Shut in between two of the greatest hills in Europe--hills almost as
high as Etna, and covering with their huge bases half a county of
land--there lies, in the Spanish Pyrenees, a little town. It has been
mentioned in books very rarely, and visited perhaps more rarely. Of
three men whom in my life I have heard speak its name, two only had
written of it, and but one had seen it. Yet to see it is to learn a
hundred things.
There is no road to it. No wheeled thing has ever been seen in its
streets. The crest of the Pyrenees (which are here both precipitous and
extremely high) is not a ridge nor an edge, but a great wall of slabs,
as it were, leaning up against the sky. Through a crack in this wall,
between two of these huge slabs, the mountaineers for many thousand
years have wormed their way across the hills, but the height and the
extreme steepness of the last four thousand feet have kept that passage
isolated and ill-known. Upon the French side the path has recently been
renewed; within a few yards upon the southern slope it dwindles and
almost disappears.
As one so passes from the one country to the other, it is for all the
world like the shutting of a door between oneself and the world. For
some reason or other the impression of a civilisation active to the
point of distress follows one all up the pass from the French railway to
the summit of the range; but when that summit is passed the new and
brilliant sun upon the enormous glaciers before one, the absence of
human signs and of water, impress one suddenly with silence.
From that point one scrambles down and down for hours into a deserted
valley--all noon and afternoon and evening: on the first flats a rude
path, at last appears. A river begins to flow; great waterfalls pour
across one's way, and for miles upon miles one limps along and down the
valley across sharp boulders such as mules go best on, and often along
the bed of a stream, until at nightfall--if one has started early and
has put energy into one's going, and if it is a long summer day--then at
nightfall one first sees cultivated fields--patches of oats not half an
acre large hanging upon the sides of the ravine wherever a little shelf
of soil has formed.
So went the Two Men upon an August evening, till they came in the
half-light upon something which might have been rocks or might have been
ruins--grey lumps against the moon: they were the houses of a little
town. A sort of gulf, winding like a river gorge, and narrower than a
column of men, was the street that brought us in. But just as we feared
that we should have to grope our way to find companionship we saw that
great surprise of modern mountain villages (but not of our own
England)--a little row of electric lamps hanging from walls of an
incalculable age.
Here, in this heap of mountain stones, and led by this last of
inventions, we heard at last the sound of music, and knew that we were
near an inn. The Moors called (and call) an inn Fundouk; the Spaniards
call it Fonda. To this Fonda, therefore, we went, and as we went the
sound of music grew louder, till we came to a door of oak studded with
gigantic nails and swung upon hinges which, by their careful workmanship
and the nature of their grotesques, were certainly of the Renaissance.
Indeed, the whole of this strange hive of mountain men was a
mixture--ignorance, sharp modernity, utter reclusion: barbaric,
Christian; ruinous and enduring things. The more recent houses had for
the most part their dates marked above their doors. There were some of
the sixteenth century, and many of the seventeenth, but the rest were
far older, and bore no marks at all. There was but one house of our own
time, and as for the church, it was fortified with narrow windows made
for arrows.
Not only did the Moors call an inn a Fundouk, but also they lived (and
live) not on the ground floor, but on the first floor of their houses:
so after them the Spaniards. We came in from the street through those
great oaken doors, not into a room, but into a sort of barn, with a
floor of beaten earth; from this a stair (every banister of which was
separately carved in a dark-wood) led up to the storey upon which the
inn was held. There was no hour for the meal. Some were beginning to
eat, some had ended. When we asked for food it was prepared, but an hour
was taken to prepare it, and it was very vile; the wine also was a wine
that tasted as much of leather as of grapes, and reminded a man more of
an old saddle than of vineyards.
The people who put this before us had in their faces courage, complete
innocence, carelessness, and sleep. They spoke to us in their language
(I understood it very ill) of far countries, which they did not clearly
know--they hardly knew the French beyond the hills. As no road led into
their ageless village, so did no road lead out of it. To reach the great
cities in the plain, and the railway eighty miles away, why, there was
the telephone. They slept at such late hours as they chose; by midnight
many were still clattering through the lane below. No order and no law
compelled them in anything.
The Two Men were asleep after this first astonishing glimpse of
forgotten men and of a strange country. In the stifling air outside
there was a clattering of the hoofs of mules and an argument of drivers.
A long way off a man was playing a little stringed instrument, and there
was also in the air a noise of insects buzzing in the night heat; when
all of a sudden the whole place awoke to the noise of a piercing cry
which but for its exquisite tone might have been the cry of pain, so
shrill was it and so coercing to the ear. It was maintained, and before
it fell was followed by a succession of those quarter-tones which only
the Arabs have, and which I had thought finally banished from Europe. To
this inhuman and appalling song were set loud open vowels rather than
words.
Of the Two Men, one leapt at once from his bed crying out, "This is the
music! This is what I have desired to hear!" For this is what he had
once been told could be heard in the desert, when first he looked out
over the sand from Atlas: but though he had travelled far, he had never
heard it, and now he heard it here, in the very root of these European
hills. It was on this account that he cried out, "This is the music!"
And when he had said this he put on a great rough cloak and ran to the
room from which the song or cry proceeded, and after him ran his
companion.
The Two Men stood at the door behind a great mass of muleteers, who all
craned forward to where, upon a dais at the end of the room, sat a
Jewess who still continued for some five minutes this intense and
terrible effort of the voice. Beside her a man who was not of her race
urged her on as one urges an animal to further effort, crying out, "Hap!
Hap!" and beating his palms together rhythmically and driving and
goading her to the full limit of her power.
The sound ceased suddenly as though it had been stabbed and killed, and
the woman whose eyes had been strained and lifted throughout as in a
trance, and whose body had been rigid and quivering, sank down upon
herself and let her eyelids fall, and her head bent forward.
There was complete silence from that moment till the dawn, and the
second of the Two Men said to the first that they had had an experience
not so much of music as of fire.