The scenery becomes more mountainous every mile, but the road keeps fairly level as it winds through the steep-sided ravine of the Bidassoa. The shiny foliage of box trees and bushes clothes the precipitous ascents in a dark green garment, threadbare in places where the woodman has been at work, and the rough banks by the roadside are in spring starred with primroses growing among mosses, penny-pies, and withered ferns of the previous year. The lonely houses now and then to be seen in the valley are of the same type all the way to Pamplona. They have low-pitched, brown-tiled roofs with a very wide overhang at the gables, shading a quaint balcony at one end. The woodwork is often painted green or brown, and the building is almost invariably whitewashed, leaving a margin of red stone showing round windows and doors and at each corner. Where there are any chimneys, they are of the diminutive type one finds in Italy. The shutters are often plain and solid, and of different colours.
Vera is the first village of a series. They are all small, the Basques, as already mentioned, disliking anything but hamlets, and all are of great picturesqueness. In general character they are very similar, each having, besides its wide-eaved balconied houses, a rushing stream crossed by a simple stone bridge half grown over with ivy, one or two bullock-carts, with a few men whose clean-shaven faces and regular, almost handsome, features seem too good to be true, a simple church, and possibly a military-looking personage in a brilliant uniform at the door of one of the houses.
The bullock-carts are often of the most primitive type, with spokeless wheels, such as one associates with the chariots of prehistoric man! Close to the fonda at Sant’ Esteban there is a smithy where the bullocks are shod. As the beasts do not stand quietly during the operation, they are slung in the wooden framework shown in the accompanying illustration, their knees resting on brackets and their hind-legs stretched out over a bar. They seem to rest quite comfortably on the broad girths by which they are suspended.
Those who visit Spain should remember that fonda means inn, and also that, in villages where there is no sign of the word on any of the houses, there may nevertheless be an inn of a simple character where a modest meal can be obtained.
Of the fonda at Sant’ Esteban the writer can speak with recent experience of the excellent lunch of three or four courses, including an appetizing omelette, which was prepared in a short quarter of an hour for five hungry travellers. The waitress was a little girl of about fourteen, whose dignified manner gave a finish to the meal, especially when she insisted on removing the tablecloth before placing the dessert and wine on the old mahogany table.
Legasa is the next village. It has the usual features and conspicuously pretty children.
Narvate is very quaint, with its wide green balconies and the carved stone panels in the walls of the larger houses, revealing the heraldic dignities of the owners.
Gorse is abundant, and in some of the villages one sees fences made of thin slabs of stone placed upright on their edges in exactly the same fashion as in the Lake District of England.
At the little town of Irurita, where coats of arms and carved wooden brackets are numerous, the road from Bayonne is joined, and almost immediately afterwards the road begins a long winding ascent among steep hillsides covered here and there with short beeches.
The haystacks are built round a central pole, as one sees them all over Italy, and the gates into the fields are of that awkward type which consists of several loose bars or thin poles dropped one above the other between two uprights placed close together at each side of the opening in the hedge or stone wall.