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. There were no longer any
factory chimneys; the villages seemed to turn from stone to mud; the
human poverty showed itself in the few patched and tattered figures that
followed the oxen in the interminable furrows shallowly scraping the
surface of the lonely levels.
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