“We passed on, and striking across a sandy peninsula at the back of the town, soon reached the shore of an immense bay, the north-westernmost end of which was formed by the far-famed cape of Finisterra, which we now saw before us stretching far into the sea.
“Along the beach of dazzling white sand we advanced towards the cape, the bourne of our journey. The sun was shining brightly, and every object was illumined by his beams. The sea lay before us like a vast mirror, and the waves which broke upon the shore were so tiny as scarcely to produce a murmur. On we sped along the deep winding bay, overhung by gigantic hills and mountains. Strange recollections began to throng upon my mind. It was upon this beach that, according to the tradition of all ancient Christendom, St. James, the patron saint of Spain, preached the gospel to the heathen Spaniards. Upon this beach had once stood an immense commercial city, the proudest in all Spain. This now desolate bay had once resounded with the voices of myriads, when the keels and commerce of all the then known world were wafted to Duyo.
“‘What is the name of this village?’ said I to a woman, as we passed by five or six ruinous houses at the bend of the bay, ere we entered upon the peninsula of Finisterra.
“‘This is no village,’ said the Gallegan—‘this is no village, Sir Cavalier; this is a city—this is Duyo.’
“So much for the glory of the world! These huts were all that the roaring sea and the tooth of time had left of Duyo, the great city! Onward now to Finisterra.”
He spends little time on such declamatory description, but it is essential to the whole effect. This particular piece is followed by the difficulty of a long ascent, by a sleep of exhaustion on a rude and dirty bed, by Borrow’s arrest as the Pretender, Don Carlos, in disguise, by an escape from
immediate execution into the hands of an Alcalde who read “Jeremy Bentham” day and night; all this in one short chapter.
Equally essential is the type of landscape represented by the solitary ruined fort in the monotonous waste between Estremoz and Elvas, which he climbed to over stones that cut his feet:
“Being about to leave the place, I heard a strange cry behind a part of the wall which I had not visited; and hastening thither, I found a miserable object in rags seated upon a stone. It was a maniac—a man about thirty years of age, and I believe deaf and dumb. There he sat, gibbering and mowing, and distorting his wild features into various dreadful appearances. There wanted nothing but this object to render the scene complete; banditti amongst such melancholy desolation would have been by no means so much in keeping. But the manaic on his stone, in the rear of the wind-beaten ruin overlooking the blasted heath, above which scowled the leaden heaven, presented such a picture of gloom and misery as I believe neither painter nor poet ever conceived in the saddest of their musings. This is not the first instance in which it has been my lot to verify the wisdom of the saying that truth is sometimes wilder than fiction.”
At Oropesa he heard from the barber-surgeon of the mysterious Guadarrama mountains, and of the valley that lay undiscovered and unknown for thousands of years until a hunter found there a tribe of people speaking a language unknown to anyone else and ignorant of the rest of men. Rough wild ways intersect the book. Thunder storms overhang it. Immense caverns echo beneath it. The travellers left behind a mill which “stood at the bottom of a valley shaded by large trees, and its wheels were turning with a dismal and monotonous noise,” and they emerged, by the light of “a corner of the moon,” on