The beautiful bay of Coruña lay still within the curve of our advancing roadway, and every re-entering angle was filled with a gleaming creek. To our right rose rugged hills, plentifully be{111}sprinkled with farmsteads; and more than one rustic township punctuated the stages of the way. The last and most important of the inlets was the great bottle-necked lagoon of Ferrol; and the famous arsenal itself lay half concealed at the mouth of it, close under the guardian headlands that form the gateway to the bay.
Ferrol surrendered to Soult without a blow after Coruña, and the pusillanimity of its governor probably robbed it of a creditable success. With half the spirit of Gerona or Zaragoza it would have proved impregnable, in the light of subsequent events. The Galicians were taken unaware when Moore drew the war into their mountains, and were stunned before they were aroused. The season, too, was winter, when a guerrilla was almost impracticable. They showed a better spirit when their torpor was thawed in the spring.
From Ferrol the road heaved us aloft to the crest of the great moorland plateau where the Miño hoards its fountains, and from which we looked out westward and northward over an almost limitless length of coast-line, with the dark upland ridges running out between the creeks like the ribs of a fan. How high we had risen we scarcely realised till we came to descend again, and saw the{112} long, deep, highland glen dropping visibly before us mile beyond mile. Yet when we reached the corner, the little cathedral town of Mondoñedo still lay far below us; for what show as mountains over the Masma valley are really only the edges of the moor. We eventually came down to the sea at the estuary of Foz a little before sunset; and just as the dusk was turning to darkness we ran into the narrow streets of Rivadeo, and the arms of the motherly old hostesses who rule the “Castilian Hotel.{113}”
CHAPTER VI
WESTERN ASTURIAS
A buxom old lady who was occupying the shadow of a large umbrella in the centre of Rivadeo marketp-lace greeted us volubly as we emerged from the Fonda door. “A good day to your honours! It seems then that they are upon a journey? Ah! without doubt they are going to Castropol. Yes, there is a road there, but it is a long way round the Ria. They will save an hour,—two hours,—by taking a boat!” Our honours, indeed, had already come to the same conclusion; neither were they altogether surprised when their friend’s eloquence culminated in the announcement that she herself (thank God) was a Castropolitan, and her boat in waiting at the quay below. A small black-eyed damsel was hastily installed commandant of the big umbrella, and the old lady sallied forth to rout out her boatman and steer us down to the shore.
This spirited attempt to corner the entire{114} passenger traffic was hotly resented by a partner in a rival firm; an unprincipled operator who endeavoured to gain control of the market by the most shameless rate-cutting. He would take us across for six reals! for five reals! for four!! He followed us down the street, waving his arms and gesticulating and pitching his voice a tone higher at every bid. But the old dame resolutely headed off all his attempts to get at her convoy; silenced his feebler abuse with broadsides of the bitterest sarcasm; and finally expressed her scorn for competition and equilibrium by a dance of derision executed upon the poop as the boat shoved off into the bay.
It was truly a lovely morning, and the view was worthy of the sunshine. Behind were the white walls and shiny slate roofs of Rivadeo scrambling one above the other up the steeply sloping cliff; before us Castropol rose from the water’s edge in a pyramid of purple shadow,—for the sun was dead behind it,—and between the two lay the glassy Ria, a long narrow fiord, winding away inland, reach beyond reach, till it lost itself in the bosom of the hazy hills. Evidently the path before us was at least cast in pleasant places.