The great
military road for Spain runs hidden, pretty wide on your left,
among the lower foothills of the Pyrenees: and from it these
foothills undulate down and drop over little cliffs to form a
moorland with patches of salt marish. In spring, they tell me,
the ground is all gay with scarlet anemones in sheets; but, when
I took the path, their glory was over and but a few late flowers
lingered. I happen, however, to like flowers for their scent
more than for their colour: and the whole of this moor was a
spilth of scent from bushes of the purple Daphne--its full
flowering time over, but its scent lingering ghostlily on the
salt wind from the sea. And the sea was forlorn as it always is
in this inner bight of the Bay of Biscay, where no ships have
any business and your whole traffic is a fishing-boat or two, or
a thread of smoke out on the horizon. You are alone between sea
and mountains; and all along the strip that separates them,
while the sky is spring, the land and the sense of it are
autumn.
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