The wealth and order everywhere associated with the Basque blood have wholly disappeared. This people is not receding--it holds its own, as it deserves to do; but as there are new fields which it has occupied within the present century upon the more western hills, so there are others to the east, and this valley among them, from whence it has disappeared. The Basque names remain, but the people are no longer of the Basque type, and the tongue is forgotten. So gradual is the ascent and so continual the little cols which have to be surmounted, that a man does not notice how much upward he is being led towards the crest of the ridge. And when he comes at last upon the grove from which he sees the plateau of Roncesvalles spread before him, he wonders that the chain of the Pyrenees (which here lie out along in cliffs like sharp sunward walls, stretching in a strict perspective to the distant horizon) should seem so low. The reason that this white wall of cliffs seems so low is that the traveller is standing upon the last of a series of great steps which have led him up towards the frontier, much as the prairie leads one up towards the Rockies in Colorado. When he has passed through the very pleasant wood which lies directly beneath the cliffs, and reaches the little village of Roncesvalles itself, he wonders still more that so famous a pass should be so small a thing. The pass from this side is so broad, with so low a saddle of grass, that it seems more like the crossing of the Sussex Downs than the crossing of an awful range of mountains. It is a rounded gap, up to which there lifts a pretty little wooded combe; and no one could be certain, during the half-hour spent in climbing such a petty summit, that he was, in so climbing, conquering Los Altos, the high Pyrenees. But when the summit is reached, then the meaning of the "_Imus Pyrenaeus_," and the place that passage has taken in history, is comprehended in a moment. One sees at what a height one was in that plain of Roncesvalles, and one sees how the main range dominates the world; for down below one an enormous cleft into the stuff of the mountains falls suddenly and almost sheer, and you see unexpectedly beneath you the approach from France into Spain. The gulf at its narrowest is tremendous; but, more than that, when the floor of the valley is reached, that floor itself slopes away down and down by runs and by cascades towards the very distant plains of the north, upon which the funnel debouches. Moreover, it was up this gulf, and from the north, that the armies came; it was this vision of a precipice that seized them when their leaders had determined to invade the Peninsula. This also was what, for so many generations, so many wanderers must have seen who came to wonder at the place where the rearguard of Charlemagne had been destroyed.