# A MOTOR - FLIGHT THROUGH SPAIN.

## I. ARAGON.

### I.

Up and up, through mossiness, ferniness, tree-drip, the
velvet brown under beech-boughs, the flash of streams in leafy
twilight, between the moist earth and moist heaven of the French
Pyrenees; then, at a bound, out on a bare mountain yoke, under a
hard blue sky, with mountains everywhere, treeless, subtly articulated,
under a sunlight so searching that each object stands forth with the
merciless prominence of stereopticon views — Spain.

Far off, on a brazen slope, a tiny brown village simulates
a sculptured knob on a shield. Over there, a single poplar: the sun
models it like a steeple. Everything is intolerably precise, vivid,
and far-spread. One seems to see as far west as Catalonia, as far
south as New Castile. Surely that remotest blue might be the Sierra
Guadarrama? One becomes eagle-eyed, one's imagination grows eagle
wings. What must they embrace, those brown hawks indolently balancing
overhead! The effort of mental and visual re-adjustment has to be
made so suddenly that one prays for time, mist, mystery. Spain should
not be so Spanish all at once!

2.

II.

No country, in fact, is more assertively itself after the
first yard over the frontier. Everybody is on horse, mule or donkey-
back; nobody walks, drives or cycles. Even the rush-past of a
staggering motor-bus jammed with travellers hardly disturbs the
impression. It is so soon gone, and so dust-wrapt, that it seems
more like a sand-storm in the desert than a modern means of convey-
ance. For if there is no mist in Spain (save on the Atlantic side)
there is the whirling mystifying dust, which, even when unprovoked by
motor traffic, will spring up out of the middle of the road in a
perpendicular Afreet-spiral, and go stalking away across the fields
seeking whom it may suffocate. It did not, however, trouble us much
on that descent to Jaca; the mountain-roads were good, and the
motor wound down easily through fawn and gray and purpling slopes
till a turn brought us to the perfect brown citadel which sits,
four-square and spländid-gated, just above the town. A good deal is
written about Jaca's walls, but if one wants to visualize them it is
best to go out and look at the citadel. The town walls themselves
survive only in fragments, rather pitifully pushed aside by the
growing outskirts. There is nothing grander than an unbroken circuit
of mediaeval walls, like those of Avila or of Zamora; but few
monuments of the past are more readily humiliated by ill-treatment,
and take their fall with less grace. Jaca's walls look unhappy.

One must seek out the cathedral, push back its heavy doors,
and absorb the good smell incense to feel one's self in old Jaca.

3.

There the ages cling to the thick piers like the very coils of the incense, that never-dislodged perfume of Spain which accumulates its honey in the deep cells of the old carven reredoses, between the elaborate finials and crockets of the chapel-tombs, in the clefts of the stall-carvings, in the very wounds of the bleeding Christ above the altar. Nothing in Spain ever changes: the smell of incense least of all. It goes on piling up, mellowing, thickening, like some celestial pot-pourri which angel-fingers gathered and dried long ago in one of the stiff round-rosed gardens of the painted retablos. If any one were to ask me what I remember of my first church in Spain — whenever I return there — I should have to answer: Only the incense. Then, gradually, the heady magic wears off, and after a day the veil of perfume, parting, reveals details of capitals, basket-wrought and monster-horned, a shadowy golden reredos, and tombs, tombs, tombs — are there anywhere else in the world so many beautiful and reposeful, homely and yet solemn, memorials as these church-tombs of Spain?

Only by this confused outburst can I render my impression of the cathedral of Jaca. It refuses to fall into shape, to be anything but scent and shadow. I had seen it before — I shall see it again; but each time hitherto it has happened to be the first church, the first glimpse of the heart of Spain, and therefore, like its people, as shadowy, inscrutable, as the landscape outside is sharp and explicit.

Inscrutable, the people, yes — with the age-old inscrutable-ness of East for West. Where else in Europe could one see a woman enter a church as this young black-veiled creature has just done, drop on her knees almost at the threshold, and then, after her prayer, prostrate herself at full length on the floor, and press her lips

4.

passionately to its stone flagging? It is the gesture of the East
to the East — the Parsee's prostration to the rising sun, the
musulman's to Mecca. No wonder the young Spanish woman is supple and
graceful — one has only to watch her in these murmuring shady
churches which are the secret soul of Spain to see that adoration and
penitence are the most masterly teachers of "euthymics".

Murmuring they are, the churches, like a forest — always
full of the stir of ritual or the secret life of prayer. Vast tracts
of Spain have long been treeless — so utterly denuded that one can
picture old peasants (before the motor-bus reached them) as having
lived and died without ever seeing a tree except that stone one in
the village reredos, with the seed of Jesse perched in boughs — and
the churches seem in some sort to have been the vases of those water-
less lands, the churches with their palm-trunk shafts, their branching
vaults, their water at the threshold, their shadows and rustlings and
secret places full of soothing.

## I. ARAGON.

### I.

Up and up, through mossiness, ferniness, tree-drip, the
velvet brown under beech-boughs, the flash of streams in leafy
twilight, between moist earth and moist heaven of the French Pyr-
нес; then, at a bound, out on a bare mountain yoke, under a
hard blue sky, with mountains everywhere, treeless, subtly articulated
under a sunlight so searching that each object stands forth with the
merciless prominence of stereopticon views — Spain.

Far off, on a brazen slope, a tiny brown village simulates
a sculptured knob on a shield. Over there, a single poplar: the sun
models it like a steeple. Everything is intolerably precise, vivid
and far-spread. One seems to see as far west as Catalonia, as far
south as New Castile. Surely that remotest blue might be the Sierra
Guadarrama? One becomes eagle-eyed, one's imagination grows eagle
wings. What must they embrace, those brown hawks indolently balancing
overhead! The effort of mental and visual re-adjustment has to be
made so suddenly that one prays for time, mist, mystery. Spain should
not be so Spanish all at once!

2.

II.

No county, in fact, is more assertively itself after the first
yard over the frontier. Everybody is on horse, mule or donkey-back:
nobody walks, drives or cycles. Even the occasional rush-past of a
staggering motor-bus jammed with travellers hardly disturbs the
impression. It is so soon gone, and so dust-wrapt, that it seems more
like a sand-storm in the desert than a modern means of conveyance.
For if there is no mist in Spain (save on the Atlantic side) there
is the whirling mystifying dust, which, even unprovoked by motor
traffic, will suddenly spring up out of the middle of the road in a
perpendicular Afreet-spiral and go stalking away across the fields
seeking when it may suffocate. It did not, however, trouble us much
on that descent to Jaca, for the mountain-roads were good, and we-
wound down comfortably through fawn and gray and purpling slopes till
a turn brought us to the perfect brown citadel which sits, four-
square and splendid-gated, just above the town. A good deal is
written about Jaca's walls, but if one wants to visualize them it is
best to go out and look at the citadel. The walls themselves survive
only in fragments, rather pitifully pushed aside by the growing out-
skirts. There is nothing grander than a circuit of mediaeval walls,
like those of Avila or of Astorga; but few monuments of the past are
more humiliated by ill-treatment and take their fall with less
grace. Jaca's walls look unhappy.

One must seek out the cathedral, push back its heavy
doors, and absorb the good incense smell to feel one's self in old