Pamplona

“ The troops who covered the blockade of Pamplona suffered severely from wet and cold, and were unavoidably subject to privations from which their more fortunate comrades near the coast were exempt. When the clouds opened they could see the fertile country of the enemy beneath them, in sunshine. ”

“ Thereupon all forces were directed towards the north against the Basque territories, the old citadel of Carlism. The closely besieged Pamplona was relieved on November 24th, and, when Quesada advanced with one hundred thousand men, Estella also fell on February 19th, 1876. On February 28th, the king himself entered Pamplona; on the same day Don Carlos retreated over the border to France. The victors conducted themselves humanely on the whole, although ten thousand persons were exiled, as many more lost their property, and a limitation of the old fueros of the Basque lands was planned. ”

“ The road from Pamplona to Tolosa is one of the widest and best in Spain, not very inferior to any in Great Britain: it takes a course through valleys along the sides of an immense mountain for a considerable way, and, frequently, over patches of fertile country—the whole abounding in foliage. Occasional villages present themselves at a few miles distant from each other, and now and then a farm house or two opens upon the traveller’s view in some wild spot. ”

“ On the exterior this Chapter-house seems to be so far removed from the east end of the church as to have hardly any connection with it; they are separated by houses built up close to their walls, and present consequently a not very imposing effect from the exterior; and standing, as the Chapter-house does, just on the edge of the city walls, it is strange that it has fared so well in the many attacks that have been made on Pamplona. The interior is remarkable only for the grand scale and proportions of the vault with which it is covered. ”

“ Narrowgauge railways convey timber and ore from the mountains to these main lines. Pamplona, the capital (pop., 1900, 28,886) , and Tudela (9449) are described in separate articles. The only other towns with more than 5000 inhabitants are Baztán (9234) , Corella (6793) , Estella (5736) and Tafalla (5494) . ”

“ From thence (Alasua) we got on to Pamplona, our first picturesque Spanish town, where we spent part of Christmas Day, and then went on to Tudela, where we had another wretched posada; no fires; milk, coffee, and butter quite unknown, and the meat stewed in oil and garlic; and this has been the case everywhere except here, with other and worse in-conveniences.
“At Zaragoza we were first a little repaid by the wonderful beauty of the Moorish architecture—like lace in brick and stone, and the people as well as the place made a new world for us; but oh! ”

“ Sangüesa, with its noble monastery; Olite, once the Windsor of Navarre. The last-named might almost rank as a working model for an antiquarian. Its lanes are packed with the decaying mansions of the long-departed courtiers, and dominated by the huge ruined castle which was the home of the warrior kings. This palatial stronghold is noted as one of the finest examples in the Peninsula: a match for our own Bamburgh or Warkworth, and consequently with few rivals in the world.
As the capital of Navarre, Pamplona has, of course, been pre-eminent for its sieges ”

“ We drove out along the coast road. There was the green of the headlands, the white, red-roofed villas, patches of forest, and the ocean very blue with the tide out and the water curling far out along the beach. We drove through Saint Jean de Luz and passed through villages farther down the coast. Back of the rolling country we were going through we saw the mountains we had come over from Pamplona. The road went on ahead. Bill looked at his watch. It was time for us to go back. He knocked on the glass and told the driver to turn around. The driver backed the car out into the grass to turn it. ”

“ The Pampa plains, immense and limitless, those mysterious sea-like horizons of the solid land, stimulate the fancy like the unknown, and cause her to express herself in glowing language and exaggerated ideas. ”

“ After crossing these hills I observed beyond, along the bases of some low mountains, a few fields of corn and a number of mud huts, where dwelt, in all their indolence, a party of natives—half Indians, half Spanish, or Christians, as Don Manuel called all his countrymen on the pampas.
As our troop trudged slowly along, some fifteen men, women, and children followed in our track, offering to sell corn, soft cheese, and a few loaves of bread, very small, and containing a goodly proportion of sand. ”

“ The lands are beautifully hedged in by the line of forest trees. Man has set before him here the hedging and ditching of nature. This pampa looks like a great pasture-field, enclosed by the Mamoré ditch on the south, and the Securé on the north. Under the shade of those trees stand the cattle of the field. They have gradually clambered over the Cordilleras from the flats of Guayaquil, through the table lands of Oruro, and from the salt district of Charcas. The creoles drove them down by the side of the Mamoré river, and let them out into the grassy prairie lands of Chiquitos and Mojos. ”

“ If to Nueva Cordoba, stripped and beaten, trembling beneath the fear of worse things to come, an army with banners held the land, so, in no lesser light, did the English see themselves, and they meant to have the treasure and to humble that white fortress. But it must be done quickly, quickly! Pampatar in Margarita, the castle of Paria or Berreo's settlement in Trinidad, could send no ships that might contend with the four swinging yonder in the river's mouth, but from the west at any hour, from La Guayra or Santa Marta, thunderbolts might fall. ”

“ Just in that moment when the sun has all but freed himself from the horizon, the pampas, in weather like this, is a golden and a wonderful and a living thing; comfortable as the light of a fire, the light of the sun destroys desolation and the bleakness of distance and almost the sense of loneliness.
Luggard had a month before him, perhaps more, to be lived out in this place. Here on the pampas he had to face Nature and Time without a companion and without a roof to cover him, and—at first sight, without an occupation to engage his mind. ”

“ If man's hand takes something away from the wild charm of nature, he also by degrees creates that other charm which belongs to rural life, so this land will come in time to be less dull and more homelike. Pleasure grounds round the estancias will mitigate the roughness of a first settlement, and there will be groves with dim recesses in their thickets to stir the imagination of children. There is always in the Pampas an amplitude of air and a solemn splendour of the sunset glow to carry the mind away beyond its near surroundings. ”

“ It extends from Cordoba to the Rios Negro or Colorado. In it are contained the great and growing towns, and from it these towns draw their prosperity. It is a country to delight the heart of the agriculturist. In many countries of South America the traveller passes through interminable jungles sparingly scattered with patches of cultivation where a few bony cattle scour for a livelihood. In the Pampa there is rich tilth and fine pasture; magnificent red and white beasts graze and fatten, standing knee-deep in the fresh grass, and sheep innumerable are raised. ”

“ I have shown you the Pampas alive with the swarms of their new civilisation. We are far enough from the romantic descriptions so dear to story-tellers. We all know now that the redskin of North America bears no resemblance to the portraits painted of him by Chateaubriand or Fenimore Cooper. The Pampas, in full process of evolution, are getting more human and losing their distinctive features. They were once as bare, to quote the joke of a poet, now a member of the Académie Française, "as the speech of an academician"; man has undertaken to raise up orchards, groves, and even forests. ”

“ After a successful day’s sport, and the contentment consequent on a hearty meal, they will ask with great satisfaction, ‘Muy buena Pampa? No?’ really meaning ‘Is not the wild life the best?’ But English readers, who have derived their idea of a Pampa from Head’s delightful work, or from other experiences of the unlimited grassy or thistle covered plains which roll away for miles in the Argentine States, and offer no obstruction to the stretching gallop of the untiring gaucho, must not transfer that pleasing picture to Patagonia. ”

“ CHAPTER IV. TEE PRAIRIE AND ITS INHABITANTS. The Pampas, or prairie lands of the Argentine, stretch to the south and west of Buenos Ayres, and cover some 800,000 square miles. On this vast level plain, watered by sluggish streams or shallow lakes, boundless as the ocean, seemingly limitless in extent, there is an exhilarating air and a rich herbage on which browse countless herds of cattle, horses, and flocks of sheep. The grass grows tall, and miles upon miles of rich scarlet, white, or yellow flowers mingle with or overtop it. ”

“ But to this all-the-year-round heat the foreigner soon becomes accustomed—everyone, as a matter of fact, workers and officials alike, is a “foreigner” to this pampa; human life is imported 166like every other commodity here. But the children born of white parents in the nitrate fields are strong and sturdy, and it is not surprising that they who have lived for a year or two on the pampas find themselves restless in other places, suffer a feeling of constraint, a longing for these wide skies and far horizons. ”

“ Above the flat desert is an enormous bowl of clear, transparent sky and one looks far away to distances that seem endless. At sunrise and sunset the effects of light upon the sky and pampa are of a beauty never seen but in expanses such as these. I have watched the sky in an Antofagasta nitrate pampa when, as the sun fell swiftly, all the arch flushed with rose, and quickly flooded with sheets of purest violet while the orange and umber pampa took on deep amethyst shadows ”

“ Cattle, horses, and sheep are never long out of the line of a traveller’s vision, and with them the herdsmen of the plains, the “gauchos.” Although the Pampas form so large a part of the territory, they do not occupy it all, for the country is so long that it boasts all sorts of climates, from the tropical to the arctic. To the north subtropical forests abound; to the west the plains fade away into the mighty Andes, which tower 23,000 feet towards the sky; while to the south lie the bleak hills and arid plains of Patagonia. ”

“ The men of the pines and thistles seem to have lost this quality, while passing through the snows of the Cordilleras, or left it behind them, as they have also left the incipient civilization of their race. On the Pampas we find them once more in the character of the true savage: living by the chase or by plunder; and bartering the produce of the latter for the trappings and trinkets of personal adornment, supplied them by the unprincipled white trader. Puelches and Picunches, Pehuenches and Ranqueles, all share this character alike,—all are treacherous, quarrelsome, and cowardly. ”

“ The flour had been brought on mules from Mendoza, three hundred and eighty miles distant, and bread was something of a luxury in Rio Quarto.
After quite a stay, nearly a day in length, we left Rio Quarto. Our route lay over an undulating pampa, covered with long grass, but scarcely a herd of cattle could be seen, and for miles we met with no evidence that human beings inhabited the country. Water was seldom found, but the small quantities that we discovered lay in little hollows of two or three inches in depth, and was of a better quality than any that we had met with on the road. ”

“ I journeyed across it in a trip from Mendoza to Bahia Blanca, and, as the name denotes, it is a vast featureless plain. Most of it is naturally fertile, but even regions that are sandy will be productive in the growing of alfalfa, which seems specially suitable, and which will not only maintain herds of cattle, but is profitable as a feeding stuff to be exported. As yet the pampa has been little more than scratched. From the railway cars the idea is obtained that the whole of the country is converted to the use of man. ”

“ While several of the men were slaughtering the cow, the carpenter, with two or three others of the troop, guided by a man sent from the Esquina, visited the hole in which the bodies lay. The earth had fallen in as the bodies had undergone decomposition, for they had been buried in the usual manner of the pampas, without any other covering than the clothes worn at the time of death. On reaching the spot, the gaucho from the town conversed at length with our men ”

“ The Pampa we were now traversing presented an expanse of undulating or rolling plains covered with a uniform growth of coarse grass interspersed with barberry bushes, and occasional lagoons in the hollows. No living creatures except ourselves appeared on the waste. To the westward the snow-clad peaks of the mountains bordering the Sarmiento Straits greeted us with an icy blast which made my thoughts longingly revert to the cosy cabin and my late shipmates, who were, no doubt, threading the intricacies of its channels. ”

“ At other hours and seasons the general aspect of the plain is monotonous, and in spite of the unobstructed view, and the unfailing verdure and sunshine, somewhat melancholy, although never sombre: and doubtless the depressed and melancholy feeling the pampa inspires in those who are unfamiliar with it is due in a great measure to the paucity of life, and to the profound silence. ”