Sitting one day in Pampeluna, which occupies the plain just below the
southern and Spanish escarpment of the Pyrenees, I and another
remembered with an equal desire that we had all our lives desired to see
Roncesvalles and the place where Roland died. This town (we said) was
that which Charlemagne destroyed upon his march to the Pass, and I, for
my part, desired here, as in every other part of Europe where I had been
able to find his footsteps, to follow them, and so to re-create his
time.
The road leads slantwise through the upper valleys of Navarre, crossing
by passes the various spurs of the mountains, but each pass higher than
the last and less frequented, for each is nearer the main range. As you
leave Pampeluna the road grows more and more deserted, and the country
through which it cuts more wild. The advantages of wealth which are
conferred by the neighbourhood of the capital of Navarre are rapidly
lost as one proceeds; the houses grow rarer, the shrines more ruinous
and more aged, until one comes at last upon the bleak valley which
introduces the final approach to Roncesvalles.
The wealth and order everywhere associated with the Basque blood have
wholly disappeared. This people is not receding--it holds its own, as it
deserves to do; but as there are new fields which it has occupied within
the present century upon the more western hills, so there are others to
the east, and this valley among them, from whence it has disappeared.
The Basque names remain, but the people are no longer of the Basque
type, and the tongue is forgotten.
So gradual is the ascent and so continual the little cols which have to
be surmounted, that a man does not notice how much upward he is being
led towards the crest of the ridge. And when he comes at last upon the
grove from which he sees the plateau of Roncesvalles spread before him,
he wonders that the chain of the Pyrenees (which here lie out along in
cliffs like sharp sunward walls, stretching in a strict perspective to
the distant horizon) should seem so low. The reason that this white wall
of cliffs seems so low is that the traveller is standing upon the last
of a series of great steps which have led him up towards the frontier,
much as the prairie leads one up towards the Rockies in Colorado. When
he has passed through the very pleasant wood which lies directly beneath
the cliffs, and reaches the little village of Roncesvalles itself, he
wonders still more that so famous a pass should be so small a thing. The
pass from this side is so broad, with so low a saddle of grass, that it
seems more like the crossing of the Sussex Downs than the crossing of an
awful range of mountains. It is a rounded gap, up to which there lifts a
pretty little wooded combe; and no one could be certain, during the
half-hour spent in climbing such a petty summit, that he was, in so
climbing, conquering Los Altos, the high Pyrenees.
But when the summit is reached, then the meaning of the "_Imus
Pyrenaeus_," and the place that passage has taken in history, is
comprehended in a moment. One sees at what a height one was in that
plain of Roncesvalles, and one sees how the main range dominates the
world; for down below one an enormous cleft into the stuff of the
mountains falls suddenly and almost sheer, and you see unexpectedly
beneath you the approach from France into Spain. The gulf at its
narrowest is tremendous; but, more than that, when the floor of the
valley is reached, that floor itself slopes away down and down by runs
and by cascades towards the very distant plains of the north, upon which
the funnel debouches. Moreover, it was up this gulf, and from the north,
that the armies came; it was this vision of a precipice that seized them
when their leaders had determined to invade the Peninsula. This also
was what, for so many generations, so many wanderers must have seen who
came to wonder at the place where the rearguard of Charlemagne had been
destroyed.
The whole of the slope is covered with an ancient wood, and this wood is
so steep that it would be impossible or dangerous to venture down it.
The old Carolingian road skirts the mountain-side with difficulty,
clinging well up upon its flank; the great modern road, which is
excellent and made for artillery, has to go even nearer the summit;
below them there falls away a slant or edge to which the huge beech
trees cling almost parallel to the steep earth, running their
perpendicular lines so high and close against the hill that they look
like pines. As you peer down in among the trunks, you see the darkness
increasing until the eye can penetrate no more, and dead, enormous trees
that have lived their centuries, and have fallen perhaps for decades,
lie across the aisles of the wood, propped up against their living
fellows; for, by one of those political accidents which are common
throughout the whole length of the Pyrenees, both sides of the watershed
belong to Spain, so that no Government or modern energy has come to
disturb the silence. One would swear that the last to order this wood
were the Romans.
I had thought to find so famous a valley peopled, or at least visited. I
found it utterly alone, and even free from travellers, as though the
wealthier part of Europe had forgotten the most famous of Christian
epics. I saw no motor-cars, nor any women--only at last, in the very
depths of the valley, a boy cutting grass in a tiny patch of open land.
And it was hereabouts, so far as I could make out, that the Peers were
killed.
The song, of course, makes them fall on the far side of the summit, upon
the fields of Roncesvalles, with the sun setting right at them along the
hills. And that is as it should be, for it is evident that (in a poem)
the hero fighting among hills should die upon the enemy's side of the
hills. But that is not the place where Roland really died. The place
where he really died, he and Oliver and Turpin and all the others, was
here in the very recess of the Northern Valley. It was here only that
rocks could have been rolled down upon an army, and here is that narrow,
strangling gorge where the line of march could most easily have been cut
in two by the fury of the mountaineers. Also Eginhard says very clearly
that they had already passed the hills and seen France, and that is
final. It was from these cliffs, then, that such an echo was made by the
horn of Roland, and it was down that funnel of a valley that the noise
grew until it filled Christendom; and it was up that gorge that there
came, as it says in the song--
The host in a tide returning:
Charles the King and his Barony.
This was the place. And any man who may yet believe (I know such a
discussion is pedantry)--any man who may yet believe the song of Roland
to have been a Northern legend had better come to this place and drink
the mountains in. For whoever to-day
High are the hills and huge and dim with cloud,
Down in the deeps, the living streams are loud,
had certainly himself stood in the silence and majesty of this valley.
It was already nearly dark when we two men had clambered down to that
place, and up between the walls of the valley we had already seen the
early stars. We pushed on to the French frontier in an eager appetite
for cleanliness and human food.
The last Spanish town is called Val Carlos, as it ought to be,
considering that Charlemagne himself had once come roaring by. When we
reached it in the darkness we had completed a forced march of forty-two
miles, going light, it is true, and carrying nothing each of us but a
gourd of wine and a sack, but we were very tired. There, at the goal of
our effort, one faint sign of Government and of men at last appeared. It
was in character with all the rest. One might not cross the frontier
upon the road without a written leave. The written leave was given us,
and in half an hour Spain was free.