So, watching them as a kind of marvel, we saw distant across the sea a faint blue tower, and recognised it for Boston Stump, so many, many miles away.

But for the birds and this landmark, which never left us, all the length of the dyke was empty of any sight save the mixing of the sea and the land.  Then gradually the heights in Norfolk beyond grew clearer, a further shore narrowed the expanse of waters, and we came to the river mouth of the Ouse, and caught sight, up the stream, of the houses of a town.

THE CERDAGNE

There is a part of Europe of which for the moment most people have not heard, but which in a few years everybody will know; so it is well worth telling before it is changed what it is like to-day.  It is called the Cerdagne.  It is a very broad valley, stretching out between hills whose height is so incredible—­or at least, whose appearance of height is so incredible—­that when they are properly painted no one will believe them to be true.  Indeed, I know a man who painted them just as they are, and those who saw the picture said it was fantastic and out of Nature, like Turner’s drawings.  But those who had been with him and had seen the place, said that somehow he had just missed the effect of height.

It is remarkable that in any country, even if one does not know that country well, what is unusual to the country strikes the traveller at once.  And so it is with the Cerdagne.  For all the valleys of the Pyrenees except this one are built upon the same plan.  They are deep gorges, narrowing in two places to gates or profound corridors, one of these places being near the crest and one near the plain; and down these valleys fall violent torrents, and in them there is only room for tiny villages or very little towns, squeezed in between the sheer surfaces of the rock or the steep forests.

So it is with the Valley of Laruns, and with that of Meuleon, and with that of Luz, and with those of the two Bagneres, and with the Val d’Aran, and with the Val d’Esera, and with the very famous Valley of Andorra.

With valleys so made the mountains are indeed more awful than they might be in the Alps:  but you never see them standing out and apart, and the mastering elevation of the Pyrenees is not apprehended until you come to the cirque or hollow at the end of each valley just underneath the main ridge; by that time you have climbed so far that you have halved the height of the barrier.

But the Cerdagne, unlike all the other valleys, is as broad as half a county, and is full of towns and fields and men and mules and slow rivulets and corn; so, standing upon either side and looking to the other, you see all together and in the large its mountain boundaries.  It is like the sight of the Grampians from beyond Strathmore, but very much more grand.  Moreover, as no one has written sufficiently about it to prepare the traveller for what he is to see