ousand (!) strong and set out to
punish the rebel.

Up a narrow pass between two high ridges went the pagan army, paying
little heed to the growing asperity and savageness of the path it was
treading.

Suddenly ahead of the two hundred thousand a high sheet of rock rose
perpendicularly skywards; on a platform Pelayo and his three hundred
warriors, who somehow or other had managed to emerge from a miraculous
cave where they had found an effigy of the Virgin of Battles, made a
last stand for their lives and liberties.

Immediately a shower of stones, beams, trunks, and what not was hurled
down into the midst of the heathen army by the three hundred warriors.
Confusion arose, and, like frightened deer, the Arabs turned and fled
down the path to the vale, pushing each other, in their fear, into the
precipice below.

Then the Virgin of Battles arose, and wishing to make the defeat still
more glorious, she caused the whole mountain to slide; an avalanche of
stones and earth dragged the remnants of Munuza's army into the ravine
beneath. So great was the slaughter and the loss of lives caused by this
defeat, that "for centuries afterward bones and weapons were to be seen
in the bed of the river when autumn's heat left the sands bare."

This Pelayo was the first king of Asturias, the first king of Spain,
from whom all later-date monarchs descended, though neither in a direct
nor a legitimate line, be it remarked in parenthesis. The tourist will
be told that it is Pelayo's tomb, and that of his sister, that are still
to be seen in the cave at Covadonga. Perhaps, though no documents or
other signs exist to bear out the statement. At any rate, the sepulchres
are old, which is their chief merit. The monastical church which stands
hard by cannot claim this latter quality; neither is it important as an
art monument.

III

LEON

The civil power enjoyed by Oviedo previous to the eleventh century moved
southwards in the wake of Asturias's conquering army. For about a
century it stopped on its way to Toledo in a fortress-town situated in a
wind-swept plain, at the juncture of two important rivers.

Leon was the name of this fortress, one of the strategical points, not
only of the early Romans, but of the Arabs who conquered the country,
and later of the nascent Christian kingdom of Asturias. In the tenth
century, or, better still, toward the beginning of the eleventh, and
after the final retreat of the Moors and their