Extracting a column from a file and merging with other file using awk

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi All:
I have following files:
File 1:

<header>
text...
text ..
text ..
text ..
<\header>
         x
         y
         z
           ...

File 2:

<header>
text...
text ..
text ..
text ..
<\header>
1     2      3  
11   22     33 .....

I would like to merge these file into a single file as :

x  1   2  3
y 11  22 33 ...

into a single file named File 3.

I am kinda lost on this.
I really appreciate your help.

2 
#!/bin/sh
awk '/header/,/\/header/{next}1' file1 > /tmp/file1.tmp
awk '/header/,/\/header/{next}1' file2 > /tmp/file2.tmp
paste -d" " /tmp/file1.tmp /tmp/file2.tmp > file3
3

Thanks!!!
I appreciate your help.

4 
awk 'NR==FNR{if(/<\\header/){f=1;next;};if(f)a[++x]=$0}{if(/<\\header/){g=1;next};if(g)print a[++z],$0}' file1 file2
x 1 2 3
y 11 22 33 .....
5

A couple of one liners that do the same using awk or sed

paste -d" " file1 file2 | awk '/<header>/,/<\\header>/{next}1' > file3
paste -d" " file1 file2 | sed '/<header>/,/<\\header>/d' > file3