.
Potes itself lies just above the mouth of the great Gorge, and the precipices of the Picos dominate it as the Wetterhorn dominates Grindelwald. The deep, narrow vale of Liebana comes winding down upon it from the southward, its slopes gay with mountain flowers, and shaggy{44} with beech and chestnut, and dotted here and there with quaint little red-roofed villages overhanging the brawling stream. But ever across the exit the great rock wall frowns gloomy and impassive, its base in the warm green valley and its battlements in the snow.
We in our sanguine ignorance had fancied ourselves upon the watershed, and thought that some two hours’ collar-work would have earned us a spell of downhill. But the mountains were still thronging round us at the village of Valdeprado; and an old neat-herd, driving his cows to the pastures, unfeelingly assured us that the pass was two leagues[5] further on. We tried to hope that he was mistaken; but the Castilian peasant knows his roads well, and is annoyingly accurate in his estimates of distance. It is seldom indeed that he errs on the merciful side. Now the road began to ascend in real earnest, climbing coil on coil up the shoulders of the mountain, and marking its course far ahead at yet loftier altitudes by faint zigzags traced among the trees. A couple of easy-going ox-waggons had lost heart at the very first corner. Their drivers and cattle were all placidly slumbering, and the whole caravan had stuck fast in the{45} middle of the road. It seemed a pity to disturb so much unanimity; and quite an hour later, looking down from the loftier terraces, we could still distinguish their figures in the same position as before. At last we emerged upon a bare and rocky saddle, just brushed by the drifting clouds—a pass by courtesy, for it was almost as high as the peaks, and the snow-wreaths lay unmelted in the shady spots by the road. A great craggy postern shot us out from the ridge into the head of an upland valley; and beneath hotter skies, through a more sunburnt country, we sped towards the plateau of Castile.