Spanish Pictures

Excerpt from Spanish Pictures: Drawn With Pen and Pencil And Spain resembles Africa or the East in those very points in which she differs from the rest of Europe. The soil has that dry and sterile look with which African travellers are familiar. One may travel for hours over tracts of country in which there is scarcely a living thing to disturb the solitude leagues upon leagues of bare rock without a particle of soil clinging to their Sides vast undulating plains, treeless and waterless; districts, each as large as an English county, covered with blocks of granite or limestone, like the desert of Sinai. Geologically, as well as in appearance, Spain is but a northern extension Of the Sahara. Those who visit Spain, expecting to find exuberant fertility, will be disappointed. There are indeed żz/erfas, which produce their three or four crops a year, and repay~the slightest amount of labour by harvests of incredible richness. But these seem like oases in an arid waste. Probably less than one half of the soil is under cultivation. Certainly the general aspect of the country is that of utter sterility and barrenness. This impression is rendered yet more intense by the numerous zvadys, or dry river-beds, which are everywhere met with. Sometimes they are quite dry, and not a drop of water flows down them except during winter storms. More commonly the stream which once filled up a wide channel has shrunk into a streamlet, which trickles amongst the stones and sand-banks in the middle of its channel. It is said that the French troops on entering Madrid in triumph, and seeing the dry bed of the Manzanares, exclaimed, What, has the river run away too I This is partly' occasioned by the diminished rainfall, partly by the water being drawn off for purposes of irrigation. Rivers which were once navigable to a considerable distance inland can now scarcely żoat a barge. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.