Sailing over it, and remembering all these things at evening, I got out of the boil and tumble into deep water.  It got darker, and the light on the Nab ship showed clearly a long way off, and purple against the west stood the solemn height of the island.  I set a course for this light, being alone at the tiller, while my two companions slept down below.  When the night was full the little variable air freshened into a breeze from the south-east; it grew stronger and stronger, and lifted little hearty following seas, and blowing on my quarter drove me quickly to the west, whither I was bound.  The night was very warm and very silent, although little patches of foam murmured perpetually, and though the wind could be heard lightly in the weather shrouds.

The star Jupiter shone brightly just above my wake, and over Selsey Bill, through a flat band of mist, the red moon rose slowly, enormous.

RONCESVALLES

Sitting one day in Pampeluna, which occupies the plain just below the southern and Spanish escarpment of the Pyrenees, I and another remembered with an equal desire that we had all our lives desired to see Roncesvalles and the place where Roland died.  This town (we said) was that which Charlemagne destroyed upon his march to the Pass, and I, for my part, desired here, as in every other part of Europe where I had been able to find his footsteps, to follow them, and so to re-create his time.

The road leads slantwise through the upper valleys of Navarre, crossing by passes the various spurs of the mountains, but each pass higher than the last and less frequented, for each is nearer the main range.  As you leave Pampeluna the road grows more and more deserted, and the country through which it cuts more wild.  The advantages of wealth which are conferred by the neighbourhood of the capital of Navarre are rapidly lost as one proceeds; the houses grow rarer, the shrines more ruinous and more aged, until one comes at last upon the bleak valley which introduces the final approach to Roncesvalles.

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