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As we passed some bare, treeless hills such as abound near Chinchilla, one of them the one, in fact, who had been at Loyola remarked to me: "This must remind you of your own country." I was dumbfounded. How could he identify those arid, parched, glinting rocks with the Basque landscape, with the humid, green, shaded countryside of Azpeitia?
In a hotel on the edge of that inlet, the Fonda de la Playa, where I put up, a young Irish gentleman named Leader was recuperating from a severe wound in the leg. He had received it in the service of Don Carlos, in a skirmish near Azpeitia, where he was the only man hit. He was out with a party of the guerrilleros, and came across a company of the Madrid troops.
The Biscayan had an inscription under his feet which said, "Don Sancho de Azpeitia," which no doubt must have been his name; and at the feet of Rocinante was another that said, "Don Quixote."
Navarre, continues El Cuartel Real, is dominated by our valiant soldiers under the skilful direction of his Majesty; Lizarraga has occupied in a few days Mondragon, Eibar, Plasencia, Azpeitia, Vergara, and other important places in Guipúzcoa, and obtained "considerable booty of war;" the standard of legitimacy is waving triumphantly in Biscay, and Bilbao is blockaded.
The Biscayan had an inscription under his feet which said, "Don Sancho de Azpeitia," which no doubt must have been his name; and at the feet of Rocinante was another that said, "Don Quixote."
I once rode to Valencia with two priests who were by no means unknown. One of them had been in the convent of Loyola at Azpeitia for four years. We talked about our respective homes; they eulogized the Valencian plain while I replied that I preferred the mountains.
The theory about Loyola, first mooted by Bowle, the English commentator, is of all, perhaps, not the least absurd. The one shred by which it hangs is a passage in Don Quixote where the angry Biscayan, the adversary of Don Quixote, is made a native of Azpeitia this being the name of the obscure village where Loyola was born.
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