Speculation On a Windy Hill (verse)
Mclntosh, Mavis
REMINISCENCES OF GUIPUZCOA By ESME J. HOWARD THE usual traveler knows little or nothing of the great beauty that belongs to the Basque coast. It is usual to visit San Sebastian or Saint Jean de...
...Vergara with its Christ sculptured by Montanes and Limpias, whose sculptured Christ in wood is now so well known...
...On the road to Roncesvalles the golden eagles are so little disturbed that it is easy to get within fifty yards of them...
...Castile is beautiful with a savage beauty...
...The romance of Guipiizcoa is unspoiled...
...After a few hours they fly south again to their nesting places in the estuaries of the Guidalquivir and Guadiana rivers...
...Each town holds a magic within it...
...The coast is not littered with modern houses like the coast of the French or Italian Rivieras—those houses with towers that resemble repulsive fungi and which always belong to the "industriali...
...This little fishing centre, which claims to have the best sailors' hospice in Spain, was the home of the world's first circumnavigator...
...The arms of the town are a whale in the wave9 of the sea...
...for the seamen of this coast were great whalers in times gone by...
...Who knows those lovely fertile Guipuzcoan valleys that run to the sea...
...Beside what might be the "plaza mayor," with its old "pelota fronton," is a well of great beauty...
...Every one of these small towns has a typical Basque church which rises well above the village...
...Where the beach ends stands the old castle of the Duke of Granada, with its haunted room, "el cuarto azul," about which Padre Coloma wrote one of his novels...
...Aranzazu built on precipitous rocks, a monastery famed for pilgrimage throughout the Basque provinces...
...There is a tablet to commemorate the death of Juan Sebastian del Cano, captain of the Victoria (one of Magellan's five ships...
...The inhabitants of Guetaria talk a quaint dialect...
...Loyola, the home of Saint Ignatius with his "casa solar...
...And as I went from place to place I saw the old castles of the kings of Navarre rising like mighty weatherbeaten rocks against the skyline...
...I have walked out late at night and seen the townsfolk dancing in the "plaza" by moonlight...
...It is built crooked for lack of space, and its walls converge toward the high altar...
...At Zaraus they say that some sailors, lost in the storm, invoked the Madonna to their aid and she appeared on the beach to save them...
...The eagles circled round majestically over the sea...
...Civilization has not yet wrought its customary destruction...
...And beyond Zaraus there is Onate with its beautiful university and patio...
...How wonderfully the green vine and the yellow maize contrast with the brown and barren plains of Vieja Castilla with their boulders, stone pines, and far-stretching Velasquez horizons...
...They come like black clouds nearer and nearer to the water when the sea is calm until they settle with a splash a mile or two from land...
...Inside, the church is high and dark, lighted only by small windows near the roof...
...When the day is clear and the sea is calm the dark shoals of sardines, which occasionally glitter like metal, can be seen flying from the pursuing dolphins in the bay...
...The onlookers sit beneath arcades or doorways drinking coffee and smoking...
...It is usual to visit San Sebastian or Saint Jean de Luz...
...The road passes well below its level under an arcade, and beneath this level again is a small chapel...
...but beyond la Sarte, which is San Sebastian's race-course, is country unexplored...
...Each has its river, at whose estuary are little towns of picturesque beauty such as Orio or Zumaya...
...but Guipiizcoa, green in its valleys, is like a smiling home for a happy people...
...The charm of antiquity is still upon it...
...At Guetaria the church dates back to the thirteenth century...
...Not far from it, the church of San Miguel, high on a hill, boasts one of the finest altar fronts of Limoges enamel to be seen anywhere...
...The Atlantic rollers break on its treacherous sands all day long, except in the morning when the waters are calm in the gray dawn...
...The houses of the town have wrought-iron balconies on the main road...
...Of these there are many in the coast towns...
...I once picked up a small bird on the sand after an all-night hurricane...
...In the time of migration storks fly south and ducks settle by the thousand in the bay...
...In the higher Pyrenees there is Pampelona with its Vauban fortifications...
...On the seaward side of the castle a Madonna looks out to sea from a niche in the wall...
...They built ships at Zaraus in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—ships for the armadas...
...His statue stands above the harbor, and in the San Sebastian guildhall there is a painting of him done by Zuloaga to celebrate the fourth centenary of his return...
...The waves went up in columns of water fifty feet high in the distant clefts of a wall of rock...
...Often enough I used to wander along the beach in the early morning looking at the sandpipers searching for food...
...Hidden in the bay, behind one end of a beach that stretches for a mile and a half, lies Zaraus where I spent many happy summers...
...many of them come from Sicily and Italy for the sardine fisheries...
...Ever since then, a lamp has burned every night at the foot of the statuette, and has acted as a warning to many a fisherman...
...It was a storm-petrel...
...The woodpeckers tap in the woods and the oyster catchers fly along the river valleys...
Vol. 3 • March 1926 • No. 17
