IN THE BASQUE COUNTRY
May 23
All day an intense impression of lusty sunlight, of quivering golden-green ... a long, white road that dazzles, between its rustling dark-green walls; blue brawling rivers; swelling upland meadows, flower-thronged, luscious with tall, cool grass; the shepherd’s thin-toned pipe; the ragged flocks, blocking the road, cropping at the hedge-rows as they hurry on towards the mountains; the slow, straining teams of jangling mules—wine-carriers coming from Spain; through dank, cobbled village streets, where the pigs pant their bellies in the roadway, and the sandal-makers flatten the hemp before their doors; and then, out again into the lusty sunlight, along the straight, powdery road that dazzles ahead interminably towards a mysterious, hazy horizon, where the land melts into the sky....
And, at last, the cool evening scents; soft shadows stealing beneath the still, silent oaks; and, all at once, a sight of the great snow-mountains, vague, phantasmagoric, like a mirage in the sky; and of the hills, all indigo, rippling towards a pale sunset of liquid gold.