“Eh?” said Cartaret. “Then there’s more than one Vitoria, my friend. If I’d only studied geography when I was at school, it might have saved me a week now.”
He tried to make talk with a hatless Englishman in tweeds, who was smoking a briar-pipe in the corridor.
“Vitoria,” said the Englishman, “is one of the places where Wellington beat the French under Joseph Buonaparte and Jourdan, in the Peninsular War.”
“Didn’t the Spanish help?” asked Cartaret.
“They thought they did,” said the Englishman.
Cartaret had had small time in Paris to learn anything about the strange people and the strange country for which he was bound; but, had he had weeks for study, he would have learned little more. Centuries had availed almost nothing to the scholars that sought to explain them. The origin of their race and language still unknown, the Basques, proud and wild, free and self-sufficient, have held to themselves their sea and mountain-fortresses from the dawn of recorded history. The successive tides of the Suavi, the Franks and the Goths have swept through those rugged valleys, and left the Basque unmixed and untainted. From the days of the Roman legions to those of the Napoleonic armies, he has withstood the onslaughts of every conqueror of Western Europe, unconquered and unchanged. The rivers of his legends draw direct from the source of all legends; the boundary of his customs is as unalterable as the foundation of his Pyrenees. The engines of imperial slaughter, the steady blows of progress, the erosion of time itself, have left him as they found him: the serene despair of the philologist, the Sphynx of ethnology, the riddle of the races of mankind.
Cartaret picked up the scanty threads of the Basques’ known chronicle. He learned that these Celtiberi had preserved an independence which outlasted the Western Empire, gave no more than a nominal allegiance to Leovigild, to Wamba and to Charlemagne, cast their fortunes with the Moors at Roncesvalles and, in the eleventh century, formed a free confederation of three separate republics under a ruler of their own blood and choice, whose tenure was dependent upon constitutional guarantees and whose power was wholly executive. Even the yoke of Spain, hated as it was, had failed materially to affect this form of government and could be justly regarded as little save a name. The three provinces—the Vascongadas as they were called: the sea-coast Viscaza and Guipuzcoa and the inland Alava—retained their ancient identity. Somewhere among their swift rivers and well-nigh inaccessible mountains must be the house of her whom he sought. Because of the name that she had given him, Cartaret headed now for Vitoria.
Twice he had to change his train, each time for a worse. From Bayonne he crossed the Spanish border at Hendaya, whence the railway, after running west along the rocky coast of the Bay of Biscay, turned southward toward the heights about Tolosa. All afternoon the scenery was varied and romantic. The hard-clay soil, cultivated with painful care by young giants and graceful amazons, gave place to pine-forests, to tree-cloaked hills, to mountains dark with mystery.
Twilight fell, then night. Cartaret could now see nothing of the landscape through which he was jolted, but, from the puffing of the engine, the slow advance, the frightful swinging about curves, it was clear to him that he was being hauled, in a series of half-circles, up long and steep ascents.
“What station is this?” he asked a French-speaking guard that passed his window at a stop where the air was cool and sweet with the odor of pine. The lantern showed only a good-natured face in a world of darkness.