TO go from Saragossa to Burgos, the capital city of Old Castile, one travels the whole length of the great valley of the Ebro, crosses a part of Arragon and a part of Navarre, as far as the city of Miranda, situated on the branch road which passes through St. Sebastian and Bayonne.
The country is full of historic memories, of ruins, monuments, and famous names; every village recalls a battle, every province a war. At Tudela, the French defeated General Castaños; at Calahorra, Sertorius withstood Pompey; at Navarrete, Henry de Transtamare was conquered by Peter the Cruel. One sees the remains of the city of Egon ad Agoncilla; the ruins of the Roman aqueduct at Alcanadre; and the remains of the Moorish bridge at Logroño. The mind grows tired of recalling the memories of so many centuries and of so many peoples, and the eye grows weary with the mind.
The appearance of the country changes every moment. Near Saragossa there are green fields dotted with houses, while here and there one sees groups of peasants wrapped in their many-colored shawls, and occasionally donkeys and carts. Farther on there are only vast undulating plains, bare and arid, without a tree, or a house, or a road, where for miles and miles one sees only a herd of cattle, a cowherd, and a hut, or some little village of mud-colored, thatched cottages, so low that one can scarcely distinguish them from the ground—groups of huts rather than villages, true pictures of poverty and squalor.
The Ebro winds beside the railroad in great curves, now so close that the train seems on the point of plunging into it, now looking in the distance like a silver line appearing and disappearing between the hillocks and through the underbrush along its banks. In the distance one sees a purple chain of mountains, and beyond them the snowy peaks of the Pyrenees. Near Tudela one sees a canal, and after Custejon the country becomes green again; as one advances the arid plains alternate with olive-groves, and here and there lines of varied green break the yellow expanse of the deserted land. On the distant hilltops one sees the ruins of enormous castles, surmounted by towers broken, gaping, and fallen to decay, like the great trunks of giants, prostrate, but threatening.
At every station I bought a paper; before I had travelled half the distance I had a mountain, the journals of Madrid and Arragon, big and little, black and red, but, unfortunately, not one friendly to
