The prevalence of granite is noticeable everywhere. The fields are divided from the path by granite walls, gate-posts, trellis standards, and even telegraph poles are slender granite monoliths, and the cottages themselves are granite built, solid and weather-proof. Many people meet us on their way to Braga: men in velvet jackets, wide, brown, homespun trousers, often with inserted patterns of other coloured cloth, and broad brimmed hats; the women, gay with bright kerchiefs over head and shoulders, but all barefooted, and many carrying poised upon their heads the slender red water jars, the fashion of which has known no change since the time when the legions of Augustus ruled the Celts and Suevians with iron hand from Bracara Augusta. Ox-carts slowly toil along, the bowed necks of the bullocks bearing above them the elaborately carved canga, here seen at its best. And still the road lies mainly upward through the keen pure air, the mountain slopes below and around us green with pine forests, and above us the eternal grey granite boulders. The land is bathed in a flood of sunlight, with here and there upon the widespread slopes and valleys the dark shadow of a passing cloud. Even up here amidst the masses of granite the fruit-laden vine persists, covering and embracing with its reaching tendrils poplars, oaks, and olives on the sheltered slopes, whilst the proud pines alone, towering on the exposed surfaces, defy the creeper’s insidious caress.
At length the high pass of the Falperra range is crossed, and before us spreads a vast fertile plain, with villages and homesteads scattered across its bosom. Soon the grey boulders disappear from around us, and the air grows softer, though granite still supplies the place of wood by the roadside. The fields of maize are usually not above an acre in extent, and are bordered everywhere by vine-clad poplars. It is clear to see that the little farms are for the most part cultivated by the owners and by hand labour, for no yard of tillable soil is left to waste. It is market day at Taipas, and flocks of picturesque husbandmen and their womenkind are wending their way into the village from distant hillside hamlets and lonely granite granges. It is a gaily clad and prosperous-looking crowd that chaffer and bargain for their herds of thin porkers, their vegetables, fruit, red clay pottery, and flaring textiles; all spread out to the best advantage beneath the trees of the market-place and by the shady wayside. The women almost invariably carry upon their heads in long spacious baskets the merchandise they buy or sell, be it live-stock, produce, yarn for weaving, or household stuff; and as invariably is the burden covered with a snowy cloth, and the woman herself is clean, well-fed, and upstanding.
Taipas, the famous thermal mineral baths of the Romans, did not detain me except to order lunch to be ready when I should return a few hours later to the primitive inn attached to the ancient baths, for I was bound for a place still more ancient than Roman Taipas, the mysterious buried city of Citania, the Portuguese Pompeii.
A few miles’ drive upon an excellent road and through a prosperous smiling country of maize, vines, and olives, brought me to the tiny hamlet of São Estevão de Briteiros, just a humble little grey church, a large farmhouse, an inn, a few cottages and a school. The road had led almost at right angles to that by which we had reached Taipas, and the Falperra range, which we had crossed earlier in the day, again loomed nearer; the nearest spur, a bold hill of nine hundred or a thousand feet high at some distance from the range, projecting far out into the plain, and rising precipitously from the little village of Briteiros, which was the present limit of my drive. Long before we reached it the abrupt hill with its tiny white hermitage chapel of São Romão on the highest point had stood out conspicuously, and seen from below looked impossible of ascent. From Briteiros, however, the climb was seen to be not so formidable; for a rough path started from behind the humble schoolhouse, through little farmsteads, gradually winding and zigzagging up the precipitous slope through the trees and brushwood that clothed the lower portion of the hill. The population of Briteiros were mostly at Taipas for the market, and a demand for the services of um rapaz, a boy, to guide the stranger to the lost city of long ago met with the reply that no man nor boy was readily available.
ON THE WAY TO MARKET, TAIPAS.
After some short delay an aged woman produced a substitute in the form of an elfin little maiden of ten or eleven, with great black eyes, half-bashful, half-bold, and jet black hair floating unrestrained over her shoulders. With her bare feet and scanty floating raiment she skipped like a dryad from stone to stone over the rugged pathway, looking back now and again as if in wondering contempt at the lumbering stranger slipping and floundering after her upon the thick carpet of pine needles that clothed the spaces between the boulders forming the track. Track it was and no more, scarped on the hillside, and evidently had been made by hands; for the stones still showed some signs of regularity and the larger masses had been removed to the side, whilst those which stood upon the causeway itself proved by their flat and polished surfaces that ages of human feet had passed over them up and down the hill. As the weird little damsel sprang with the free action of a wild thing from stone to stone, her black hair floating in the pine-scented breeze, it was easy for me to imagine how the people who long, long ago, before history records, had dwelt upon this hill and made this causeway had looked and moved. Racial inundations had passed over the land since then, leaving traces perhaps in this or the other type of the countryside, but the girl’s far-off ancestors, dwelling always upon the same spot, had struck deeper and more lasting root than their stone walls and causeways, and as the little guide flittered up the rough climb before me, the ages seemed to fall away and the dim past to grow in clearness.
Half up the hill the trees cease, and the stony causeway rises precipitously through a region of purple heather, broom and yellow gorse, thickly strewn with giant granite boulders. Presently the ruins of a wall of rough stones cemented together stretch across right and left; and running parallel, and just inside of it, a dry water channel well made of hewn stones. The ground-plans and walls a yard or two high, of houses are on all sides of us; and climbing a little higher and turning the shoulder of the hill we see spread before us, covering the whole of the south upper slopes of the declivity, a vast stretch of uncovered ruins—a once-populous town of the unrecorded past.
Before describing in detail these, by far the most complete and interesting Celtiberian remains in the Peninsula, a few words may be said with regard to the discovery and exploration of them, as well as to the theories as to their origin. For reasons which need not be re-stated here the Celtic element was less intimately mixed with the Iberian in the north-western part of the Peninsula than elsewhere, and the tribes in this part of the country were those which withstood longest the imposition of the Roman bureaucratic system after the assassination of the patriot Viriatus, and the fall of Numancia in the second century B.C. Not till the time of the great Julius did the legionaries, stationed then permanently at Braga, sweep all this province clean of revolt, and bring the tribesmen to their knees after dire slaughter and destruction. The Celtiberian tribes in this remote corner had lived their simple pastoral lives from time unrecorded in small family clans, each independent, with its own law and its own gods; but for purposes of mutual defence in later times confederations of many clans were formed, mòr thuatha, as in Ireland. Each of these confederations possessed a fortified centre or stronghold as a place of assembly and refuge, usually upon an eminence, wherein the scattered clans might meet for defence or in council to treat of common interests. The Roman historian, Valerius Maximus speaks especially of some such fortress upon a mountain in Lusitania, and praises its inhabitants for their stubborn bravery. He calls it by the name of Citania, and antiquaries have given to the extensive ruins now before us that name during the last few years, on the assumption that this may be the place referred to by the Roman chronicler.
Vague stories had always pervaded the countryside of buried ruins, with the accompanying legends of witches, warlocks, and enchanted Moors existing upon the hill of São Romão; and in the eighteenth century the curate of São Estevão de Briteiros at the foot of the hill had brought down from the hill-top and placed in his church porch a great mysterious slab of stone covered with mystic devices and of strange fashioning. But not until our own times did a man come with public spirit enough to devote his life and small fortune to the exploration of this city of the past, for in Portugal public encouragement of any such objects is rare indeed. This man was Dr. Sarmento, who for many years until his death recently, made a labour of love in uncovering systematically the vestiges of the prehistoric city.