The _carrera_ runs along the breasting cliffs from San Sebastián to Santander beside a sea blue as the summer sky. It crosses the tip of a little city resting on land that tongues from the mountain far into the Bay. The land is high and steep: the streets twine. And in their midst, coiled all about by alleys, stands a smothered church. It is blackened by the salt of seven hundred years. It stands low: there is a street at its door, and there are other streets at rising levels on its four façades, so that it is plunged and buried in the town. And the windows are rare, or are blanked by pavements and by the cellars of adjoining houses. Only the steeple is sheer to the open heaven. It is an ignoble church, foul like a ship’s bottom after a voyage round the seven seas. Its nave is foul with shadows; its windows have a yellow blear like the eyes of the beggar at the gate. The town is stifled and somber: it is like an apple rotted by this old church at its core. The Basque here has forgotten how to dance. He has not turned his saints’ days into merry making. The church has conquered: the Empiry of Castile. But more significant than such invasions of the end of old Spain upon the Basque, are the invasions of the modern Basque into the life of Spain. While the Spaniard gave himself to crusades and conquest, the Basque held aloof with his energy untapped. To resist invasion of body and of spirit took courage. But the effort was as naught beside the effort of the Spaniard to fuse Moslem, Jew, German, Roman, Celt, into one Spanish soul. The Spanish soul was achieved: but Spanish spirit locked in the exertion. This was the moment of the Basque with his reserve of virgin power. He had no culture but the most primitive; no world for the expanding of his might save a strip of rocky soil. Spain offered a profound culture and the sea, and worlds beyond the sea. Now the Basque passes from his spiritual sleep--passes into Spain, through the door which Spain herself had battered open.... _CHAPTER XIII_ _TWO ANDALUSIANS_ _a. The Sleepers_ _b. The Awakeners_ _c. The Sleepless Spirit_ _a. The Sleepers_