Spanish Highways and Byways

XXII

ACROSS THE BASQUE PROVINCES

It did not seem to me historically respectful to take leave of Spain without having made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Santiago. A dauntless friend crossed the sea to bear me company. Hygienic pilgrim that she is, she came equipped not with cockle shells and sandal shoon, but with sleeping bags, coffee, and cereals. Many a morning, in traversing those northern provinces, where the scenery was better than the breakfast, we blessed her boxes of "grape nuts," and many a night, doomed to penitential beds, we were thankful to intrench ourselves against the stings and arrows of outrageous insects in those spacious linen bags, that gather close about the neck, or, when dangers thicken, above the head, leaving only a loophole for the breath.

Our point of departure was that city of nature's fancy-work, San Sebastian. Then, in the early half of July, it was all alive with expectancy, looking every day for the coming of the Court. It is reputed to be the cleanest town of the Peninsula, and is, in truth, as bright as a wave-washed pebble. Nevertheless, it is a favorite waltz hall of the fleas, which shamelessly obtrude themselves even into conversation.

The chief summer industry of San Sebastian is sea-bathing. The soldiers begin it at six o'clock in the morning, marching by regiments down to the Concha, clearing for action, and striking out into the gentle surf, all in simultaneous obedience to successive words of command. Some two hours later teams of oxen draw scores of jaunty bathing cars down near the white lip of this opalescent shell of water, and there the long day through all ages, sizes, and ranks of humanity sport in the curling foam or swim far out into the sparkling bay.

San Sebastian is the capital of Guipúzcoa, one of the three Basque provinces. These lie among the Cantabrian mountains, and are delightfully picturesque with wheat-growing valleys and well-wooded heights. As the train wandered on, in its pensive Spanish fashion, we found ourselves now in Scotland, in a beautiful waste of heather and gorse, now amid the English ivy and hawthorn, hearing the song of the English robin, and now in our own New England, with the hilly reaches of apple orchards and the fields upon fields of tasselled Indian maize.

The Basques are a thrifty folk, and have cultivated their scant acres to the utmost. The valleys are planted with corn, the lower hills are ridged and terraced for a variety of crops. Above are walnuts and chestnuts, and the flintiest summits serve for pasturage. It was curious to see men at work on those steep slopes that had been scooped out into a succession of narrow shelves, and more strange yet to catch glimpses of peasants ploughing the very mountain top, picturesque figures against the sky.

The reaping is of the cleanest. The harvest fields have a neat, scoured look, as if the women had been over them with scrubbing brushes. Yet this utilitarian soil admits of oaks and beeches, ferns and clover, morning glories, dandelions, pimpernel, and daisies.

All that sunny morning the train swung us blithely on from one charm of the eyes to another – from a ruined watch-tower, where red-handed Carlists had crouched, to a bright-kerchiefed maiden singing amid her beehives; from a range of abrupt peaks, cleft by deep gorges, to sycamore-shaded byways and poplar-bordered streams; from a village graveyard, the pathetic little parallelogram enclosed in high gray walls and dim with cypress shadows, to a tumbling, madcap torrent spanned by a time-gnawed Roman arch. Shooting the heart of some black hill, the train would run out on a mere ledge above a valley hamlet, and from pure inquisitiveness, apparently, ramble all around the circle, peering down from every point of view on the cluster of great, patriarchal houses, sometimes of timber and plaster, more often of stone, where whole clans dwell together under the same red-tiled roof. Queer old houses these, occasionally topped with blue chimneys, and now and then with a fantastic coat of arms sculptured over the door, or a fresco of saints and devils blazoned all across the front. Sometimes freshly whitewashed, these Basque houses have more often a weather-worn, dingy look, but, however black the timbers, lines of clean linen flutter airily from roofs and balconies.

They are a decent, self-respecting, prosperous people, these Basque mountaineers, of whose history my companion told me stirring tales. They are supposed, though not without dispute, to be the oldest race in Europe, descendants of those original Iberians whom the westward-trooping Aryans drove into the fastnesses of the Pyrenees. They have their own language, of Asiatic type. They themselves believe that it was spoken in the Garden of Eden. There are some twenty-five dialects of the Vascuense, and it is so difficult for foreigners that even George Borrow spoke it "with considerable hesitation," and one exhausted student, abandoning the struggle, declared that the words were all "written Solomon and pronounced Nebuchadnezzar." The Basques attribute their hardy virtues to the crabbedness of their speech, telling how the devil, after slaving over their vocabulary for seven years, had succeeded in learning only three words, and threw up his lesson in a pet, so that to this day he remains unable to meddle with their peasant piety. What little literature there is in the Basque language is naturally of the popular cast – hero songs, dancing songs, dirges, hymns, and folk-lore.

The Basques are noted for their passionate love of liberty. The sturdy peasant is lord of his own rugged farm, and insists on tilling it in his own primitive way, breaking the soil with rude mattock more often than with plough. An English engineer, laying a railroad through Alava, tried his best to make his men abandon their slow, laborious method of carrying the earth in baskets on their heads. He finally had all the baskets removed by night, and wheelbarrows left in their places. But the unalterable Basques set the loaded wheelbarrows on their heads, and staggered about beneath these awkward burdens until, for very shame, he had to give them back their baskets.

The peasant drives over the mountain roads in a ponderous ox-cart, with two clumsy disks of wood for wheels. The platform is wrought of rough-hewn beams, five or seven, the middle one running forward to serve as pole. All the structure, except the iron tires and nails, is of wood, and the solid wooden wheels, as the massive axle to which they are riveted turns over and over, make a most horrible squeaking. It is a sound dear to the peasantry, for they believe the oxen like it, and, moreover, that it frightens away the devil; but once upon a time a town of advanced views voted a fine of five dollars for any man who should bring this musical abomination within its limits. Thereupon a freeborn Basque rose with the dawn, selected his best carved oaken yoke, draped the red-stained sheepskin a trifle more carefully than usual above the patient eyes of his great smooth oxen, and took his way, "squeakity-squeak, squeakity-squeak," straight to the door of the Ayuntamiento, city hall, where he paid his twenty-five pesetas, and then devoted the rest of the day to driving all about the streets, squeaking out his money's worth. This is no servile temper, and it was not until our own generation that the dearly cherished liberties of the Basques were wrested away.

These warders of the Pyrenees, for the Basques of Navarre and those now known as French Basques must not be forgotten, did good service in helping the Visigoths beat back the northward-pressing Moors and the southward-pressing Franks; but when the Basque provinces of Spain were incorporated with Leon and Navarre, and later with Castile, the mountaineers stood stubbornly for their fuéros, or peculiar rights.

My comrade's lecture had reached this point, when, finding ourselves at Amorebieta, in the Province of Vizcaya, or Biscay, we suddenly descended from the train, and handed our bags to an honest Basque porter, who deposited them on the floor of an open waiting room, in full reach of an honest Basque population. For ourselves, we turned our faces toward the centre of Vizcayan glory, the famous Tree of Guernica. We entered a rustic train, that seemed entirely undecided which way to go. The station agent blew a little tin horn, green meadows and wattled fences began to glide past the car windows, and the interrupted discourse was resumed.

The lawmakers of Vizcaya were duly chosen by their fellow-nobles, for every Basque held the rank of hidalgo, or "son of somebody." The deputies met every two years in the village of Guernica, sitting on stone benches in the open air beneath the sacred oak, and there elected the Señores de Vizcaya. Even the kings of Spain were allowed no grander title, but had to come to the Tree of Guernica, at first in person, later by deputy, and there swear to observe the fuéros. To this green shadow came the peasant from his lonely farm-house, high on the mountainside, to answer before his peers to such charges as might be brought against him; for within the sanctuary of his home the law could lay no hand on him or his.

It was the Carlist wars that changed all this. The fuéros, of which a list dating from 1342 is still extant, granted the Basque provinces a Republican Constitution that almost realized an ideal democracy, with immunity from taxes save for their own needs, and from military service beyond their own boundaries. But when the dynastic strife broke out, the Basques put on the white cap of Don Carlos and bore the brunt of the conflict. We had already passed through Vergara, where, in 1839, Espartero ended the first Carlist war by a treaty which compelled the Basques to lay down their arms. But the cost of this rebellion was paid in blood. Their political status was practically unaffected. At the close of the second Carlist war, in 1876, Alfonso XII signalized his victory by meting out to them a terrible punishment, abrogating the precious fuéros that the Tree of Guernica had guarded for so many centuries. The Government imposed, moreover, its salt and tobacco monopolies, and made the Basques subject to military conscription. At every station we saw Spain's Vizcayan soldiers, red-capped and red-trousered, with blue-belted frock coats, under which beat hearts of doubtful loyalty. The son of Alfonso XII will have to reckon with the Basques, when the third Carlist war shall be declared, but it may be doubted whether the fuéros, which Don Carlos, of course, promises to restore, will ever come home to nest again in the Guernica Oak.

My erudite fellow-vagabond was just pointing out the typical shape of the Basque head, with its broad forehead, long, narrowing face, curved nose, and pointed chin, when we reached Guernica. Such a sweet and tranquil village as it is, set in the beauty of the hills, with the dignity and pathos of its history pervading every hushed, old-fashioned street! The guide, whom two affable ladies, sharers of our carriage in the little picnic train, had taken pains to look up for us at the station, was not, we judged, a favorable specimen of the haughty Basque hidalgo. He was a dull, mumbling, slouchy lad, who sunk his voice to an awed whisper as we passed the escutcheon-carved palace of a count. But he led us by pleasant ways to the modern Casa de Juntas, or Senate House, where we were shown the assembly room, with its altar for mass, the library and other apartments, together with the portraits of the twenty-six first Señores de Vizcaya, from Lope the Pirate, who forced back the invading Galicians in 840, to the Infante Don Juan, under whom the Basque provinces were finally incorporated with Castile.

Close by the Casa de Juntas, which stands in a dreamy bit of park as fresh and trim as an English cathedral close, rises a pillared portico. There, where brown-eyed little Basque girls, their brown braids blowing in the breeze, were dangling green figs above their laughing mouths, used to sit, on those seven stone seats, the grave Basque fathers, making laws, meting out judgment, and regulating all the affairs of this simple mountain republic. The portico, bearing as joint devices the lion and castle of Spain and the three wolves of Vizcaya, was formerly enveloped in the leafy shadow of the Sacred Tree; but what rises behind it now is only the gaunt stem of a patriarchal oak, a very Abraham of plants, all enclosed in glass, as if embalmed in its casket. Before the portico, however, grows a lusty scion, for the Tree of Guernica is of unbroken lineage, shoots being always cherished to succeed in case the centuried predecessor fail.