The
Houses, When They Did Not Stand Apart Like Our Own Farmhouses, Gathered
Into Gray-Brown Villages Around Some High-Shouldered Church With A
Bell-Tower In Front Or At One Corner Of The Fagade.
In most of the
larger houses an economy of the sun's heat, the only heat recognized in
the winter of southern countries, was practised by glassing in the
balconies that stretched quite across their fronts and kept the cold
from at least one story.
It gave them a very cheery look, and must have
made them livable at least in the daytime. Now and then the tall
chimney of one of those manufactories we had seen on the way from Irun
invited belief in the march of industrial prosperity; but whether the
Basque who took work in a mill or a foundry forfeited his nobility
remained a part of the universal Basque secret. From time to time a
mountain stream brawled from under a world-old bridge, and then spread a
quiet tide for the women to kneel beside and wash the clothes which they
spread to dry on every bush and grassy slope of the banks.
The whole scene changed after we ran out of the Basque country and into
the austere landscape of old Castile. The hills retreated and swelled
into mountains that were not less than terrible in their savage
nakedness. The fields of corn and the orchards ceased, and the green of
the pastures changed to the tawny gray of the measureless wheat-lands
into which the valleys flattened and widened.
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