I had thought to find so famous a valley peopled, or at least visited.  I found it utterly alone, and even free from travellers, as though the wealthier part of Europe had forgotten the most famous of Christian epics.  I saw no motor-cars, nor any women—­only at last, in the very depths of the valley, a boy cutting grass in a tiny patch of open land.  And it was hereabouts, so far as I could make out, that the Peers were killed.

The song, of course, makes them fall on the far side of the summit, upon the fields of Roncesvalles, with the sun setting right at them along the hills.  And that is as it should be, for it is evident that (in a poem) the hero fighting among hills should die upon the enemy’s side of the hills.  But that is not the place where Roland really died.  The place where he really died, he and Oliver and Turpin and all the others, was here in the very recess of the Northern Valley.  It was here only that rocks could have been rolled down upon an army, and here is that narrow, strangling gorge where the line of march could most easily have been cut in two by the fury of the mountaineers.  Also Eginhard says very clearly that they had already passed the hills and seen France, and that is final.  It was from these cliffs, then, that such an echo was made by the horn of Roland, and it was down that funnel of a valley that the noise grew until it filled Christendom; and it was up that gorge that there came, as it says in the song—­

     The host in a tide returning: 
     Charles the King and his Barony.

This was the place.  And any man who may yet believe (I know such a discussion is pedantry)—­any man who may yet believe the song of Roland to have been a Northern legend had better come to this place and drink the mountains in.  For whoever to-day

     High are the hills and huge and dim with cloud,
     Down in the deeps, the living streams are loud,

had certainly himself stood in the silence and majesty of this valley.

It was already nearly dark when we two men had clambered down to that place, and up between the walls of the valley we had already seen the early stars.  We pushed on to the French frontier in an eager appetite for cleanliness and human food.

The last Spanish town is called Val Carlos, as it ought to be, considering that Charlemagne himself had once come roaring by.  When we reached it in the darkness we had completed a forced march of forty-two miles, going light, it is true, and carrying nothing each of us but a gourd of wine and a sack, but we were very tired.  There, at the goal of our effort, one faint sign of Government and of men at last appeared.  It was in character with all the rest.  One might not cross the frontier upon the road without a written leave.  The written leave was given us, and in half an hour Spain was free.

THE SLANT OFF THE LAND