It is at once the most amusing and the most dramatic feature of our time that we can foresee—for some few years ahead—material things. Things moral escape us altogether. Never was there a generation of Europeans who could less determine what the near future held for the fate of national characters, of religions, or of styles in art; the more foolish attempt to escape this ignorance by pretending that things moral depend upon things material. They observe the cutting of a canal and prophesy the decline of one nation upon its completion, the growth of another—as though the power of nations armed resided in something lower than the Mind, and as though the success of armies (upon which all at last depends) were determined by the exchange of metals or by new routes of trade. Meanwhile, though the future, even the immediate future, of nations and of faiths is more closely hidden from us than ever, yet it is entertaining, and, as I have said, it is even dramatic, to watch our power of prophecy over material things.

We undertake works of such magnitude and spread[Pg 259] over so long a span of years, they are accomplished under such conditions of international comprehension and security, that we can stand (sometimes) in a desert place and say, "Here, in five years, will be a town," or on a barren coast and say, "Here, in five years, will be a harbour." We can distract ourselves by imagining the contrast beforehand and by returning, when the work is done, to see how nearly one has imagined the truth. Bizerta once afforded such an opportunity, Rosyth now affords one, and so does that sight which set me writing this, and which I have just witnessed in a remote and hitherto quite silent valley. There, with little advertisement of public interest, one of the immemorial high-roads of Europe is under restoration and is about to return to life: the old High Road into Spain.

It is often remarked that the lines of European travel can hardly be permanently altered, that Nature has designed them. Generations do sometimes pass in which some profound change in man rather than in Nature affects a few of the great roads. The Roman line from the south northward, the highway from the Saone to the Straits of Dover, passing by Laon and Amiens, was deflected as the Dark Ages closed round the mind of Gaul. Water carriage succeeded the degraded high-roads. The convergence of water-ways in the basin of Paris made that basin the centre of travel, and the old way by Laon was forgotten. Yet modern conditions restored it. The railway has done again what the Roman[Pg 260] engineers accomplished, and Laon is once again a halt upon the great road southwards, and once again the most direct avenue from the Channel to the Mediterranean follows the plain to the east of Paris. So it has come to be with a road equally famous, equally forgotten, the High Road from the North into Spain.

The Pyrenees lie, as every one knows, like an artificial wall between the valley of the Ebro and Gaul. How great the division is only those can believe who have seen with their own eyes the meadows and the deep orchards of Bearn, and then, after a painful crossing of the hills, have come upon the burnt deserts of Aragon. The road from the one to the other, the administrative road which bound Spain to Gaul, which connected Cæsaraugusta with Tolosa, that is, Saragossa with Toulouse, was a Roman Highway, called "the High Pyrenean," the highest and most central of the two main passes. It had, as I have said, Toulouse for its northern terminus, Saragossa for its southern. It had for two mountain towns, or depots, at the foot of either climb, Oloron, the town of the Ilurones, on the north; on the south the Bishop's town of Jaca. It had for its last outpost just before the last steep Urdos, the Forum Ligneum, to the north; to the south a cluster of huts and a station, whose Roman name has not come down to us, but which since the barbarian invasions has been called "Canfranc." This great road, like so many throughout the Empire, fell. You may yet trace its[Pg 261] structure in those places where it is not identical with the modern way, but with the close of the Empire, and on nearly to our own time its surface was left unrepaired. Armies used it, as they used all the great Roman roads of the north and west, till the Twelfth Century. The Merovingians crossed it in their raids to the Ebro; Charlemagne sent men down it in the advance upon (and failure before) Saragossa—the expedition whose retreat was clinched by the destruction of his rearguard and the death of Roland in Roncesvalles. It was still a gate for armies when the reconquest of Spain from the Mohammedan began. Jaca was free before any other town of the Central North, Huesca fell before the first Crusade was fought, Saragossa before the second. Bearn, and indeed all Christendom, still used that high notch until the new c............