THE people of the Iberian peninsula are famous for their very pronounced“racial”characteristics. The Spaniard is supposed to be so“racially”different from any other group of people, that one will recognize him anywhere and under all circumstances by his racial haughtiness, his formal courtesy, his pride, his sobriety and his ability to play the guitar and the castanets.For even music has been dragged in to bolster up the“racial theory”.

Perhaps so. Perhaps it is as easy to recognize the Spaniard by his haughtiness and pride as by his ability to play the guitar and the castanets.But I have very serious doubts upon the subject.The Spaniards merely took to playing the guitar and the castanets because in their dry and warm climate they were able to use out-of-door instruments.When it comes however to playing them really well, both Americans and Germans are greatly superior to the native talent.If they play them less frequently than the Spaniards do, that is the result of the climate under which they live.You can't very well play the castanets in the pouring rain of a cold Berlin evening nor the guitar when your fingers tremble with frostbite.And as for those qualities of pride and haughtiness and formal courtesy, weren't they all of them the result of centuries of hard military training, and wasn't this military life the direct outcome of the fact that Spain was geologically speaking quite as much a part of Africa as of Europe?Therefore wasn't it bound to be a battlefield for Europeans and Africans until either one side or the other should have won?In the end, the Spaniard was victorious, but the land for which he had been obliged to fight for such a long time had left its imprint upon him.What would he have developed into if his cradle had stood in Copenhagen or Berne?Into a perfectly ordinary little Dane or Swiss.Instead of playing the castanets, he would have yodeled, because the steep walls of a mountain valley with their marvellous echoes invite one to yodel.And instead of living on a little dry bread and sour wine, raised with infinite care and patience on his own neglected soil(neglected again on account of that clash between Africa and Europe),he would have eaten a lot of butter, necessary to protect his body against the eternal dampness of the climate, and he would have drunk aquavit, because the abundant presence of cheap grain would have made gin the almost inevitable national beverage.

And now look at the map. You remember the mountain-ranges of Greece and Italy.In Greece they ran diagonally across the country.In Italy they ran in an almost straight line from north to south, dividing the country into halves but allowing enough space on both sides for the construction of roads that coasted the country from one end to the other, while the salient of the Po plain made the Apennine peninsula an integral part of the European continent.

In Spain the mountains make horizontal ridges which one might almost describe as visible degrees of latitude. After a single glance at the map you will understand how these mountain-ranges must have acted as barriers to any sort of orderly progress.They begin with the Pyrenees.

The Pyrenees,240 miles long, run in a straight and uninterrupted line from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. They are not as high as the Alps and therefore it ought to be easier to cross them by means of mountain passes.But that is not so.The Alps, although very high, are also very wide and the roads that run across them, although quite long, rise only very slowly and offer no special difficulties to either man or pack-horse.The Pyrenees on the other hand are only 60 miles wide, and as a result their mountain passes were much too steep for anybody except a goat or a mule.According to well-seasoned travellers, even the mules experienced difficulties.Trained mountaineers(mostly professional smugglers)were able to get through, but only during a few months of summer.The engineers who built the railroads connecting Spain with the rest of the world realized this, for they built the two trunk lines from Paris to Madrid and from Paris to Barcelona along the shores of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.Whereas the Alps have half a dozen railroad lines passing over them or under them, the Pyrenees, between Irun in the west and Figueras in the east, are not pierced by a single tunnel.After all, one can't very well dig a tunnel sixty miles long.Neither can one send trains across a track with an inclination of forty degrees.

There is one fairly easy pass in the west, the famous pass of Roncesvalles, where Roland, Charlemagne's famous Paladin, died loyally serving his master's interests until the moment he succumbed under the last of the Saracens'attacks. Seven hundred years later, another army composed of Frenchmen used this pass as an entrance gate into Spain.They got across the pass itself but were stopped before Pamplona, the city that dominates the road on the southern side.During the siege, one of the Spanish soldiers, a certain Ignatius de Loyola, was desperately wounded through a shot in the leg.While recovering, he had those visions which inspired him to found the Company of Jesus, the famous Society of the Jesuits.

The Jesuits afterwards did more to influence the geographic development of a vast number of countries than any other religious organization, more even than those indefatigable travelers, the Franciscans. It was here that they began, defending the only passage across the center of the Pyrenees.

It was undoubtedly this inaccessibility of the Pyrenees which gave the famous Basque people their chance to maintain themselves from prehistoric times until today and which accounts for the independent Republic of Andorra, very high up in the eastern part of the mountains. The Basques, about 700,000 in number, inhabit a triangle that is bounded by the Gulf of Biscay in the north, by the Spanish province of Navarre in the east, while the western frontier follows a line from the city of Santander to the city of Logrono on the Ebro River.The name Basque means the same as our word Gascon, but it has nothing to do with the cronies of the famous Captain d'Artagnan.The Roman conquerors called them Iberians and called the whole of Spain the Iberian peninsula.As for the Basques themselves, they proudly say that they are Eskualdunak, which sounds very un-European and quite like Eskimo.

Just for good measure, and because your guess is apt to be as sound as mine, here are a few of the current theories about the origin of the Basques. Some of the professors who distil racial theories out of skulls and gutturals, believe them to be connected with those Berbers whom I mentioned several chapters ago as the possible descendants of one of the earliest tribes of prehistoric Europeans, the so-called Cromagnon race.Others claim that they are the survivors who saved themselves on the European continent when the romantic island of Atlantis disappeared beneath the waves of the ocean.Still others hold that they have always been where they are now and don't bother to ask where they came from.Whatever the truth, the Basques have shown remarkable ability in keeping themselves aloof from the rest of the world.They are very industrious.More than a hundred thousand of them have migrated to South America.They are excellent fishermen and sailors and iron workers and they mind their own business and keep off the front page of the newspapers.

The most important city of their country is Vitoria, founded in the sixth century by a Gothic king and scene of that famous battle in which an Irishman by the name of Arthur Wellesley, but better known by his English title of the Duke of Wellington, defeated the armies of a Gorsican general by the name of Buonaparte, but better known by his French title of the Emperor Napoleon, and forced the latter to leave Spain for good and all.

As for Andorra, this strange commonwealth numbering fully 5000 inhabitants, connected with the outside world by a bridle-path, is the only surviving specimen of those queer little medieval principalities which retained their independence because, as frontier posts, they might render valuable service to some distant monarch and because afterwards they were too far removed from the busy outside world to attract anybody's attention.

The capital has 600 inhabitants, but the Andorrans, like the Icelanders and the people of San Marino in Italy, were ruling themselves according to their own desires at least eight hundred years before we started our experiment in applied democracy. As a sister republic of great antiquity, Andorra should at least enjoy our sympathetic respect.Eight hundred years is a long time.Where shall we be in the year 2732?

In one other respect, the Pyrenees are quite different from the Alps. They have practically no glaciers.Once upon a time they may have been covered more thickly with snow and ice than the Swiss mountains, but a few square miles of glacier are all that remain.The same holds true of practically all Spanish ridges.They are steep and difficult to cross.But even the Sierra Nevada, the range of southern Andalusia, only shows a few snow caps from October till March, if that long.

The direction of the mountains was of course of immediate influence upon the Spanish rivers. They all of them start on or near the barren high plateau in the center—the remnant of a terrific prehistoric mountain-range which has worn away in the course of millions of years, and they hasten to the sea, but at such terrific speed and with so many waterfalls that none of them possesses the slightest value as a trade-route.Furthermore, the long dry summers deprive them of most of their water, as you may see in Madrid where the sandy bottom of the Manzanares provides the children of the capital with a nice imitation sea-shore for at least five months of the year.

That is why I won't even bother to tell you the names of most of them. The Tagus on which Lisbon, the Portuguese capital, is situated is an exception.It is navigable almost as far as the Spanish-Portuguese frontier.The Ebro too in northern Spain, which runs through Navarre and Catalonia, can be used by smaller vessels, but larger ones have to pass most of the way through a canal which runs parallel with the river itself.The Guadalquivir(Wadi-el-Kebir or Big River of the Moors)which connects Seville with the Atlantic Ocean can only be used by vessels that draw less than fifteen feet.Between Seville and Cordova, the famous Moorish capital that used to boast of no less than nine hundred public baths before the Christians captured it and reduced the population from 200,000 to 50,000 and the public baths from 900 to 0,the Guadalquivir is only available for small vessels.After that it becomes what most Spanish rivers are, canyon rivers(like our own Colorado)which are a great hindrance to overland trade while contributing practically nothing to commerce along the water routes.

Generally speaking, therefore, Nature was not particularly kind to the Spaniards. The great central part of the country consisted of a high plateau, divided into halves by a low mountain ridge.Old Castile is the name of the northern half and New Castile that of the other.The dividing ridge is called the Sierra de Guadarrama.

The name Castile, which merely means“castle”,is a very pretty name. But it resembles those boxes of Spanish cigars of which the label is so much more imposing than the quality of the contents.For Castile is as harsh and ill-favored a land as may be found anywhere.When General Sherman, after his march through Georgia, remarked that henceforth a crow wishing to cross the Shenandoah Valley would have to pack his own rations, he was consciously or unconsciously quoting a remark which the Romans made 2000 years before when they said that a nightingale trying to cross Castile would have to take its food and drink with it or it would die of hunger and thirst.For the mountains which surround this plateau are sufficiently high to prevent the clouds that arise from the Atlantic and the Mediterranean from reaching this unfortunate table-land.

As a result, Castile suffers from nine months of inferno and during the other three months of the year it is exposed to the cold and dry winds which sweep across this treeless tract with such a merciless fury that sheep are the only animals that can live here with any degree of comfort, while the only plant that prospers is a variety of grass, the esparto or halfa grass, which is very tough and can therefore be used for basket-work.

But most of this table-land, called the meseta by the Spaniards(a word which you meet again in our own“mesas”,familiar to all those who know New Mexico or follow the adventures of Krazy Kat),is something that closely resembles a plain, ordinary desert, and that makes you understand why Spain and Portugal, although much larger than England, have only half the population of the British Isles.

For further particulars about the shabby poverty of these regions, I refer you to the works of a certain Don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. You may remember that the“ingenious hidalgo”who was his hero bore the proud name of Don Quixote de la Mancha.Well, Mancha was one of those inland deserts with which the plateau of Castile was dotted then as it is now, a bleak, inhospitable stretch of waste land near Toledo, the ancient Spanish capital.The name itself was ominous to Spanish ears, for in the original Arabic, al mansha, it meant“wilderness”and the poor Don was really the“Lord of the Wilderness”.

In a country like that, where Nature is both stingy and obstinate, Man must either settle down to hard labor and force her to yield him the necessities of life, or he can choose to live as the average Spaniard lives, who as a rule can load all the family possessions on the back of one very small donkey. And that brings us to one of the greatest tragedies that ever occurred as a result of a country's unfortunate geographic position.

Eight hundred years ago, the country belonged to the Moors. It was not the first time the Iberian peninsula had been invaded.For the country possessed valuable mineral deposits.Two thousand years ago copper, zinc and silver were what petroleum is today.Wherever copper, zinc and silver were to be found, rival armies would fight for their possession.When the Mediterranean was divided into two great armed camps and when the Semites(of Carthage, a colony of the Phoenicians and ruthless in its exploitation of subject nations)and the Romans(not of Semitic origin but quite as ruthless in their exploitation of subject nations)were throwing loaded dice(one of the chief early uses made of lead was for the purpose of loading dice)for the treasures of the world, Spain could not long escape her fate.Like many a modern land, unfortunately blessed with natural riches, Spain was turned into a battleground for the mercenaries of two large groups of organized brigands.

As soon as they were gone, the country was used as a convenient land bridge for wild tribes from northern Europe, trying to break into Africa.

And then, early during the seventh century, a camel driver in Arabia had a vision and started a number of desert tribes of whom no one had ever heard, on the war-path, bound for world-domination. A century later, they had conquered all of northern Africa and were ready to tackle Europe.In the year 711 Tarik sailed for the famous Monkey Rock(the only spot in Europe where monkeys continued to live in a wild state)and without meeting any opposition landed his troops near Gibraltar, the famous rock(which incidentally does not look like the well-known advertisement because it turns its back upon the land and not upon the sea)which during the last two hundred years has belonged to England.

Thereafter the old Pillars of Hercules, the straits which Hercules had dug by the simple process of pushing the mountains of Europe and Africa aside, belonged to the Mohammedans.

Could the Spaniards have defended themselves successfully against this invasion?They tried too. But the geography of their country prevented any concerted action, for the mountain-ranges(which ran a parallel course)and the rivers with their deep canyons divided the country into a number of independent little squares.Remember that even today some five thousand Spanish villages have no direct communication with each other or any other part of the world, except by a narrow track which pedestrians, free from dizziness, may use during certain parts of the year.

And then remember one of the few definite facts which history and geography teach us, that such countries are breeding places for clannishness. Now clannishness has undoubtedly certain good qualities.It makes the members of the same clan loyal to each other and loyal to the common or clan interests.But Scotland and the Scandinavian peninsula are there to show us that clannishness is the deadly enemy of all forms of economic cooperation and national organization.Island dwellers are supposed to be“insular”,and to care for nothing except the affairs of their own little islet.But they at least can sit themselves down in a boat once in a while and spend an afternoon with their neighbors, or rescue the crew of a ship-wrecked vessel and hear what the big world is doing.The man of the valley, shut off from the rest of humanity by an almost unsurpassable mountain ridge, has no one but himself and his neighbors and they in turn have no one but themselves and their neighbors.

The conquest of Spain by the Mohammedans was possible because the Moors, although a desert people and therefore great worshippers of the restricted“tribal”idea, were for once united under strong leaders who had given them a common national purpose which made them forget their own petty ambitions. While the Spanish clans fought each one for itself and hated their rival clans as cordially(and often more so)than they hated the common enemy who was driving them out of house and home, the Mohammedans obeyed a single head.

The seven centuries during which the great Spanish war of liberation lasted are an endless recital of treachery and rivalry between the little Christian states of the north that survived because the Pyrenees formed a barrier across which they could not hope to retreat without getting into trouble with the French, who, after a few vague gestures on the part of Charlemagne, had left them completely to their own fate.

Meanwhile the Moors had turned southern Spain into a veritable garden. These desert people appreciated the value of water, and they loved the flowers and trees which were so sadly lacking in their own part of the world.They constructed vast irrigation works and imported the orange, the date, the almond tree, sugar-cane and cotton.They set the Guadalquivir to work to turn the valley between Cordova and Seville into one vast“huerta”or garden where the farmer was able to reap as many as four harvests every year.They tapped the Jucar River which flows into the Mediterranean near Valencia and added another 1200 square miles of fertile land to their possessions.They imported engineers, built universities where agriculture was scientifically studied, and constructed about the only roads the country possesses to this very day.What they did for the progress of astronomy and mathematics we have already seen in the first part of this book.And they were the only people in the Europe of that day who paid the slightest attention to medicine and hygiene, carrying their tolerance in such matters so far that they reintroduced the works of the ancient Greeks into the west by means of their own Arabic translations.And they set another force to work which was to be of tremendous value to them.Instead of shutting the Jews up in ghettos or worse, they gave them free rein to develop their great commercial and organizing power for the benefit of the country at large.

And then the inevitable happened. Almost the whole of the country had been conquered, and there was little danger from the side of the Christians.Other Arab and Berber tribes, thirsting in their miserable deserts, heard news of this terrestrial Paradise.And since Mohammedan rule was autocratic, the success or failure of that rule depended upon the ability of a single person.Amidst these luxurious surroundings, dynasties founded by strong-armed plow-boys degenerated and became weak.Other strong-armed plow-boys, still sweating behind their oxen, cast envious eyes upon the joys of the Alhambra of Granada and the Alcazar of Seville.There were civil wars.There was murder.Whole families were wiped out.Others pushed to the front.Meanwhile in the north, the strong man had made his appearance.Clans were being combined into tiny principalities.Tiny principalities were being combined into small states.Men began to hear the names of Castile and Leon and Aragon and Navarre.Finally they forgot their ancient rivalries long enough to marry Ferdinand of Aragon with Isabel of Castile, the land of the castles.

During this great war of liberation over three thousand pitched battles were fought. The Church turned the“racial”struggle into a conflict of religious aspirations.The Spaniard became the soldier of the Cross—a most noble ambition which was to bring ruin to the country for which he so valiantly fought.For in the same year that the last of the Moorish strongholds, Granada, was taken from the Moors, Columbus discovered the road to America.Six years later, Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape and found the direct route to the Indies.Therefore, just at the moment when the Spaniard should have taken possession of his own home and should have continued to develop those latent natural forces of his country which had been set into motion by the Moors, he came into easy money.His religious feeling of exaltation made it easy for him to imagine himself a holy missionary when in reality he was nothing but an uncommon(because uncommonly brutal and greedy)brigand.In 1519 he conquered Mexico.In 1532 he conquered Peru.After that, he was lost.All further ambitions were drowned in the steady flow of gold which the cumbersome galleons dumped into the storehouses of Seville and Cadiz.No man would disgrace himself working with his hands when he could belong to the“gold collar class”by demanding his share of the Aztec and Inca plunder.

All the painful work of the Moors became undone. The Moors themselves were forced to leave the country.Next the Jews went, thrown wholesale into filthy vessels to carry them, naked and deprived of all their possessions, wherever it pleased the captain of the ship to put them on land.Their hearts filled with revenge but their minds sharpened by their sufferings, they struck back at their tormentors, had a hand in every heretical enterprise that was directed against the hated name of Spain.But even Providence must take a hand and give these unfortunate sufferers of the Golden Illusion a monarch whose view of life did not extend beyond the cloistered cell he erected for himself in the palace of the Escurial, situated on the outskirts of the bleak Castilian plain, to which he had transferred his new capital city of Madrid.

Henceforth the riches of three continents and the man-power of an entire nation were to be used to curb the aggressions of the unbelievers, the Protestants of the north, the Mohammedans of the south. The Spanish people, changed by seven centuries of religious warfare into a race in whose eyes the supernatural had become the natural, willingly obeyed their royal master.And they bled to death in the attempt just as they impoverished themselves by growing too rich.

The Iberian peninsula made the Spanish people what they are today. Can the Spanish people now turn around and after centuries of neglect change the Iberian peninsula into what they want it to be, regardless of the past and with only an eye to the future?

They are trying and in some cities, like Barcelona, they are trying very hard.

But what a job!What a job!