Edgar Thomas Ainger Wigram

“ Burguete stands in the centre of a little cup-like valley; and prominent upon the further lip rises a big domed hill, one of the flankers of the pass. It is a sleek, smooth mountain, upholstered with green turf, and spangled with grazing sheep; and the big round beeches and chestnuts herd together all over its crest, as domesticated as on an English lawn. Yet the little hillock beneath it was the scene of one of the greatest of tragedies; for there stood the abbey of Roncesvalles, the sepulchre of Charlemagne’s slaughtered Peers. ”

“ A city notable for its size, and yet more for its menacing aspect:—a grim black row of massive towers and curtains, with the slender stems of a dozen minarets shooting up into the sky behind the ramparts like reeds behind a dyke of stone. The snow peaks on our left stretch beyond it, and fade off gradually into the distance; and as we draw nearer we perceive that on our right the town is guarded by the deep ravine of the Tigris. Such is Diarbekr—Black Amida; whose classical name is not yet disused entirely, and which owes its inseparable epithet to the basalt of which it is built. ”

“ Here rises a staircase of gigantic terraces; here a fringe of crooked fingers, black and jagged against the sky; here a range of sheer bluff bastions, like the cubos [2] of a titanic wall; and from time to time the glittering crest of some remoter peak peers over their shoulders into the depths of the gulf below. The mountain limestone is as hard as granite, and has shed but few screes or boulders to obstruct the passage of the stream, and the road squeezes itself along whichever bank happens to be widest at the moment, crossing and recrossing as occasion requires. ”

“ Lugo stands upon one of the minor ridges which help to compose what Galicia calls a plain; and the river Miño, broad and placid like the Thames at Richmond, flows far beneath it in a deep, well-wooded vale. Like many of the Galician mountain townships, Lugo is roofed with rough, grey slating, and this fact at the first glance gives it a curiously un-Spanish air; yet there is no town in all the Peninsula more thoroughly national in tone.
The massive walls of the city are its greatest and most impressive feature. ”

“ THERE are more pleasant places in the world than the city of Mosul. Hot, white, and dusty, it lies on a rather “hummocky” site along the right (or western) bank of the Tigris, looking across to where the mounds of Nebi Yunus and Koyunjik mark the site of Nineveh.
It boasts a population of about eighty thousand souls, of whom perhaps a fourth are Christians, and five thousand Jews: and the whole is surrounded by a wall and moat which enclose rather more than a square mile of ground—an area about equal to the city of London. ”

“ We have continued gradually rising for the greater part of our journey; but the ground breaks away suddenly and sharply a few miles short of the coast. The view from the crest is delightful. A wide expanse of green undulating woodland maps itself out beneath us at the foot of the deep descent; and beyond gleam the still blue waters of the ocean, and the little saucepan-shaped city of Coruña standing out boldly in the centre of its bay.
What a welcome sight it must have presented to Moore and his soldiers as they struggled over the Puerto Bello, a few miles along the ridge to the east! ”

“ We were rising on to the top of the precipice which had overshadowed our morning’s march. The last pitch was the steepest of any; but here the ground was less rugged, and a few sketchy outlines of terraces tried to pose as cultivated fields. At last we emerged on a tiny plateau, a sprocket on the slope of the mountain, and beheld the dozen rough stone cabins which compose the village of Erdil.
Erdil is not the remotest spot on earth; for beyond it we could descry another and yet remoter Kurdish village some five hours further up the vale. ”

“ Segóvia is Queen of Castilian cities, as Toledo is the King of them. But Segóvia does not lend her countenance to those who approach from the south. She sits with her face to the northward towering over the road from Valladolid:—an unforgettable vision, the fairy city of our dreams.
Spain seems to take a delight in concentrating her fascinations. For mile after mile she will trail you over a dull and spirit-quelling country, till all your enthusiasm is properly subdued. ”

“ A man who can stand at Akra, and think that the rugged ridge behind that town is the only obstacle between him and Gawar Plain, has the strangest ideas of the land he is sending his subordinates into!
No doubt Petros was to blame. An Assyrian who wants to get to a place will tell you that the road is easy, with the gayest defiance of facts; and men who will go off with a small raiding party, with no equipment save rifles and the clothes they wear, have not the least notion that “an army cannot charge in and out again like a troop of hussars.” ”

“ Fortunately the cyclist’s self-sufficiency is not tested nearly so highly. He moves both further and faster than the pedestrian,—covering two days’ march in a single morning’s ride. For him the great Spanish plains are shorn of half their monotony; and if he loves Spain he may blame me for hinting at monotony even here. He finds something strangely exhilarating in the gorgeous sunshine, the dry crisp air, the unrivalled immensity of landscape, and the all-pervading silence, so grateful after London’s maddening din. ”

“ There are far finer Assyrian sculptures in the Louvre and the British Museum than the grim, gaunt, battered sentinels that keep watch over the Gomel vale. But ranged along a Bloomsbury corridor they are obviously mere graven images; while enthroned amid the solitudes of their own eerie mountains they seem to be the very gods themselves.
There are several similar bas-reliefs scattered here and there about the mountains—some fairly well preserved like those at Malthaiyah between Dohuk and Alkosh, some now almost obliterated like that by the gate of Amadia. ”

“ But the moment we pass the portal all cavilling is awed to silence. Out of the blaze of the southern sunshine we step into a vast, mysterious twilight, lit only by the jewelled pictures in the clerestory overhead. The air is heavy with the odour of incense; and the chant of the canons thunders down the aisles. The style of this great temple is the purest and most solemn of thirteenth-century Gothic. Built by the canonized king, St Ferdinand, out of the spoils of Seville, it is equal to Rheims in majesty, and ranks next to Cologne in point of size. ”

“ They razed the cities to the dust; they massacred every living creature; they demolished even the irrigation works that gave fertility to the fields. And the desert which spreads to this day over all the plains to the eastward is, far more truly than his mausoleum at Samarcand, the monument of Timour the Lame.
Yet Aleppo itself was near enough to the sea to recover even from this disaster; and within 150 years of Timour’s conquest it was once more one of the chief marts of the East. Hither came the London Turkey merchants, among them the “Master of the Tiger.” ”

“ And never was coup de théâtre more artfully developed than this great spectacle of Segóvia. A far-distant glimpse of a little group of turrets bristling upon the base of the mountains at the foot of the Seven Pikes; a tardy approach up the valley of the Eresma, whose trees and rocks impede all further view. The valley becomes a trench; and a vision of towers and cliffs begins to stir our anticipation; while the trench narrows down to a gullet, with sides so straight and smooth that they might have been cut by hand. ”

“ The breastwork range of the mountains rears itself up like a wall above the minor inequalities of the plateau, and the heights stretch away right and left continuously as though they were toeing a line. Of all the countries of Europe, Spain is the land which is nearest in sympathy with the Orient; and the sudden uplift of the Cantabrian mountains above the basin of the Duero is an excellent reproduction of the rise of the Kurdistan ranges above the plain of Mosul. ”

“ It is a mild method of “going Fanti” which rejoices their primitive instincts: and they will find both the land and the people just temperately primitive in Spain.
Many of us have felt the fascination of Italy. But those who have “heard the East a-calling” tell us that her call is stronger still;—and Spain is the echo of the East. “Lofty and sour to them that love her not, but to those men that seek her sweet as summer.” Even Italy, with all its charm, tastes flat to a Spanish enthusiast. He craves no other nor no better land. ”

“ Riches which might deck out a whole church among us lovers of bare walls are here found packed within the compass of a single chapel; and little gems of carving and inlay are thrust aside like lumber into corners where they can be scarcely seen. The whole is a dream of magnificence unsurpassable even in Italy: yet it is the gorgeous gloom of Toledo which still springs first to the memory when we contrast our own chaste chilly churches with the opulence of the shrines of Spain.
The cathedral stands upon steeply sloping ground well above the level of the Arlanzon. ”

“ As we thread the long poplar avenues which radiate from the gates of Leon, and climb from its fertile valley on to the bald bleak moors, we might almost persuade ourselves that the days of pilgrimage are not over even yet. The road is thronged for miles with a steady procession of country-folk, trooping into the early market in the old Gothic capital—as picturesque a medley as ever delighted the student of costume. Market-women stride-legged between their donkey’s panniers, like Dulcinea del Toboso when she was enchanted ”