To him who looks, day after day, on this astonishing natural wall,
stretching, without visible gap, for nearly three hundred miles, it
is easy to see why France not only is, but must be, a different world
from Spain. Even human thought cannot, to any useful extent, fly
over that great wall of homeless rock and snow. On the other side
there must needs be another folk, with another tongue, other manners,
other polities, and if not another creed, yet surely with other, and
utterly different, conceptions of the universe, and of man's business
therein. Railroads may do somewhat. But what of one railroad; or
even of two, one on the ocean, one on the sea, two hundred and
seventy miles apart? Before French civilization can inform and
elevate the Spanish people you must 'plane down the Pyrenees.'
At Montrejeau, a pretty town upon a hill which overhangs the Garonne,
you find, again, verdure and a railroad; and, turning your back upon
the Pyrenees, run down the rich ugly vale of the Garonne, through
crops of exceeding richness--wheat, which is reaped in July, to be
followed by buckwheat reaped in October; then by green crops to be
cut in May, and that again by maize, to be pulled in October, and
followed by wheat and the same rotation.
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