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.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 40357
   :PG.Title: Four Months Afoot in Spain
   :PG.Released: 2012-07-27
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: Harry A. Franck
   :DC.Title: Four Months Afoot in Spain
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1911
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

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FOUR MONTHS AFOOT IN SPAIN
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      Cover

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      :alt: Map showing the author's itinerary

      Map showing the author's itinerary

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   .. class:: LARGE

      HARRY A. FRANCK

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      FOUR MONTHS AFOOT
      IN SPAIN

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      GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING CO., INC,
      GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK  

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      COPYRIGHT 1911, BY THE CENTURY CO.  ALL
      RIGHTS RESERVED.  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
      AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

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      A FOREWORD

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   Yet another story of travels in western Europe,
   especially one having for its basis the mere
   random wanderings of a four-months' absence from
   home, may seem almost to call for apology.  If so,
   it is hereby duly tendered.  What befell me on this
   vacation jaunt is no story of harrowing adventure, nor
   yet a record of the acquisition of new facts.  But as
   I covered a thousand miles of the Iberian peninsula
   on foot, twice that distance by third-class rail, and
   am given to mingling with "the masses," it may be
   that there have filtered into the following pages some
   facts and impressions that will be new to the reader.
   Yet it is less to record these that I have written, than
   to answer a question that has often been put to me
   since my return:

   "How can a man make such a journey on $172?"

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   THE AUTHOR.

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   CONTENTS

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   CHAPTER

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   I.  `A 'Tweendecks Journey`_
   II.  `Footpaths of Andalusia`_
   III.  `The Last Foothold of the Moor`_
   IV.  `The Banks of the Guadalquivir`_
   V.  `The Torero at Home`_
   VI.  `Tramping Northward`_
   VII.  `Spanish Roads and Roadsters`_
   VIII.  `On the Road in La Mancha`_
   IX.  `The Trail of the Priest`_
   X.  `Shadows of the Philips`_
   XI.  `Crumbling Cities`_
   XII.  `Wildest Spain`_
   XIII.  `The Land of the Basque`_
   XIV.  `A Descent into Aragon`_
   XV.  `Emigrating Homeward`_

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.. _`A 'TWEENDECKS JOURNEY`:

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   FOUR MONTHS AFOOT IN SPAIN

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   CHAPTER I

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   A 'TWEENDECKS JOURNEY

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Not the least of the virtues of the private schools
of New York City is the length of their
summer vacations.  It was an evening late in May
that I mounted to my lodgings in Hartley Hall,
rollicksome with the information that I should soon
be free from professional duties a full four months.
Where I preferred to spend that term of freedom
was easily decided.  Except for one migratory
"year off," I had not been so long outside a
classroom since my fifth birthday; and it seemed fully
as far back that I had begun to dream of tramping
through Spain.  If the desire had in earlier days
battened on mere curiosity, it found more rational
nourishment now in my hope of acquiring greater
fluency in the Spanish tongue, the teaching of which,
with other European languages, was the source of
my livelihood.

There was one potent obstacle, however, to my
jubilant planning.  When I had set aside the
smallest portion of my savings that could tide me over
the first month of autumn, there was left a stark
one hundred and seventy-two dollars.  The briefest
of mathematical calculations demonstrated that such
a sum could cover but scantily one hundred and
twenty days.  Yet the blithesome project would not
be put to rout by mere figures.  I had been well
schooled at least in the art of spending sparingly;
with a long summer before me I was not averse to
a bit of adventure, even the adventure of falling
penniless in foreign lands.  A permanent stranding
was easily averted--I had but to leave in trust a
sum sufficient for repatriation, to be forwarded to
whatever corner of the globe insolvency might
overhaul me.  Which, being done, I pocketed in express
checks and cash the remainder of my resources--to-wit,
one hundred and thirty-two dollars--tossed
into a battered suit-case a summer's supply of small
clothes and a thread-bare costume for ship wear, and
set out to discover what portion of the Iberian
peninsula might be surveyed with such equipment.

Thus it was that on the morning of June first I
boarded the "L" as usual at One Hundred and
Sixteenth street; but took this time the west side
express instead of the local that screeches off at
Fifty-third into the heart of the city.  A serge
suit of an earlier vintage and double-soled oxfords
were the chief articles of my attire, reduced already
to Spanish simplicity except for the fleckless collar
and the cracked derby I had donned for the flight
through exacting Manhattan.  As for the suitcase
that rocked against the platform gate as we roared
southward, it was still far from a pedestrian's scrip.
For with the ambitious resolution to rectify during
the long sea voyage before me some of the sins of
omission, I had stuffed into it at the last moment a
dozen classic volumes in Sixth-avenue bindings.

"Christ'fer!" croaked the guard.

I descended to the street and threaded my way
to the ferry.  Across the river Hoboken was
thronged with luggage-laden mankind, swarthy sons
and daughters of toil for the most part; an eddying
stream of which the general trend was toward a
group of steamship docks.  With it I was borne into
a vast two-story pier, strewn below with everything
that ships transport across the seas and resounding
above with the voice of an excited multitude.  Near
the center of the upper wharf stood an isolated
booth bearing a transient sign-board:

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   "SCHNELLDAMPFER.
   PRINZESSIN ----."

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Within, sat a coatless, broad-gauge Teuton, puffing
at a stogie.

"Third-class to Gibraltar," I requested, stooping
to peer through the wicket.

The German reached mechanically for a pen and
began to fill in a leaf of what looked like a large
check-book.  Then he paused and squinted out upon
me:

Ah--er--you mean *steerage*?"

"Steerage, mein Herr; to Gibraltar."

He signed the blue check and pushed it toward
me, still holding it firmly by one corner.

"Thirty dollars and fifty cents," he rumbled.

I paid it and, ticket in hand, wormed my way
to the nearer of two gangways.  Here I was
repulsed; but at the second, an officer of immaculate
exterior but for two very bleary eyes, tore off a
corner of the blue check and jerked a thumb over
his shoulder toward the steamer behind him.  As I
set foot on her deck a seaman sprang up suddenly
from the scuppers and hurled at my chest a tightly
rolled blanket.  I caught it without a fumble, having
once dabbled in football, and, spreading it out on a
hatch, disclosed to view a deep tin plate, a huge
cup, a knife, fork and spoon of leaden hue, and a
red card announcing itself as "Buono per una
razione."

A hasty inspection of the *Prinzessen* ----
confirmed a suspicion that she would not offer the
advantages of the steamers plying the northern route.
She was a princess indeed, a sailor's princess, such
as he may find who has the stomach to search in the
dives along West street or down on the lower
Bowery.  At her launching she had, perhaps,
justified her christening; but long years have passed
since she was degraded to the unfastidious southern
service.

The steerage section, congested now with
disheveled Latins and cumbrous bundles, comprised the
forward main deck, bounded on the bow by the
forecastlehead and aft by an iron wall that rose a sheer
eight feet to the first-class promenade, above which
opened the hurricane deck and higher still the
wheelhouse and bridge.  This space was further limited
by two large hatchways, covered with tarpaulins, of
which a corner of each was thrown back to disclose
two dark holes like the mouths of a mine.  By these
one entered the third-class quarters, of which the
forward was assigned to "single men" and the
other to any species of the human race that does not
fall into that category.  I descended the first by a
perpendicular ladder to a dungeon where all but
utter darkness reigned.  As my eyes accustomed
themselves to this condition, there grew up about me
row after row of double-decked bunks, heaped with
indistinct shapes.  I approached the nearest and
was confronted by two wolfish eyes, then another
pair and another flashed up about me on every side.
My foresighted fellow-passengers, having preëmpted
sleeping-space, were prepared to hold their claims by
force of arms--and baggage.

Every berth seemed to be taken.  I meandered in
and out among them until in a far corner I found
one empty; but as I laid a hand upon its edge, a
cadaverous youth sprang at me with a plaintive
whine, "E mío! è mío!"  I returned to the central
space.  A sweater-clad sailor whom I had not made
out before was standing at the edge of an opening
in the deck similar to that above.

"Qui non ch' è più," he said; "Giù!"

I descended accordingly to a second bridewell
below the water-line and lighted only by a feeble
electric bulb in the ceiling.  Here half the bunks were
unoccupied.  I chose one athwartships against the
forward bulkhead--a wooden bin containing a
burlap sack of straw--tossed into it blanket and
baggage, and climbed again to daylight and fresh air.

At eleven the sepulchral bass of the steamer
sounded, the vast pier, banked with straining faces
and fluttering handkerchiefs, began slowly to recede,
sweeping with it the adjoining city, until all
Hoboken had joined in the flight to the neighboring
hills.  We were off.  I pitched overboard the
cracked derby and crowded with a half-thousand
others to the rail, eager for the long-anticipated
pleasure of watching the inimitable panorama of
New York grow smaller and smaller and melt away
on the horizon.  But we were barely abreast the
Battery when three officers, alleging the
impossibility of checking their human cargo on the open
deck, ordered the entire steerage community below.
When, long after, it came my turn to be released,
my native land was utterly effaced, and the deck was
spattering with a chilling rain before which we
retreated and frittered away the remnant of the day
with amical advances and bachelor banter.

In the morning the scene was transformed.
Almost without exception my fellow-voyagers had
changed from the somber garb of America to the
picturesque comfort of their first landing in the
Western world.  The steerage deck, flooded with
sunshine, resembled the *piazza* of some Calabrian
city on a day of festival.  Women in many-hued
vesture and brilliant *fazzoletti* sat in groups on the
hatches, suckling their babes or mirthful over their
knitting.  Along the rail lounged men in bag-like
trousers and tight-fitting jackets of velveteen, with
broad scarlet sashes.  Jaunty, deep-chested youths
strolled fore and aft angling for glances from
winsome eyes.  Unromantic elders squatted in circles
about the deck, screaming over games of mora; in
and out among them all raced sportive bambini.
High up on a winch sat a slender fellow Turkish
fashion, thumbing a zither.

Though there was not one beside myself to whom
that tongue was native, English was still the
dominating language.  Except for a handful of Greeks,
the entire 'tweendecks company hailed from southern
Italy or her islands.  But force of habit or
linguistic pride still gave full sway to the slang-strewn
speech of east New York or the labor camp.  There
were not a few who might have expressed themselves
far more clearly in some other medium, yet when I
addressed them in Italian silence was frequently the
response.  The new world was still too close astern
to give way to the spell of the old.

But it was in their mother tongue that I
exchanged the first confidences with three young men
with whom I passed many an hour during the
journey.  The mightiest was Antonio Massarone, a
vociferous giant of twenty, whose scorn was
unbounded for those of his race who had pursued
fortune no further than the over-peopled cities of our
eastern coast.  Emigration had carried him to the
mines of Nevada, and it was seldom that he refrained
from patting his garnished waistband when tales of
experience were exchanging.  But the time had come
when he must give up his princely wage of three
dollars a day and return for years of drudgery and
drill at as many cents, or forever forfeit the right to
dwell in his native land.  When his term was ended
he would again turn westward; before that glad day
comes what a stalwart task confronts certain officers
of the Italian army!

Nicolò, too, expected to return.  In fact, of all
the steerage community a very few had resolved to
remain at home, and for each of these there were a
score who had emigrated a half-dozen times in the
face of similar resolutions.  Nicolò was a bootblack,
proud of his calling and envious of no other.
Already there hovered in his day dreams a three-chair
"parlor" in which his station should be nearest the
door and bordering on the cash-register.  Conscription
called him also, but he approached the day of
recruiting light of heart, knowing a man of four
feet nine would be quickly rejected.

As for Pietro Scerbo, the last of our quartet, his
home-coming was voluntary, for the family obligation
to the army had already been fulfilled by two older
brothers.  Pietro had spent his eighteen months
kneading spaghetti dough in the Bronx at seven
dollars a week; and he physically quaked at the
sarcasm of 'Tonio on the subject of wages.  Still he
was by no means returning empty-handed.  "To be
sure, I am not rich with gold, like 'Tonio," he
confessed one day, when the miner was out of earshot,
"but I have spent only what I must--two dollars
in the boarding-house, sometimes some clothes, and
in the winter each week six lire to hear Caruso."

Thirty dollars a month and the peerless-voiced a
necessity of life!  I, too, had been a frequent
"standee" at the Metropolitan, yet had as often
charged myself with being an extravagant young
rascal.

The steerage rations on the *Prinzessin* were in no
way out of keeping with her general unattractiveness.
Those who kept to their bunks until expelled by the
seaman whose duties included the daily fumigation
of the dungeons, were in no way the losers for being
deprived of the infantile roll and the strange
imitation of coffee that made up the European breakfast.
Sea breezes bring appetite, however, especially on a
faintly rippling ocean, and it was not strange that,
though the dinner-hour came early, even racial
lethargy fled at its announcement.  Long before
noon a single jangle of the steward's bell cut short
all morning pastimes and instantly choked the
passages to the lower regions with a clamorous, jocose
struggle of humanity as those on deck dived below
for their meal-hour implements and collided with the
foresighted, fighting their way up the ladders.
Once disentangled, we filed by the mouth of the
culinary cavern under the forecastlehead, to
receive each a ladleful of the particular pièce de
résistance of the day, a half-grown loaf of bread, and
a brimming cupful of red wine.  Thus laden, each
squirmed his way through the multitude and made
table of whatever space offered,--on the edge of a
hatch, the drum of a winch, or on the deck itself.
Unvaryingly day by day boiled beef alternated with
pork and beans.  Then there was macaroni, not
alternately, nor yet moderately, but ubiquitously,
fourteen days a week; for supper was in no way
different from dinner even in the unearthly hour of its
serving.  It was tolerably coarse macaroni, but
otherwise no worse than omnipresent macaroni must
be when boiled by the barrel under the watchful eye
of a rotund, torpescent, bath-fearing, tobacco-loving,
Neapolitan ship's cook.  For the wine we were
supremely grateful; not that it was particularly
good wine, but such as it was not even the pirates in
the galley could make it worse.

The ensembled climax of this daily extravaganza,
however, had for its setting the steerage
"washroom," an iron cell furnished with two asthmatic
salt-water faucets.  To it dashed first the long
experienced in the quick-lunch world, and on their
heels the competing multitude.  The 'tweendecks
strongholds housed six hundred, the "wash-room"
six, whence it goes without saying that the minority
was always in power and the majority howling for
admittance and a division of the spoils.  Yet
dissension, as is wont, was rampant even among the
sovereign.  From within sounded the splashing of
water, the tittering of jostled damsels, or the
shouting for passage of one who had resigned his post
and must run the gauntlet to freedom through a
vociferous raillery.  In due time complete rotation
in office was accomplished, but it was ever a late
hour when the last gourmand emerged from the
alleyway and carried his dripping utensils below.

The *Prinzessin* plowed steadily eastward.  Gradually,
as the scent of the old world came stronger to
our nostrils, the tongue of the West fell into disuse.
Had I been innocent of Italian I must soon have lost
all share in the general activities.  As it was, I had
the entrée to each group; even the solemn socialists,
seated together behind the winch planning the
details of the portending reversal of society, did not
lower their voices as I passed.

How little akin are anticipation and realization!
Ever before on the high seas it had been my part
to labor unceasingly among cattle pens or to bear
the moil of watch and watch; and the unlimited
leisure of the ticketed had seemed always fit object
for envy.  Yet here was I myself at last crossing
the Atlantic as a passenger, and weary already of
this forced inactivity before the voyage was well
begun.  The first full day, to be sure, had passed
delightfully, dozing care-free in the sun or striding
through the top-most volume in my luggage.  But
before the second was ended reading became a bore;
idling more fatiguing than the wielding of a
coal-shovel.  On the third, I sauntered down into the
forecastle more than half inclined to suggest to one
of its inmates a reversal of rôles; but the watch
below greeted me with that chill disdain accorded
mere passengers, never once lapsing into the
masculine banter that would have marked my acceptance
as an equal.  As a last resort I set off on long
pedestrian tours of the deck, to the astonishment of
the lounging Latins, though now and then some
youth inoculated with the restlessness of the West,
notably 'Tonio, fell in with me for a mile or two.

It was the miner, too, who first accepted my
challenge to a bout of hand-wrestling and quickly
brought me undeserved fame by sprawling prone on
his back, when, had he employed a tithe of science,
he might have tossed me into the scuppers.  From
the moment of its introduction this exotic pastime
won great popularity.  Preliminary jousts filled the
morning hours; toward evening the hatches were
transformed into grandstands from which the
assembled third-class populace cheered on the panting
contestants and greeted each downfall with a
cannonade of laughter, in which even the vanquished
joined.

More constant and universal than all else, however,
was the demand for music.  The most diffident
possessor of a mouth-organ or a jew's-harp knew
no peace during his waking hours.  Great was the
joy when, as dusk was falling on the second day out,
a Calabrian who had won fortune and corpulence
as a grocer in Harlem, clambered on deck, straining
affectionately to his bosom a black box with
megaphone attachment.

"E un fonógrafo," he announced proudly; "a
present I take to the old madre at home."  He
warded off with his elbows the exultant uprising and
deposited the instrument tenderly on a handkerchief
spread by his wife on a corner of the hatch.  "For
a hundred dollars, signori!" he cried; "Madre di
Dío!  How she will wonder if there is a little man
in the box!  For on the first day, signori, I do not
tell her how the music is put in the fonógrafo,
ha! ha! ha! not for a whole day!"--and the joke came
perilously near to choking him into apoplexy long
before its perpetration.

A turn of the key and the apparatus struck up
"La donna è móbile," the strikingly clear tones
floating away on the evening air to blend with the
wash of the sea on our bow.  A hush fell over the
forward deck; into the circle of faces illumed by the
swinging ship's lantern crept the mirage of dreams;
a sigh sounded in the black night of the outskirts.

"E Bonci, amici," whispered the Calabrian as the
last note died away.

The announcement was superfluous; no one else
could have sung the sprightly little lyric with such
perfection.

Bits of other operas followed, plantation melodies,
and the monologues of witty Irishmen; but always
the catholic instrument came back to "La donna è
móbile," and one could lean back on one's elbows and
fancy the dapper little tenor standing in person on
the corner of the hatch, pouring out his voice to his
own appreciative people.

Thereafter as regularly as the twilight appeared
the Calabrian with his "fonógrafo."  The forward
deck took to sleeping by day that the evening
musicale might be prolonged into the small hours.
Whatever its imperfections, the little black box did
much to charm away the monotony of the voyage,
in its early stages.

But good fortune is rarely perennial.  One night
in mid-Atlantic a first-class passenger of the type
that adds, by contrast, to the attractiveness of the
steerage, his arms about the waists of two damsels
old enough to have known better, paused to hang
over the rail.  Bonci was singing.  The promenader
surveyed the oblivious multitude below in silence until
the aria ended, then turned on his heel with a snort
of contempt.  The maidens giggled, the affectionate
trio strolled aft, and a moment later the cabin
piano was jangling a Broadway favorite.  When I
turned my head the Calabrian was closing his instrument.

"No, amici, no more," he said as protest rose;
"We must not annoy the rich signori up there."

Nor could he be moved to open the apparatus
again as long as the voyage lasted.

Amid the general merriment of home-coming was
here and there a note of sadness in the caverns of
the *Prinzessin*.  On a hatch huddled day by day, when,
the sun was high, a family of three, doomed to early
extinction by the white-faced scourge of the north.
Below, it was whispered, lay an actress once famous
in the Italian quarter, matched in a race with death
to her native village.  A toil-worn Athenian, on
life's down grade, who had been robbed on the very
eve of sailing of seven years' earnings of pick and
shovel, tramped the deck from dawn to midnight
with sunken head, refusing either food or drink.
Now and again he stepped to the rail to shake his
knotted fist at the western horizon, stretched his arms
on high, and took up again his endless march.

Then there were the deported--seven men whose
berths were not far from my own.  One had shown
symptoms of trachoma; another bore the mark of a
bullet through one hand; a third was a very
Hercules, whom the port doctors had pronounced
flawless, but who had landed with four dollars less than
the twenty-five required.  With this single
exception, however, one could not but praise the judgment
of Ellis Island.  The remaining four were dwarfish
Neapolitans, little more than wharf rats; and the
best of Naples bring little that is desirable.  Yet
one could not but pity the unpleasing little wretches,
who had risen so far above their environment as to
save money in a place where money is bought dearly,
and whose only reward for years of repression of
every appetite had been a month of misery and
frustration.

"Porca di Madonna!" cursed the nearest, pointing
to three small blue scars on his neck; "For
nothing but these your infernal doctors have made me a
beggar!"

"On the sea, when it was too late," whined his
companion, "they told me we with red eyes should
not go to New York, but to a city named Canada.
Madre dí Dío!  Why did I not take my ticket to this
Canada?"

"You will next time?" I hinted.

"Next time!" he shrieked, dropping from his
bunk as noiselessly as a cat.  "Is there a next time
with a book like that?"  He shook in my face the
libretto containing a record of his activities since
birth, lacking which no Italian of the proletariat
may live in peace in his own land nor embark for
another.  Across every page was stamped indelibly
the word "deported."

"They ruined it, curse them!  It's something in
your maledetta American language that tells the
police not to let me go and the agenzia not to sell
me a ticket.  My book is destroyed!  Sono
scomunicato!  And where shall I get the money for this
next time, díceme?  To come to America I have
worked nine, ten, sangue della Vergine! how do I
know how many years!  Why did I not take the
ticket to this Canada?"

On the morning of June seventh we raised the
Azores; at first the dimmest blot on the horizon, a
point or two off the starboard bow, as if the edge
of heaven had been salt-splashed by a turbulent wave.
Excited dispute arose in the throng that quickly
mustered at the rail.  All but the nautical-eyed
saw only a cloud, which in a twinkling the hysterical
had pronounced the forerunner of a howling tempest
that was soon to bring to the *Prinzessin* the dreaded
*mal di mare*, perhaps even ununctioned destruction.
One quaking father drove his family below and
barricaded his corner against the tornado-lashed night
to come.

An hour brought reassurance, however, and with
it jubilation as the outpost of the eastern world took
on corporate form.  Before sunset we were abreast
the island.  An oblong hillside sloped upward to a
cloud-cowled peak.  Villages rambled away up
tortuous valleys; here and there the green was dotted
with chalk-white houses and whiter churches.
Higher still the island was mottled with duodecimo
fields of grain, each maturing in its own season;
while far and near brilliant red windmills, less stolid
and thick-set than those of Holland, toiled in the
breeze, not hurriedly but with a deliberate vivacity
befitting the Latin south.  Most striking of all was
a scent of profoundest peace that came even to the
passing ship, and a suggestion of eternal summer,
not of burning days and sultry nights, but of early
June in some fairy realm utterly undisturbed by the
clamorous rumble of the outer world.

Two smaller islands appeared before the day was
done, one to port so near that we could count the
cottage windows and all but make out the features
of skirt-blown peasant women standing firm-footed
in deep green meadows against a background of
dimming hills.  As the night descended, the houses
faded to twinkling lights, now in clusters, now a
stone's-throw one from another, but not once failing
as long as we remained on deck.

For two days following the horizon was unbroken.
Then through the morning mists of June tenth rose
Cabo San Vicente, the scowling granite corner-stone
of Europe, every line of its time-scarred features a
defiance to the sea and a menace to the passerby.
Beyond stretched a wrinkled, verdureless plateau,
to all appearances unpeopled, and falling into the
Atlantic in grim, oxide-stained cliffs that here
advanced within hailing distance, there retreated to
the hazy horizon.  All through the day the world's
commerce filed past,--water-logged tramps crawling
along the face of the land, whale-like oil tanks
showing only a dorsal fin of funnel and deck-house,
East Indiamen straining Biscayward, and all the
smaller fry of fishermen and coasters.  A rumor,
rising no one knew where, promised that early
morning should find us entering the Mediterranean.  I
subsidized the services of a fellow-voyager dexterous
with shears and razor and, reduced to a tuft of
forelock, descended once more to the lower dungeon.

Long before daylight I was awakened by the
*commissario*, or steerage steward, tugging at a leg
of my trousers and screeching in his boyish falsetto,
"Gibiltèrra!  Make ready!  Gibiltèrra!"  It was
no part of the commissario's duties to call
third-class passengers.  But ever since the day he had
examined my ticket, the little whisp of a man who
never ceased to regard me with suspicion, as if he
doubted the sanity of a traveler who was bound for
a land that was neither Italy nor America.  Of late
he seemed convinced that my professed plan was
merely a ruse to reach Naples without paying full
fare, and he eyed me askance now as I clambered
from my bunk, in his pigwidgeon face a stern
determination that my knavery should not succeed.

Supplied with a bucket by a sailor, I climbed on
deck and approached the galley.  The cook was
snoring in a corner of his domain; his understudy
was nowhere to be seen.  I tip-toed to the hot-water
faucet and was soon below again stripping off my
"ship's clothes," which the obliging seaman, having
bespoken this reward, caught up one by one as they
fell.  The splashing of water aroused the encircling
sleepers.  Gradually they slid to the deck and
gathered around me, inquiring the details of my
eccentric plan.  By the time I was dressed in the best
my suitcase offered, every mortal in the "single"
quarters had come at least once to bid me a dubious
farewell.

The commissario returned and led the way in
silence along the deserted promenade to the deck
abaft the cabins.  The *Prinzessin* lay at anchor.  A
half-mile away, across a placid lagoon, towered the
haggard Rock of Gibraltar, a stone-faced city
strewn along its base.  About the harbor, glinting
in the slanting sunlight, prowled rowboats, sloops,
and yawls, and sharp-nosed launches.  One of the
latter soon swung in against the starboard ladder
and there stepped on deck two men in white
uniforms, who seated themselves without a word at a
table which the commissario produced by some magic
of his own, and fell to spreading out impressive
documents.  A glance sufficed to recognize them
Englishmen.  At length the older raised his head with an
interrogatory jerk, and the commissario, with the
air of a man taken red-handed in some rascality,
minced forward and laid on the table a great legal
blank with one line scrawled across it.

"T 'ird classy maneefesto, signori," he apologized.

"Eh!" cried the Englishman.  "A steerage passenger
for Gibraltar?"

The steward jerked his head backward toward me.

"Humph!" said the spokesman, inspecting me
from crown to toe.  "Where do you hail from?"

Before I could reply there swarmed down the
companionway a host of cabin passengers, in port-of-call
array, whom the Englishman greeted with bared
head and his broadest welcome-to-our-city smile;
then bowed to the launch ladder.  As he resumed his
chair I laid my passport before him.

"For what purpose do you desire to land in
Gibraltar?" he demanded.

"I am bound for Spain--" I began.

"Spain!" shouted the Briton, with such emphasis
as if that land lay at the far ends of the earth.
"Indeed!  Where are you going from Gibraltar,
and how soon?"

"Until I get ashore I can hardly say; in a day or
so, at least; to Granada, perhaps, or Málaga."

"Out of respect for the American passport,"
replied the Englishman grandiloquently, "I am
going to let you land.  But see you stick to this
story."

I descended to the launch and ten minutes later
landed with my haughty fellow-tourists at a bawling,
tout-lined wharf.  An officer peeped into my
handbag, and I sauntered on through a fortress gate
under which a sun-scorched Tommy Atkins marched
unremittingly to and fro.  Beyond, opened a
narrow street, paralleling the harbor front and peopled
even at this early hour with a mingling of races that
gave to the scene the aspect of a temperate India, or
a scoured and rebuilt Egypt.  Sturdy British
troopers in snug khaki and roof-like tropical
helmets strode past; bare-legged Moors in flowing
*bournous* stalked by in the widening streak of sunshine
along the western walls; the tinkle of goat-bells
mingled with the rhythmic cries of their drivers,
offering a cup fresh-drawn to whomever possessed
a copper; now an orange woman hobbled by, chanting
her wares; everywhere flitted swarthy little men
in misfit rags, with small baskets of immense
strawberries which sold for a song to all but the tourists
who tailed out behind me.

Suddenly, a furlong beyond the gate, a
signboard flashed down upon me, and I turned
instinctively in at the open door of the "Seaman's
Institute."  I found myself in a sort of restaurant,
with here and there a pair of England's soldiers at
table, and a towsled youth of darker tint hanging
over the bar.  I commanded ham and eggs; when
they were served the youth dropped into the chair
opposite and, leaning on his elbows, smiled speechlessly
upon me, as if the sight of an unfamiliar face
brought him extraordinary pleasure.

"Room to put me up?" I asked.

"Nothin' much else but room," sighed the youth,
in the slurring speech of the Anglo-Spanish
half-cast, "but the super 's not up yet, an' I 'm only
the skittles."

I left my baggage in his keeping and, roaming
on through the rapidly warming city to the Alameda
Gardens, clambered away the day on the blistered
face of the great Rock above.

The "super," a flabby-muscled tank of an
Englishman, was lolling out the evening among his
clients when I reëntered the Institute.  My request
for lodging roused him but momentarily from his
lethargy.

"Sign off here?" he drawled.

"Left the *Prinzessin* this morning," I answered,
suddenly reminded that I was no longer a seaman
prepared to produce my discharge-book on demand.

"A.B., eh?"

"Been before the mast on the *Warwickshire*, *Glen*--"

"All right.  A bob a night is our tax.  But no
smoking aloft," he added, as I dropped a coin on
the table before him.

"'Ow ye like Gib?" asked the half-cast, leading
the way up a narrow stairway.

"Like it," I replied.

"Yes, they all does," he mourned, "for one day.
But 'ow if you 'ad always to bask on the stewin'
old Rock, like a bally lizard?  Saint Patrick!  If
only some toff 'ud pay me a ticket to America!"

He entered a great room, divided by thin wooden
partitions into a score of small ones, and, tramping
down a hallway, lighted me into the last chamber.
Opposite the cot was a tall window with heavy
wooden blinds.  I flung them open and leaned out
over the *reja*; and all at once, unheralded, the Spain
of my dreams leaped into reality.  Below, to one
side, flowed the murmuring stream of Gibraltar's
main thoroughfare; further away the flat-roofed
city descended in moonlit indistinctness into the
Mediterranean.  From a high-walled garden a pebble-toss
away and canopied with fragrant fruit-trees,
rose the twang of a guitar and a man's clear voice
singing a languorous air of Andalusia.  Now and
again a peal of laughter broke on the night and
drifted away on the wings of the indolent sea-breeze.
I rolled a cigarette and lighted it pensively, not in
contempt for the "super's" orders, but because
some transgression of established law seemed the
only fitting celebration of the untrammeled summer
that was opening before me.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`FOOTPATHS OF ANDALUSIA`:

.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER II


.. class:: center medium

   FOOTPATHS OF ANDALUSIA

.. vspace:: 2

Gibraltar rises early.  Proof of the
assertion may be lacking, but certainly not even a
"Rock lizard" could recompose himself for another
nap after the passing of the crashing military band
that snatched me at daybreak back to the waking
world.  With one bound I sprang from cot to
window.  But there was no ground for alarm; in
gorge-like Waterport street below, Thomas Atkins, a
regiment strong, was marching briskly barrackward,
sweeping the flotsam of civilian life into the nooks
and crannies of the flanking buildings.

According to the Hoyle of travelers a glimpse of
Morocco was next in order.  But with the absurdity
of things inanimate and Oriental both the Tangiers
steamers were scheduled to loll out the day in harbor.
When "Skittles" had again stowed away my chattels,
I drifted aimlessly out into the city.  But the
old eagerness to tread Spanish soil was soon upon me,
heightened now by the sight of Algeciras gleaming
across the bay.  The harbor steamer would have
landed me there a mere peseta poorer.  Instead, I
sauntered through the Landport gate and away
along the shifting highway which the Holder of the
Rock has dubbed, in his insular tongue, the "Road
to Spain."

It led me past the double rank of sentry boxes
between which soldiers of England tramp everlastingly,
and into bandit-famed La Linea.  A Spaniard
in rumpled uniform scowled out upon me from the
first stone hovel, but, finding me empty-handed, as
silently withdrew.  I turned westward through the
disjointed town and out upon the curving shore of
the bay.

Here was neither highway nor path.  Indeed, were
each Spanish minute tagged with a Broadway
price-mark, the peseta would have been dearly saved, for
the apparent proximity of Algeciras had been but a
tricking of the eye.  Hour after hour I waded on
through seashore sand, halting now and then in the
shadow of some time-gnawed watch-tower of the
departed Moor, before me such a survey of the
shimmering sea to the very base of the hazy African
coast as amply to justify the setting of an outlook
on this jutting headland.

The modern guardian of the coast dwells more
lowly.  Every here and there I came upon a bleached
and tattered grass hut just out of reach of the
languid surf, and under it a no less ragged and listless
*carabinero* squatted in Arabic pose and tranquillity,
musket within reach, or frankly and audibly asleep
on his back in the sand.  Yet his station, too, was
wisely chosen.  The watch and ward of to-day is set
for no war-trimmed galley from the rival continent,
but against petty smugglers skulking along the rim
of the bay.  Nor could the guard better spend his
day than asleep: his work falls at night.

It was the hour of *siesta* when I shuffled up a
sandy bank into Algeciras.  Except for a cur or two
that slunk with wilted tail across the plaza, the town
lay in sultry repose.  I sat down in a shaded corner
of the square.  Above me nodded the aged city tower,
housing the far-famed and often-cursed bell of
Algeciras.  Recently, which is to say some time
during the past century, it was cracked from rim to
crown; and the city fathers have not yet taken up
the question of its replacement.  Meanwhile, it
continues afflictingly faithful to its task.  At
quarter-hourly intervals it clanked out across the bay like the
suspended hull of a battleship beaten with the butt
of a cannon, a languid sigh rose over the drowsing
city, and silence settled down anew.

As the shadows spread, life revived, slowly and
yawningly at first, then swelling to a contrasting
merry-making that reached its climax toward
midnight in the festooned streets beyond the plaza.
Algeciras was celebrating her annual *feria*.
Somewhere I fell in with a carpenter in blouse and hemp
sandals, whose Spanish flowed musically as a
woodland brook, and together we sauntered out the
evening among the lighted booths.  The amusement
mongers were toiling lustily.  Gypsy and clown,
*bolerina*, juggler, and ballad-singer drew each his
little knot of idlers, but a multitude was massed only
around the gambling tables.  Here a hubbub of
excited voices assailed the ear; an incessant rain of
coins fell on the green cloth, from the ragged and
the tailored, from quavering crones and little
children.  The carpenter dived into the fray with his
only peseta, screaming with excitement as the wheel
stopped on the number he had played.  Within an
hour a pocket of his blouse was bulging with silver.
I caught him by the sleeve and shouted a word in his
ear.  Wild horses could not have dragged him away,
nor the voices of sirens have distracted his eyes from
the spinning trundle.  A half-hour later he did not
possess a copper.

"If you had listened," I said, when we had reached
a conversational distance, "you would not have lost
your fortune."

"What fortune!" he panted.  "All I have lost,
señor, is one peseta, and had an evening of a lifetime."

I caught the morning steamer to Gibraltar and an
hour later was pitching across the neck of the
Mediterranean on board the *Gebel Dersa*.  Third-class
fare to Africa was one peseta; first-class, ten; and
the difference in accommodation about forty feet,--to
wit, the distance from the forward to the afterdeck.
One peseta, indeed, seemed to be the fixed
charge for any service in this corner of the world.
My evening meal, the night's lodging, the boatman's
fee for setting me aboard the steamer had each cost
as much.  It would be as easy to quote a fixed
selling-price for mining-stocks as to set the value of that
delusive Spanish coin.  The summer's average,
however, was close upon sixteen cents for the peseta, of
which the *céntimo* is the hundredth part.  There are
at large, be it further noted, a vast number of
home-made pesetas worth just sixteen cents less, which
show great affinity for the stranger's pocket until
such time as he learns to emulate the native and sound
each coin on the stone set into every counter.

It was while we were skirting the calcined town of
Tarifa that I made the acquaintance of Aghmed
Shat.  The introduction was not of my seeking--but
of the ingratiating ways of Aghmed I need say
nothing, known as he is by every resident of our
land.  At least I can recall no fellow-countryman
whose visiting-card he did not dig up from the
abysmal confusion of his inner garments.

To that host of admirers it will bring grief to
learn that Aghmed was most unjustly treated aboard
the *Gebel Dersa* on that blistering thirteenth day of
June.  Yet facts must be reported.  It chanced that
the dozen Anglo-Saxons sprawled ungracefully
about the after-deck composed, at such times as
composure was possible, a single party.  As all the
world knows, it is for no other purpose than to
offer the protection of his name and learning to just
such defenseless flocks that the high-born Moroccan
gentleman in question has been journeying thrice
weekly to the Rock these thirty years.  Yet the
bellwether of the party, blind to his opportunity, had
chosen as guide an ignorant, vile, ugly, utterly
unprincipled rascal whose only motive was mercenary.
True, Aghmed and the rascal were outwardly as
alike as two bogus pesetas.  But surely any man
worthy the title of personal conductor should be
versed in the reading of character, or at least able
to distinguish between genuine testimonials from the
world's élite and a parcel of bald forgeries!  Worst
of all, the leader, with that stiff-neckedness
congenital to his race, had persisted in his error even
after Aghmed had recounted in full detail the rascal's
crimes.  Small wonder there was dejection in the
face of the universally-recommended as he crossed
the pitching plank that connected the first-class with
the baser world, his skirts threshing in the wind, his
turban awry.

At sight of me, however, he brightened visibly.
With outstretched hand and a wan smile he minuetted
forward and seated himself on the hatch beside me
with the unobtrusive greeting:

"Why for you travel third-class?"

The question struck me as superfluous.  But it is
as impossible to scowl down Aghmed's spirit of
investigation as to stare him into believing an
American a Spaniard.  By the time the valleys of the
African coast had begun to take on individuality, I
had heard not only the full story of his benevolent
life but had refused for the twentieth time his
disinterested offer of protection.  Nature, however, made
Aghmed a guardian of his fellow-man, as she has
made other hapless mortals poets; and her commands
must be carried out at whatever sacrifice.  Gradually,
slowly, sadly, the "souvenir" which "americano
gentlemen" were accustomed to bestow upon him
with their farewell hand-clasp fell from twenty
shillings to ten, to five, to three, then to as many pesetas.
It was useless to explain that I had trusted to my
own guidance in many an Arab land, and been fully
satisfied with the service.  When every other
argument had fallen lifeless at his slippered feet, he sent
forth at regular intervals the sole survivor, cheering
it on with a cloud of acrid cigarette smoke:

"Si el señor"--for his hamstrung English had
not far endured the journey--"if the gentleman has
never taken a guide, this will be a new experience."

In the end the sole survivor won.  What, after all,
is travel but a seeking after new experience?  Here,
in truth, was one; and I might find out for myself
whether a full-grown man tagging through the
streets of a foreign city on the heels of a
twaddle-spouting native feels as ridiculous as he looks.

We anchored toward noon in the churning harbor
of Tangiers and were soon pitched into the
pandemonium of all that goes to make up an Oriental mob
lying in wait for touring Europeans.  In a
twinkling, Aghmed had engaged donkeys to carry us to
the principal hotel.  I paused on the outskirts of
the riot to inform him that our sight-seeing would
be afoot; and with a scream of astonishment he reeled
and would, perhaps, have fallen had not the street
been paved in that which would have made such
stage-business unpleasant.

"Pero, señor!" he gasped.  "You do not--you--why,
people will say you have no money!"

"Horrible!" I cried, dodging a slaughtered sheep
on the head of a black urchin in scanty night-shirt
that dashed suddenly out of a slit between two
buildings.  Aghmed, myopic with excitement, failed to
side-step, and it was some distance beyond that his
wail again fell on my ear:

"O señor!  Americano gentlemen never go by this
street.  I cannot guide without donkeys--"

"You can perhaps run along home to dinner?" I
suggested; but he merely fell silent and pattered on
at my heels, now and again heaving a plaintive sigh.

For the better part of the day we roamed in and
out through the tangled city.  In the confusion of
donkeys, bare legs, and immodesty, the narcotic
smell of hashish, the sound of the harsh guttural
tongue once so familiar, memories of more distant
Mohammedan lands surged upon me.  Yet by
comparison Tangiers seemed only a faded segment of
the swarming Arab world set aside to overawe
European tourists, Arabic enough in its way, but
only a little, mild-mannered sample.

Late in the afternoon I rounded the beach and,
falling upon the highway to Fez, strolled away out
of sight and sound of the seaport.  Aghmed still
languished at my heels.  To him also the day had
brought a new experience.  As we leaned back
against a grassy slope to watch the setting of the
red sun, he broke a long hour's silence.

"Señor," he said, "never have I walked so much.
When we had come to the Socco I was tired.  When
we had seen all the city my legs were as two stone
pillars.  Yet I must keep walking."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because you must be protected!  Ah, señor, you
do not know how dangerous is Tangiers; and here in
the country alone you would before now be dead, or
carried off by bandits.  Perhaps this much walking
will make me sick.  Or if I have been seen by my
friends or a gentleman tourist!  Allah meskeen!
They will say I am no longer a gentleman guide, but
a donkey boy."

When her night traffic had taken on its wonted
swing, my stone-legged protector called at the inn
for the purpose of proving that the far-famed
naughtiness of his city was no mere conceit.  The
demonstration was not convincing.  Two hours or
more we ambled from wineshop to *café cantante*,
enduring a deal of caterwauling and inane vulgarity
by no means superior to a Friday-night performance
on the Bowery.  The relieving shepherd's crook,
moreover, being nowhere in evidence, I fled the
torture and retired to bed.

To my infinite relief, Aghmed was on hand in full
health next morning to bid me farewell at the end
of the pier and to receive his specified "souvenir."  He
was profuse, too, with the hope that I might soon
revisit his land; but I caught no hint of a desire to
add my card to his collection.

The steamer plowed her way back to Europe, and
by mid-afternoon I emerged from the Sailor's
Institute face to face with a serious problem.  The most
patient of men, which I am not, would hardly set off
on a tramp across the Iberian peninsula carrying a
forty-pound suitcase, even of unread classics.  To
have dumped the books in the first alleyway would
have been easy, yet painful, for there runs a strain
of Scotch in my veins.  I dropped in on the nearest
bookseller to inquire whether he could see his way
clear to accept at a bargain a batch of novels newly
imported from New York.  But the eager glow
quickly faded from his features as I laid the volumes
before him.

"Why, sir!" he cried.  "These be *old* books, out
of date.  I thought had you something New York
is reading this summer--"

In which attitude his two rivals also dismissed me,
even though I sought the good will of the last by
squandering the bulk of a bright gold sovereign for
Baedeker's "Spain."  As I turned down to the
harbor, a thought, or more exactly the sight of a
sergeant's uniform under the fortress gate, struck me.
The wearer stiffened like a ramrod when I halted
before him.

"Have you a library in the barracks?"

"Ah--certainly, garrison library.  But I hardly
fawncy the commander would allow--"

"Of course not," I interrupted, tossing the books
into his arms; "but I am off for Spain and if you
have any use for a few novels--"

"Ah--er--well, thank you most kindly, sir!"
bawled the officer after me.

Though the fact may never be called to his
attention, the sergeant had heard the last phrase of
English that passed my lips in many a week.  As a
personal experiment I had resolved not to speak a word
of my native tongue within the kingdom of Spain,
even to myself; though this latter proviso, to be sure,
necessitated the early acquisition of a few Spanish
terms of double voltage.

The forerunner of evening was descending upon
Algeciras as I mounted through her now all but
voiceless fiesta and struck away over a grass-patched
hillock.  The further slope was skirted by a dusty
highway that wound off through a billowy country
pregnant with the promise of greater heights to
come.  But the trend of the road was west rather
than north.  Over the hills ahead two male voices
were bawling a sort of dialogue of song.  I mended
my pace and had soon overtaken two peasants
rollicking homeward from the festival.  When I inquired
if this were the highway to Madrid they fell suddenly
silent, after a word of greeting, and strode along
beside me exchanging puzzled glances.

"Well, then, to Honda, señores?" I asked.  "Poresta
carretera?"

"No, no, señor!" they answered quickly.  "Por
aquí no!  You must go on the railroad."

"No, I am traveling on foot."

"Perfectamente, señor; and to walk to Honda you
must take the railroad."

There was nothing in the mien of either to suggest
the practical joker.  Yet so far as my experience
carried there was not a corner of Europe where two
steps on the right of way was rated less a crime than
arson or housebreaking.

We reached the line not far beyond, the highway
diving under by a stone-faced cutting and bearing the
peasants away with it.  Over the next rise their
dove-tailed duet rang out again and, melting in volume
and rendered almost musical by distance, filtered back
to me from the deepening valleys a full quarter-hour
longer.

I climbed the embankment not without misgiving.
Sure enough, a track there was, beside the
broad-gauge rails, covered with cinders and scarred with
many imprints of donkey hoofs.  A mile along it
demonstrated how poor a walking kit is even a
half-empty suitcase.  I sat down to take stock of the
contents.  In the jumble was a blue flannel shirt past
its prime.  I fished out thread and needle and sewed
a Jack-Tar seam across the garment below the
armpits, amputated sleeves and shoulders with a few,
slashes, and behold! a knapsack that might bear my
burdens through all the kingdom of Spain, and hold
its own in any gathering of shoulder-packed
wayfarers.  When I had stuffed my possessions into it
there was still room to spare for such odds and ends
as find their way into the baggage of the least
acquisitive of travelers.  Then pitching the suitcase
spread-eagle over the bordering hedge, I cut a stick
in a neighboring thicket and struck off again at the
regular stride so indispensable to any true enjoyment
of tramping.

Night fell soon after.  A fall it was indeed; no
half-hearted settling down of gloom as in our
northern zone, but a descendant flood of obscurity that
left the eyes blinking in dismay.  To right and left,
where had been rolling uplands and heathered fields
sharp-cut in smallest detail, nothing--a sea of inky
blackness; and ahead, the stony-blind unknown.
The cinder path held firm, but only a foot rubbing
along the rail guided my steps, until such time as
sight resumed its leadership.

An hour or more I marched on into the summer
night.  Then out of the darkness ahead stole a feeble
point of light, an increasing murmur of human
voices, and the end of the first day's tramp was before
me.  Beside the way a stone building stood open, an
oil torch twilighting a cobble-floored room heaped
at one end with a Spanish grocer's wares.  An
unshaven man of fifty, a red handkerchief bound
brigand-fashion about his head, bulked forward
through an inner doorway.

"You furnish lodgings?"

"Sí, señor; and your burro?"

"I am walking.  Is supper to be had?"

"Claro, hombre!  Choose from the baskets and
the señora shall cook it for you in a twinkling."

All through the following day the path continued
parasitic to the railway.  The roadbed was thickly
covered with crushed stone, with nowhere a hint of
the existence of section-gangs.  On either hand
rolled away a landscape stamped with the features
of an African ancestry, all but concealed at times
by the cactus-trees of a willow's height that hedged
the track.  At rare intervals a stuccoed station
serving some hamlet hidden among the hills found
standing-room on the right of way.  An occasional hovel
built of field stones frowned down from the crest of
a parched hillock.  Now and again out of the
meeting-place of the rails ahead came jogging a peasant
seated sidewise on an ass, to swerve suddenly aside
and rattle off down a rocky gorge, singing a
high-pitched ballad of Arabic cadence.  But these were
but bubbles on the surface of a fathomless solitude,
though a solitude brilliant with an all-invading
sunshine that left no skulking-place for somber moods.

It turned out that the railroad had not been built
for the exclusive convenience of pedestrians and
donkeys.  A bit before noon a rumbling arose out
of the north, and no unconscionable time thereafter
the daily "expreso" roared by--at a rate close
upon fifteen miles an hour.  The ticket collector,
cigarette in mouth, clambered hand over hand along
the running board, in imminent peril of losing his
footing--and being obliged to pursue his train to
the next station.  During the afternoon there passed
two "mixtos," toy freight trains with a caudal
carload of passengers.  But the speed of these was more
reasonable, varying from six to eight miles, with
vacations at each station and frequent holidays in the
open country.

The sun was still an hour high when I reached the
station of San Pablo.  This time the town itself
stood in plain sight, pitched on the summit of an
oak-grown hill barely a mile from the line.  I
plunged quickly down into the intervening valley.

It was a checker-board place, perhaps only a
century or two old; certainly no relic of the Moor, for
there was not a sign of shop or market in all its
extent.  Only in the last street did I catch sight of one
of its inhabitants, dining in solitary state in the
center of a bare room.  He stared at me a long
moment when I halted before the immense open window
to inquire for an inn.

"San Pablo, señor," he answered at last, "is a
private town owned by the mining company.  There
is no inn."

I was turning away when he continued:

"But step inside and we shall see what the ama
can arrange for you."

He was, as I had guessed, a Frenchman, an expert
employed in the mines.  The Spanish, however, in
which he addressed the *ama* was faultless.

"Ah, Don Victor!" protested that matron, "How
can I give posada, having no license from the
government?  And without the permission of Don José--"

"Pepete," said the Gaul to an urchin peering in
upon us, "ask Don José to have the goodness to step
over.  He is manager of the mines," he continued,
"and so alcalde and potentate of San Pablo."

It would have been a misfortune, indeed, to have
journeyed through Andalusia without making the
acquaintance of Don José.  He burst in upon us a
moment later; a very hippopotamus of a man,
dressed in baggy trousers, slouch hat, and alpaca
jacket.  Unfortunately his arrival coincided with
my announcement that I was walking to Córdoba--the
whole itinerary would have been too strong meat
for Latin consumption--and his native geniality
was for a time overshadowed by astonishment at my
extraordinary means of locomotion.  I had all but
finished the meal set for me in an adjoining room
when the pair entered and sat down beside me.

"Señor," began the manager, in what was meant to
be a whisper, "you cannot walk to Córdoba.  It is
forty leagues."

"How much money have you?" put in the Frenchman.

"Er--I have something over seven pesetas," I answered.

"Bueno!  Bonísima!" cried the alcalde, patting
me on the shoulder.  "Don Victor and I will add the
rest and I shall go with you to the station to buy
the ticket--in the morning."

Great, I reflected, is the infant mortality among
generous resolutions in the gray of dawn, and
accordingly held my peace.

Having settled my future to his own satisfaction,
Don José linked an arm in one of mine and plunged
out into the night.

"Your bed is waiting for you in your own house,"
he said with Spanish formality.  "You have only to
say the word."

The first syllable of which I had not found time to
say before we marched full front into San Pablo's
barrack-like café.  A roar of greeting sounded
through the dense cloud of cigarette smoke: "Buenas
tardes!  Don José!"

"Buenas, amigos!  Que le gusta!" returned my
companion, and pushing toward a table with two
vacant chairs he continued without a break, "Un
ponche, Don Gregario!  And you, señor?  Anything
you may choose, though there is nothing equal
to ponche.  Verdad, Rufo?"  Then as I opened my
lips to express a preference, "Sí! sí!  Don Gregario!
Dos ponches!"

The room was filled with a hundred bronze-tinted
miners over wine and cards.  Don José was the
industrial autocrat of every man present, yet one would
have fancied him rather a brother or cousin, so free
was the intercourse from haughtiness on the one
hand and servility on the other.  Miner and
manager addressed each other by their given names,
shouted at each other in friendly dispute, thumped
each other fraternally on the back.  Despite all which
one felt absolute assurance that when labor again
caught up its pick the manager's word would
command instant obedience.

The landlord, flushed with the exertion of their
concoction, soon set the incomparable beverages
before us.  With the alacrity of a man who will have
no shadow of debt hanging over his head, Don José
thrust a hand into a pocket of his alpaca and cast
on the table three mammoth coppers, the combined
value of which was close upon five cents.  With the
first sip he rolled a cigarette and pushed pouch and
papers toward me.  Then having introduced me as
"Señor Newyorkano," he plunged headlong into the
story of my life, addressing not merely the
assembled miners but whomever else may have been
prowling within gunshot of the building.  "And to
think, amigos," he concluded, "after crossing all
the sea el señor should have wandered into San Pablo
looking for a posada!"

The company beat their hands on the tables and
howled with merriment.  Whatever the uproarious
humor of that climax to my adventures, it lost
nothing of its poignancy as long as the evening lasted,
and served to top off a score of otherwise pointless
tales.

My ignorance of the Andalusian game notwithstanding,
I had soon taken a hand.  The alcalde, consuming
uncounted cigarettes, beamed over my shoulder
shouting praise of my sagacity each time I cast
on the table the card he pointed out.  As for
"ponche," what the peerless libation lacked in favor
with the masses it gained in the unswerving fidelity of
its sponsor.  With clock-like regularity his
reverberating voice rang out above the din of revelry: "Don
Gregario, un ponche!"  In vain did I announce my
thirst permanently abated, in vain did I "say the
word" or strive at least to take advantage of the
free choice offered me.  My protest was invariably
drowned in the roar of the amended order: "Sí, sí!
Dos ponches, Don Gregario!"

Evening rolled into night, night into morning, and
still the clank of copper coins continued.  Once I
attempted to forestall the diving into that fathomless
alpaca by thrusting a hand into my own pocket.
My unquenchable host started to his feet with a
bellow that seemed to set the very walls vibrating:

"Strangers, señor, cannot spend money in San
Pablo!  We are a private town!"

The minute hand was nearing the completion of
its third lap when a general uprising, subtly
instigated by the landlord, swept the carousers into the
coal-black night.  "My house" was no such regal
mansion as befitted an industrial sovereign, an alcalde,
and a man of unlimited coppers rolled into one.  It
was different, to be sure, from the other bare stone
dwellings of San Pablo, but only in the wild bachelor
disorder that reigned within its four naked walls.
In one corner was a mountainous husk mattress.  Its
mate, alleged my host, lay somewhere buried in the
jumble; and he verified the assertion not long after
by dragging it forth.  While he was booting this
into some resemblance to a bed, I kicked off my shoes
and sank into profound slumber.

Don José, too, awoke at sunrise.  His generosity,
however, was but a shadow of its former self.  On
the descent from the town he listened to my objections
to the proposed charity without once proffering
a reply.  In the depth of the valley he halted and
stared gloomily up at the steep, sun-glazed path to
the station observing that Providence after all is
the appointed guardian of the foolhardy.  I thrust
out a hand.  He shook it dejectedly and, bidding
me go with God and remember there is no drink equal
to ponche, set out to clamber his way back to the
village.

Beyond the curve that swept San Pablo into the
past a stream brawled down out of the hills.  I
climbed a little way up the gorge and came upon a
tumbled boulder that had stored up a pool of just
the depth for a morning plunge.  Further on the
railway grew more winding with every mile.  The
hills increased to mountain spurs, and soon after
came the mountains themselves, the parched and
rock-tumbled Sierra de Honda, fertile only with the
memory of smugglers and intricate pathways.  The
route led through many long, sombrous tunnels,
entrance into which from the blazing sunshine was like
the diving into a mountain lake.  Where the
burrowings ended, the line became still more circuitous,
leaping over abysmal, jagged gulleys by massive
dry bridges.

I fasted all the day; for it was Sunday, and the
few station buildings that appeared were deserted.
Yet the privation passed almost unnoticed.  Were
a choice to be made I would willingly sacrifice any
day's dinner for the unfailing sunshine of Spain,
reinforced by the pleasure of knowing that with the
new dawn another unclouded day will begin.

.. _`A Moorish gate of Ronda`:

.. figure:: images/img-048a.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: A Moorish gate of Ronda

   A Moorish gate of Ronda


My night's halt was beneath swaying palm-trees.

Down through a ravine beside the track were
scattered a few rambling houses, in one of which I found
accommodations.  Its owner was a peasant, battered
with years, who sat before his dwelling smoking in
the cool of evening with his three sons.  One of
these was a *guardia civil* who had seen all the
provinces of Spain, and whose language in consequence
was Spanish.  His brothers, on the other hand,
spoke the crabbed dialect of Andalusia.  I caught
the sense of most of their remarks only at the third
or forth repetition, to their ever-increasing astonishment.

.. figure:: images/img-048b.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: A gitana of Granada.  In the district of the Alhambra.

   A gitana of Granada.  In the district of the Alhambra.


"Hermano," interrupted the guardia once, "you
know you do not speak Spanish?"

The speaker fell silent and listened for some time
open-mouthed to his brother in uniform.

"Caracoles!" he cried suddenly.  "I speak no
other tongue than you, brother, except for the fine
words you have picked up at las Cortes!"

Which was exactly the difficulty.  The "fine"
words were of pure Castilian, for which the rural
andaluz substitutes terms left behind by the Moor.
Furthermore his speech is guttural, explosive,
slovenly, more redolent of Arabic than of Spanish.  He
is particularly prone to slight the S.  His version
of "estes señores" is "ete señore."  Which is
comprehensible; but how shall the stranger guess that
"cotóa e' l' jutí'a" is meant to convey the
information that "la justicia es costosa?"

My evening meal consisted of a *gazpacho*, olives,
eggs, cherries, blood-dripping pomegranates, a rich
brown bread, and wine; my couch of a straw
mattress in a corner of the great kitchen--and my
reckoning was barely twelve cents.

Afoot with the dawn, I had soon entered the vast
cork forest that covers all the northern slope of the
sierra.  Wherever a siding offered, stood long rows
of open freight cars piled high with bales of the
spongy bark; the morning "mixto" hobbled by
bearing southward material seemingly sufficient to
stop all the bottles in Christendom.

By rail Ronda was still a long day distant--but
not afoot.  Before the morning was old I came upon
the beginning of the short-cut which my hosts of
the night had described.  It straggled uncertainly
upward for a time across a rolling sandy country
knobbed with tufts of withered grass and overspread
with mammoth cork-trees, some still unbarked, some
standing stark naked in the blistering sun.  Then all
at once, path, sand and vegetation ceased, and above
me stretched to the very heavens the grilling face of
a bare rock.  I mounted zigzagging, as up the slate
roof of some gigantic church, swathed in a heat that
burned through the very soles of my shoes.  A mile
up, two guardias civiles emerged suddenly from a
fissure, the sun glinting on their muskets and polished
black three-cornered hats.  Here, then, of all places,
was to be my first meeting with these officious
fellows, whose inquisitiveness was reported the chief
drawback to a tramp in Spain.  But they greeted
me with truly Spanish politeness, even cordiality.
Only casually, when we had chatted a bit, as is wont
among travelers meeting on the road, did one of them
suggest:

"You carry, no doubt, señor, your personal papers?"

I dived into my shirt--my knapsack, and drew
out my passport.  The officers admired it a moment
side by side without making so bold as to touch it,
thanked me for privilege, raised a forefinger to their
hats, and stalked on down the broiling rock.

A full hour higher I brought up against a sheer
precipice.  Of the town that must be near there was
still not a trace.  For some time longer I marched
along the foot of the cliff, swinging half round a
circle and always mounting.  Then all at once the
impregnable wall gave way, a hundred white stone
houses burst simultaneously on my sight, and I
entered a city seething in the heat of noonday.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE LAST FOOTHOLD OF THE MOOR`:

.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER III


.. class:: center medium

   THE LAST FOOTHOLD OF THE MOOR

.. vspace:: 2

Ronda crouches on the bald summit of a rock
so mighty that one can easily fancy it the
broken base of some pillar that once upheld the
sky.  Nature seems here to have established
division of labor.  The gigantic rock bearing aloft the
city sustains of itself not a sprig of vegetation.
Below, so far below that Ronda dares even in
summer to fling down unburied the mutilated carcasses
from her bullring, spreads the encircling *vega*,
producing liberally for the multitude above, but
granting foothold scarcely to a peasant's hovel.  Beyond
and round about stretches the sierra, having for its
task to shelter the city against prowling storms and
to enrich the souls of her inhabitants with its rugged
grandeur.

Travelers come to Ronda chiefly to gaze elsewhere.
As an outlook upon the world she is well worth the
coming; as a city she is almost monotonous, with her
squat, white-washed houses sweltering in the
omnivorous sunshine.  Her only "sight" is the *Tajo*,
the "gash" in the living rock like the mark of some
powerful woodman's ax in the top of a tree-stump.
A stork-legged bridge spans it, linking two unequal
sections of the town, which without this must be utter
strangers.  A stream trickles along its bottom, how
deep down one recognizes only when he has noted
how like toy buildings are the grist-mills that squat
beside it pilfering their power.

Elsewhere within the town the eyes wander away
to the enclosing mountains.  The wonder is not that
her inhabitants are dreamy-eyed; rather that they
succeed at intervals in shaking off the spell of
nature's setting to play their rôles in life's prosaic
drama.  As for myself, I rambled through her
piping streets for half the afternoon because she is
Spanish, and because my supply of currency was
falling low.  Ronda boasts no bank.  Her chief
dry-goods merchant, however--by what right my
informant could not guess--boasts himself a banker.
I found the amateur financier at home, which chanced
to be distant the height of one short stairway from
his place of business.  When I had chatted an hour
or two with his clerks, the good man himself
appeared, rosy with the exertions of the siesta, and
examined the ten-dollar check with many expressions of
gratitude for the opportunity.

"We shall take pleasure," he said, "in liquidating
this obligation.  You will, of course, bring persons of
my acquaintance to establish your identity, como es
costumbre in large financial transactions?"

I had never so fully realized how convincing was
my command of Spanish as when I had succeeded
within an hour in convincing this bond-slave of
"costumbre" that express-checks are designed to
avoid just this difficulty.  He expressed a desire to
examine the document more thoroughly and retired
with it to the depths of his establishment.  Toward
evening he returned with pen and ink-horn.

"I accept the obligation," he announced, "and
shall pay you fifty-seven pesetas, according to
yesterday's quotation on the Borsa.  But I find I have
such a sum on hand only in coppers."

"Which would weigh," I murmured, after the
necessary calculation, "something over thirty
pounds.  You will permit me, señor, to express my
deep gratitude--and to worry along for the time
being with the money in pocket."

Travelers who arraign Honda for lack of creature
comforts can never have been assigned the quarters
a peseta won me for the night in the "Parador de
Vista Hermosa."  The room was a house in itself,
peculiarly clean and home-like, and furnished not
only with the necessities of bed, chairs, and
taper-lighted effigy of the Virgin, but with table,
washstand, and even a bar of soap, the first I had seen
in the land except that in my own knapsack.  When
the sun had fallen powerless behind the sierra, I
drew the green reed shade and found before my
window a little *rejaed* balcony hanging so directly
over the Tajo that the butt of a cigarette fell
whirling down, down to the very bottom of the gorge.
I dragged a chair out into the dusk and sat smoking
beneath the star-sprinkled sky long past a pedestrian's
bedtime, the unbroken music of the Guadalvin far
below ascending to mingle with the murmur of the
strolling city.

To the north of Ronda begins a highway that
goes down through a country as arid and
rock-strewn as the anti-Lebanon.  Here, too, is much of
the Arab's contempt for roads.  Donkeys bearing
singing men tripped by along hard-beaten paths just
far enough off the public way to be no part of it.
Now and again donkey and trail rambled away
independently over the thirsty hills, perhaps to return
an hour beyond, more often to be swallowed up in
the unknown.  The untraveled carretera lay inches
deep in fine white dust.  Far and near the landscape
was touched only with a few slight patches of
viridity.  The solitary tree under which I tossed
through an hour of siesta cast the stringy, wavering
shade of a bean-pole.

Sharp-eyed with appetite, I came near, nevertheless,
to passing unseen early in the afternoon a
village hidden in plain sight along the flank of a
reddish, barren hill.  In this, too, Andalusia resembles
Asia Minor; her hamlets are so often of the same
colored or colorless rocks as the hills on which they
are built as frequently to escape the eye.  I forded
a bone-dry brook and climbed into the tumbled
*pueblo*.  Toward the end of the principal lack of a
street one of the crumbling hovel-fronts was scrawled
in faded red, with the Spaniard's innocent
indistinction between the second and twenty-second letters
of the alphabet:

.. _`Aqui se bende bino`:

.. figure:: images/img-056.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: Aqui se bende bino

   Aqui se bende bino


Once admitted to the sleepy interior, I regaled
myself on bread, cheese, and "bino" and scrambled back
to the highway.  It wandered more and more erratically,
slinking often around hills that a bit of
exertion would have surmounted.  I recalled the
independence of the donkeys and, picking up a path at
an elbow of the route, struck off across the rugged
country.

But there is sound truth, as in all his venerable if
somewhat baggy-kneed proverbs, in the Spaniard's
assertion that "no hay atajo sin trabajo."  In this
short-cut there was work and to spare.  As long as
the day lasted the way continued stiff and stony,
ceaselessly mounting or descending, with never a
level of breathing-space breadth nor a moment's
respite from the rampant sunshine.  A few times I
stumbled upon an inhabited heap of stones in a fold
of the hills.  Man, at least fully clothed, seemed
never before to have strayed thus far afield.  From
each hutch poured forth a shaggy fellow with his
draggled mate and a flock of half-naked children,
all to stare speechlessly after me as long as the crown
of my hat remained in sight.

The highway had deserted me entirely.  As darkness
came on, the dimming outline of the cragged
hills rising on either hand carried the thoughts more
than ever back to the savage, Bedouin-skulking
solitudes of Asia Minor.  Long after these, too, had
blended into the night I stumbled on.  At length
there fell on my ear the distant dismal howling of
dogs.  I pressed forward, and when the sound had
grown to a discordant uproar plunged, stick in hand,
into a chaos of buildings jumbled together on a rocky
ridge,--the village of Peñarruria.

The twisting, shoulder-broad channels between the
predelugian hovels were strewn with cobblestones, no
two of equal size or height, but all polished icy
smooth.  I sprawled and skated among them, a prey
to embarrassment for my clumsiness, until my
confusion was suddenly dispelled by the pleasure of
seeing a native fall down, a buxom girl of eighteen
who suffered thus for her pride in putting on shoes.
Throughout the town these were rare, and stockings
more so.

The *venta* into which I straggled at last was the
replica of an Arabic *khan*, as ancient as the days of
Tarik.  It consisted of a covered barnyard court
surrounded by a vast corridor, with rock arches and
pillars, beneath which mules, *borricos*, and a horse
or two were munching.  One archway near the
entrance was given over to human occupation.  The
*posadero* grumbled at me a word of greeting; his
wife snarled interminably over her pots and jars in
preparing me a meager supper.  Now and again as
I ate, an *arriero* arrived and led his animal through
the dining-room to the stable.  I steeled myself to
endure a rough and stony night.

When I had sipped the last of my wine, however,
the hostess, sullen as ever, mounted three stone steps
in the depth of the archway and lighted me into a
room that was strikingly in contrast with the
dungeon-like inn proper.  The chamber was neatly, even
daintily furnished, the walls decorated college-fashion
with pictures of every size and variety, the tile
floor carpeted with a thick rug, the bed veiled with
lace curtains.  It was distinctly a feminine room; and
as I undressed the certainty grew upon me that I
had dispossessed for the night the daughter of the
house, who had turned out to be none other than
that maid whose pride-shod downfall had so relieved
my embarrassment.  Evidently the venta of
Peñarruria afforded no other accommodations befitting a
guest who could squander more than a half peseta
for a mere night's lodging.

Over the head of the bed, framed in flowers and
the dust-dry memento of Palm Sunday, was a chromo
misrepresentation of the Virgin, beneath which
flickered a wick floating in oil.  I was early trained
to sleep in darkness.  When I had endured for a
long half-hour the dancing of the light on my
eyelids, I rose to blow it out, and sank quickly into
slumber.

I had all but finished my coffee and wedge of black
bread next morning when a double shriek announced
that my forgotten sacrilege had been discovered.
The modern vestal virgins, in the persons of the
posadera and her now barefoot daughter, charged
fire-eyed out of my erstwhile quarters and swooped
down upon me like two lineal descendants of the
Grecian Furies.  I mustered such expression of
innocence and fearlessness as I was able and listened in
silence.  They exhausted in time their stock of
blistering adjectives and dashed together into the street
publishing their grievance to all Peñarruria.
Gradually the shrill voices died away in the contorted
village, and with them my apprehension of figuring
in some modern auto da fé.  As I was picking up
my knapsack, however, an urchin burst in upon me
shouting that the guardia civil thereby summoned me
into his presence.

"Ha," thought I, "Spain has merely grown more
up-to-date in dealing with heretics."

The officer was not to be avoided.  He sat before
a building which I must pass to escape from the
town; a deep-eyed man who manipulated his cigarette
with one hand while he slowly ran the fingers of the
other through the only beard, perhaps, in all the
dreaded company of which he was a member.  His
greeting, however, was cordial, almost diffident.  In
fact, the cause of my summons was quite other than
I had apprehended.  Having learned my nationality
from the inn register, he had made so bold as to hope
that I would delay my departure long enough to
give him a cigarette's worth of information
concerning the western hemisphere.

"I have resigned from the guardia," he said in
explanation of his un-Spanish curiosity, "and in
three months I go to make cigars in your Tampa,
in la Florida.  Spain can no longer feed her children."

I sketched briefly the life in the new world, not
forgetting to picture some of the hardships such
a change must bring a man of the fixed habits of
forty, and took leave of him with the national benediction.

For some hours I trudged on across a country
similar to that of the day before.  The heat was
African.  The Spanish summer resembles an intermittent
fever; with nightfall comes an inner assurance
that the worst is over, and infallibly with the new
day the blazing sun sends down its rays seemingly
more fiercely than before.  The reflection of how
agreeable would be a respite from its fury was
weaving itself into my thoughts when I swooped
suddenly down upon a railway at a hamlet named
Gobantes.  I had no hope of covering all Spain
afoot.  Away among the hills to the north the
whistle of a locomotive that moment sounded.  I
turned aside to the station and bought a ticket to
Málaga.

The train squirmed away through howling, arid
mountains, abounding in tunnels and tumbled
bottomless gorges; then descending headlong to the
plain, landed me at the seaport in mid-afternoon.
Even Malaga on the seashore suffers from the heat.
Her Alameda was thick in dust as an Andalusian
highway; beneath the choking trees that bordered
it the stone benches were blistering to the touch.
The excursion was rewarded, however, if by nothing
more than the mighty view of the sail-flecked
Mediterranean from the summit of the Gibilfaro,
reached by a dripping climb through shifting rubble
and swarms of begging gypsy children.  Africa
was visible, dimly but unmistakably.  Below
simmered the city, unenlivened by a single touch of
green; to the right the vega stretched floor-level to
the foot of the treeless Alhama.  Directly beneath
me, like some vast tub, yawned the bullring, empty
now but for a score of boys playing at "torero,"
flaunting their jackets in the face of an urchin fitted
with paper horns, and dashing in pretended terror
for the barrier when he turned upon them.  The
ascent of the Gibilfaro must certainly be forbidden
on Sunday afternoons.  From this height the struggle
in the arena, visible in its entirety, yet purged
by distance of its unpleasing details, would be a
scene more impressive than from the best seat in the
tribunes.

When I reached the station next morning the
platform gate was locked and the train I had hoped to
take was legally departed.  A railway hanger-on, in
rags and hemp sandals, however, climbed the iron
picket fence and shouted a word to the engineer.
Then beckoning to me to follow, he trotted back into
the building and rapped authoritatively on the closed
window of the ticket-office.

"Señor," he said, as the agent looked out upon
us, "be kind enough to sell this caballero a ticket."

"The train is gone," answered the agent.

"Not so, señor," replied the bundle of rags
haughtily; "I am having it held that this cavalier
may take it."

"Ah, very well," responded the official; and
having sold me the ticket, he handed to the hanger-on
the key to the platform gate.  As I passed through
it the latter held out his hand, into which I dropped
a copper.

"Muchísimas gracias, caballero," he said, bowing
profoundly, "and may your grace forever travel
with God."

It was noon when I descended at Bobadilla, the
sand-swept junction where all southern Spain
changes cars.  The train to Granada was soon
jolting away to the eastward.  Within the third-class
compartment the heat was flesh-smelting.  The bare
wooden cell, of the size of a piano-crate, was packed
not merely to its lawful and unreasonable capacity
of ten persons, but with all the personal chattels
under which nine of those persons had been able to
totter down to the station.  Between the two plank
benches, that danced up and down so like the screen
of a threshing machine as to deceive the blind man
beside me into the ludicrous notion that the train
was moving rapidly, was heaped a cart-load.  To
attempt an inventory thereof would be to name
everything bulky, unpleasing, and sharp-cornered that
ever falls into the possession of the Spanish peasant.
Suffice it to specify that at the summit of the heap
swayed a crate of chickens whose cackling sounded
without hint of interruption from Bobadilla to the
end of the journey.

The national characteristics of third-class are
clearly marked.  Before a French train is well under
way two men are sure to fall into some heated dispute,
to which their companions give undivided but
speechless attention.  The German rides in moody silence;
the Italian babbles incessantly of nothing.  An
Englishman endures a third-class journey frozen-featured
as if he were striving to convince his fellows
that he has been thus reduced for once because he
has bestowed his purse on the worthy poor.  But the
truly democratic Spaniard settles down by the
compartmentful into a cheery family.  Not one of
my fellow-sufferers but had some reminiscence to
relate, not a question arose to which each did not
offer his frank opinion.  He who descended carried
away with him the benediction of all; the newcomer
became in a twinkling a full-fledged member of the
impromptu brotherhood.

Nine times I was fervently entreated to partake of
a traveler's lunch, and my offer to share my own
afternoon nibble was as many times declined with
wishes for good appetite and digestion.  Travelers
who assure us that this custom inherited from the
Moor has died out in Spain are in error; it is dead
only among foreigners in first-class carriages and
tourist hotels--who never had it.  The genuine
Spaniard would sooner slap his neighbor in the face
than to eat before him without begging him to share
the repast.

We halted more than frequently.  On each such
occasion there sounded above the last screech of the
brakes the drone of a guard announcing the length
of the stay.  Little less often the traveler in the
further corner of the compartment squirmed his way
to the door and departed.  With a sigh of relief the
survivors divided the space equitably between
them--and were incontinently called upon to yield it up
again as some dust-cloaked peasant flung his bag of
implements against my legs with a cheery "buenas
tardes" and climbed in upon us.

Then came the task of again getting the train
under way.  The brisk "all aboard" of our own
land would be unbearably rude to the gentle Spanish
ear.  Whence every station, large or small, holds in
captivity a man whose only duty in life seems to be
that of announcing the departure of trains.  He is
invariably tattered, sun-bleached, and sandal-footed,
with the general appearance of one whom life has
used not unkindly but confounded roughly.  How
each station succeeds in keeping its announcer in
the pink of dilapidation is a Spanish secret.  But
there he is, without fail, and when the council of
officials has at length concluded that the train must
depart, he patters noiselessly along the edge of the
platform, chanting in a music weird, forlorn, purely
Arabic, a phrase so rhythmic that no printed words
can more than faintly suggest it:

"Seño-o-o-res viajeros al tre-e-e-en."

"Gentlemen travelers to the train" is all it means
in mere words; but rolling from the lips of one of
these forlorn captives it seems to carry with it all the
history of Spain, and sinks into the soul like a voice
from the abysmal past.

Among my fellow-passengers was the first Spanish
priest with whom I came into conversational
contact.  In the retrospect that fact is all but effaced
by the memory that he was not merely the first but
the only Spaniard who ever declined my proffer of
a cigarette.  To one eager to find the prevailing
estimation of the priesthood of Spain false or vastly
overdrawn, this first introduction to the gown
augured well.  He was neither fat nor sensual:
rather the contrary, with the lineaments of a man
sincere in his work and beneficent in his habits.  His
manner was affable, without a hint of that patronizing
air and pose of sanctity frequently to be
observed among Protestant clergy, his attitude of
equality toward the laity peculiarly reminiscent of
the priests of Buddha.

At the station of San Francisco half the
passengers descended.  The building was perched on a
shelf of rock that fell away behind it into a stony
gulf.  Surrounding all the station precinct ran a
weather-warped and blackened fence, ten feet high,
along the top of which screamed and jostled fully
two score women and girls, offering for sale every
species of ware from cucumbers to turkeys.
Hucksters and beggars swarm down--or rather up--on
San Francisco in such multitudes that the railway
company was forced to build the fence for the
protection of its patrons.  But the women, not to be so
easily outdone, carry each a ladder to surmount the
difficulty.  As the train swung on around a pinnacle
of rock, we caught a long enduring view of the source
of the uproar--the populous and pauperous city of
Loja, lodged in a trough-like hillside across the valley.

Not far beyond there burst suddenly on the sight
the snow-cowled Sierra Nevada, and almost at the
same moment the train halted at Puente Pinos.  I
recalled the village as the spot where Columbus saw
the ebbing tide of his fortunes checked by the
messengers of "Ysabel la Católica"; but not so the
priest.

"One of our great industries, señor," he said,
pointing to several smoke-belching chimneys near at
hand.  "Puente Pinos produces the best sugar in
Spain."

"The cane is harvested early?" I observed,
gazing away across the flat fields.

"No, no," laughed the priest, "betabel (sugar beets)."

Spanish railways are as prone as those of Italy to
repudiate the printed promise of their tickets.  We
descended toward sunset at a station named Granada
only to find that the geographical Granada was still
some miles distant.  The priest had offered to direct
me to an inn or I should perhaps have escaped
entirely the experience of riding in a Spanish
street-car.  It crawled for an hour through an ocean of
dust, anchoring every cable-length to take aboard
some floundering pedestrian.  Many of these were
priests; and as they gathered one by one on either
side of my companion, the hope I had entertained of
discovering more of virtue beneath the Spanish sotana
than the world grants oozed unrestrainably away.
For they were, almost without exception, pot-bellied,
self-satisfied, cynical, with obscenity and the evidences
of unnatural vice as plainly legible on their
countenances as the words on a printed page.

We reached at last the central plaza, where my
guide pointed out a large modern building bearing
across the front of its third story the inscription,
"Gran Casa de Viajeros de la Viuda Robledo."  As
I alighted, a band of valets de place swept down upon
me.  I gave them no attention; which did not, of
course, lessen the impertinence with which they danced
about me.  Having guessed my goal, one of them
dashed before me up the stairs, shouting to the señora
to be prepared to receive the guest he was bringing.

The widow Robledo was a serene-visaged woman in
the early fifties; her house a species of family hotel
never patronized by foreigners.  We came quickly
to terms, however; I was assigned a room overhanging
the culinary regions, for which, with the
customary two and a half meals a day, I engaged to pay
four pesetas.

At the mention of money, the tout, who during all
the transaction had not once withdrawn the light of
his simian countenance, demanded a peseta for having
found me a lodging.  I reminded him of the real facts
of the case and invited him to withdraw.  He
followed me instead into my new quarters, repeating his
demands in a bullying voice, and for the only time
in my Spanish experience I was compelled to resort
to physical coercion.  Unfortunate indeed is the
tourist who must daily endure and misjudge the race
from these pests, so exactly the antithesis of the
courteous, uncovetous Spaniard of the working class.

I had not yet removed the outer stain of travel
when a vast excitement descended upon Granada,--it
began to rain.  On every hand sounded the slamming
of doors, the creaking of unused shutters; from
below came up the jangling of pans and the agitated
voices of servants.  The shower lasted nearly ten
minutes, and was chronicled at length next day in all
the newspapers of Spain.

From the edge of Granada city a long green aisle
between exotic elms leads easily upward to the
domain of the Alhambra.  In its deep-shaded groves,
so near yet seeming so far removed from the stony
face of thirsty Spain, reigns a dream-inviting
stillness, a quiet enhanced rather than broken by the
murmur of captive brooks.  For this, too, remains in
memory of the Moor, that the waters of the Genii
and Darro are still brought to play through a score
of little stone channels beneath the trees.  There I
drifted each morning, other plans notwithstanding, to
idle away the day on the grassy headland before and
below which spreads the vastness of the province of
Granada, or distressing the guardians of the ancient
palace with my untourist-like loiterings.  But for her
fame the traveler would surely pass the Alhambra by
as a half-ruined nest of bats and beggars.  Yet
within she retains much of her voluptuous splendor,
despite the desolating of time and her prostitution to
a gaping-stock of tourists.  Like so much of the
Mussulman's building, the overshadowed palace is
effeminate, seeming to speak aloud of that luxury and
wantonness of the Moor in his decadent days before
the iron-fisted reyes católicos came to thrust him
forth from his last European kingdom.  In this she
resembles the Taj Mahal; yet the difference is great.
For the effeminacy of the Alhambra is the unrobustness
of woman, while the Taj, like the Oriental man,
is effeminate outwardly, superficially, beneath all
which shows sound masculinity.

In the city below is only enough to be seen to give
contrast to the half-effaced traces of magnificence on
the hill.  He who comes to Granada trusting to read
in her the last word of the degradation of the once
regal and all powerful must continue his quest.  Of
squalor and beggars she is singularly free--for
Spain.  Something of both remains for him who will
wander through the Albaicin, peering into its
cave-dwellings, wherein, and at times before which romp
brown gypsy children garbed in the costume in which
the reputed ancestor of us all set forth from the
valley of Eden, or occasional jade-eyed hoydens of
the grotto sunning their blacker tresses and
mumbling crones plying their *bachi* in conspicuous places.
But even this seems rather a misery of parade than
a reality, a theatrical lying-in-wait for the gullible
*Busné* from foreign shores.

By night there is life and movement in Granada;
a strolling to and fro along the Alameda to the
strains of a military band, the droning of the
water-carriers who bring down lump by lump the ice-fields
of the Sierra Nevada, and a dancing away of the
summer night to the clatter of the castanet.  But by
day--once only during my stay was the languid
pulse of the city stirred during the sunlit hours.  A
conscript regiment thundered in upon us, blocking
all traffic and filling the air with a fog of dust that
dispelled for a time my eagerness to seek again the
open road; a dust that thick-shrouded beneath its
drab the very color of caisson and uniform,
dry-blanketing the panting horses, and streaking the faces
of men and officers with figures like unto the
ornamental writing on the inner walls of the Alhambra.





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.. _`THE BANKS OF THE GUADALQUIVIR`:

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   CHAPTER IV


.. class:: center medium

   THE BANKS OF THE GUADALQUIVIR

.. vspace:: 2

Granada was sleeping a fitful Sunday siesta
when I repacked my knapsack in the Casa
Robledo.  In the streets were only the fruit-sellers from
the surrounding country, still faintly chanting over
the half-empty baskets on the backs of their lolling
asses.  I paused to spend two "perros gordos" for as
many pounds of cherries--for he who has once
tasted the cherries of Granada has no second
choice--and trudged away through the northern suburb
leaving a trail of pits behind me.

The highway surmounted the last crest and swung
down to the level of the plain.  Like a sea of heat
mist diked by the encircling mountains stretched the
vega, looking across which one saw at a glance no
fewer than a score of villages half concealed by an
inundation of sunshine so physically visible that one
observed with astonishment that the snow lay still
unmelted on the peak of Mulhacen behind.

Yet for all the heat I would not have been elsewhere
nor doing else than striking across the steaming
vega of Granada.  In such situations, I confess, I like
my own company best.  With the finest companion
in the world a ten-mile tramp through this heat and
dust would have been a labor like the digging of a
ditch.  Alone, with the imagination free to take color
from the landscape, each petty inconvenience seemed
but to put me the more in touch with the real Spain.

Just here lies the advantage of traveling in this
half-tramp fashion.  The "personally conducted"
traveler, too, sees the Alhambra; yet how slight is
that compared with sharing the actual life of the
Spanish people, which the tourist catches if at all in
vagrant, posing fragments?  To move through a
foreign country shut up in a moving room, carrying
with one the modern luxuries of home, is not travel;
we call it so by courtesy and for lack of an exact
term.  "Il faut payer de sa personne."  He who
will gather the real honey of travel must be on the
scene, a "super" at least on the stage itself, not
gossiping with his fellows in a box.

With all its aridity the vega was richly productive.
Olive-trees hung heavy, on either hand spread
broad fields of grain in which peasants were toiling
swelteringly as if they had never heard of the
common sense institution of Sunday.  When sun and
tree-tops met, the highway began to wind, leaving
the vega behind and wandering through low hills
among which appeared no villages, only an occasional
rough-hewn house by the way.  Toward twilight
there opened a more verdant valley, and a stream,
rising somewhere near at hand, fell in with the
carretera and capered prattling along with it into the
night.

It was ten perhaps when I came upon a lonely
little venta by the wayside, a one-story building older
than the modern world, serving both for dwelling and
stable.  The master of the house and her husband
were both of that light-hearted gentry to whom life
means nothing more than to be permitted good health
and a place to eat an occasional *puchero*.  With
these and a pair of mountain arrieros I gossiped until
my eyelids grew heavy, and turned in on a husk
mattress spread, like that of my hosts, on the kitchen
floor.

At the first hint of dawn I was off and had set the
sun a handicap of three miles or more before he
began to ruddy the jagged chain to the eastward.  The
family was already at work, the arrieros wending on
their southward way singing savage fragments of
song; for like the Arab the rural andaluz sleeps
full-dressed and springs instantly from bed to labor.

A country lightly populated continued.  At high
noon I reached a bath-inviting irrigating stream that
wound through a grove of willows offering protection
enough from the sun for a brief siesta.  Soon after,
the landscape grew savage and untenanted, and the
carretera more and more constricted until it passed,
like a thread through the eye of a needle, through
a short tunnel, built, said the inscription, by Isabel
II--an example of exaggerated Spanish courtesy
evidently, for history shouts assurance that the
activities of that lady were rather exclusively confined
to less enduring works.  Once released, the gorge
expanded to a rambling valley with many orchards of
apricots and plums, still walled, however, by hills
so lofty that the sun deserted it early and gave the
unusual sight of a lingering twilight.

From sunset until well into the night I kept sharp
lookout for a public hostelry; but only a few
peasants' hovels appeared, and with fifty-six kilometers
in my legs I gave up the search and made my bed
of a bundle of straw on a little nose of meadow above
the highway.  All through the night the tramp of
asses and the cursing or singing of their drivers
passing below drifted into my dreams.  The weather
was not cold, yet in the most silent hour a chilliness
half-arousing crept over me, and it was with a sense
of relief that I awoke at last entirely and wandered on.

By daylight the hills receded somewhat, flattening
themselves out to rolling uplands; the stream grew
broad and noisy in its strength.  Then suddenly at
the turning of an abrupt hill Jaen rose before me, a
city pitched on a rocky summit like the capping over
a haycock, in the center the vast cathedral; the whole
radiant with the flush of morning and surrounded by
a soil as red as if the blood of all the Moorish wars
were gathered here and mixed with the clay.  The
highway, catching sight of its goal, abandoned
unceremoniously the guidance of the river and climbed
with great strides up the red hillside into the town.

I had been so long up that the day seemed
already far advanced.  But Jaen was still half abed.
I drifted into what was outwardly a little *cantina*,
with zinc bar and shining spigots, but domestically
the home of an amiable couple.  The *cantinero*,
lolling in the customary fat-man's attitude behind the
bar, woke with a start from the first of that day's
siestas when I requested breakfast, while his spouse
ceased her sweeping to cry out, "Como!  Tan
temprano!  Why, it is scarcely eight o'clock!"  The
lady, however, gave evidence of an un-Spanish
adaptability by rising to the occasion.  While Señor
Corpulence was still shaking his head condolingly, she
called to the driver of a passing flock of goats, one
of which, under her watchful eye, yielded up a
foaming cupful that tided me over until I sat down in
the family dining-room to a breakfast such as is
rarely forthcoming in Spain before high noon.

The cantina was no more a lodging-house than a
restaurant.  But so charming a couple was not to be
lost sight of, and before the meal was ended I
expressed a hope of making my home with them during
my stay.  The landlord was taking breath to express
his regrets when the matron, after a moment of
hesitation, admitted that even that might be possible,
adding however, with an air of mystery, that she
could not be certain until toward night.  I left my
bundle and sauntered out into the city.

Jaen is a town of the Arab, a steep town with those
narrow, sun-dodging streets that to the utilitarian
are inexcusable but to all others give evidence of the
wisdom of the Moor.  Content, perhaps, with its past
history, it is to-day a slow, serenely peaceful place
riding at anchor in the stream of time and singularly
free from that dread disease of doing something
always.  Unusually full it seemed of ingenuous,
unhurrying old men engaged only in watching life
glide by under the blue sky.  I spent half the day
chatting with these in the thirsting, dust-blown park
in the center of the town.  Their language was still
a dialect of Andalusia, a bit more Castilian perhaps
than on the southern coast, at any rate now grown as
familiar as my own.

Each conversation was punctuated with cigarette
smoke.  Nothing in Spain is more nearly incessant
than the rolling and burning of what Borrow dubbed
in the days before the French word had won a place
in our language "paper cigars."  We of America
are inclined to look upon indulgence in this form of
the weed as a failing of youth, undignified at least
in old men.  Not so the Spaniard.  Whatever his
age or station in life--the policeman on his beat,
the engineer at his throttle, the boy at his father's
heels, the priest in his gown, puff eternally at their
cigarillo.  The express-check cashed in a Spanish
bank is swallowed up in a cloud of smoke as thick
as the fog that hovers over the Grand Banks; the
directors who should attempt to forbid smoking in
their establishment would in all probability be
invited to hump over their own ledgers.  The Spaniard
is strikingly the antithesis of the American in this,
that his "pleasures," his addictions come first and his
work second.  Let the two conflict and his work must
be postponed or left undone.  In contrast to his
ceaseless smoking the Spaniard never chews tobacco;
his language has no word for that habit.

To the foreigner who smokes Spain is no Promised
Land.  The ready-made cigarettes are an abomination,
the tobacco a stringy shag that grows endurable
only with long enduring.  Matches, like tobacco, are
a fabrication--and a snare--of the government
monopoly.  Luckily, fire was long before matches
were.  These old men of Jaen one and all carried
flint and steel and in lieu of tinder a coil of fibrous
rope fitted with a nickled ring as extinguisher.  Few
peoples equal the Spaniard in eagerness and ability
to "beat" the government.

I returned at evening to the wineshop to be
greeted as a member of the household.

"You wondered," laughed the señora, "why I
could not answer you this morning.  It is because
the spare room is rented to Don Luis, here, who works
at night on the railroad.  Meet Don Luis, who has
just risen and given permission that you sleep in his
bed, which I go now to spread with clean sheets."

The railway man was one of nature's satisfactions,
a short solid fellow of thirty-five, overflowing with
contagious cheerfulness.  The libation incidental to
our introduction being drained, the landlord led the
way, chair in hand, to the bit of level flagging before
the shop.  As we sat "al fresco" drinking into our
lungs the refreshing air of evening, we were joined
by a well-dressed man whom I recalled having seen
somewhere during the day.  He was a lawyer, speaking
a pure Castilian with scarcely a trace of the local
patois, in short, one whom the caste rules of any
other land of Europe would have forbidden to spend
an evening in company with a tavern-keeper, a
switchman, and a wandering unknown.

"How does it happen, señor," I asked, when our
acquaintance had advanced somewhat, "that I saw
you in the cathedral this morning?"

"The domain of women, priests and tourists?"
he laughed.  "Because, señor, it is the one place in
town where I can get cool."

Truly the heat of a summer day in Jaen calls for
some such drastic measure, for it grows estival,
gigantic, weighing down alike on mind and body
until one feels imperative necessity of escaping from
it somehow, of running away from it somewhere; and
there is no surer refuge than the cavernous cathedral.

This as well as the fact that the edifice contains
considerable that is artistic led me back to it the next
morning.  But this time it was in the turmoil of a
personally conducted party.  When I had taken
refuge in a shaded seat across the way, the flock poured
out upon the broad stone steps and, falling upon a
beggar, checked their flight long enough to bestow
upon him a shower of pity and copper coins.

The mendicant was blind and crippled, outwardly
a personification of gratitude and humility, and
attended by a gaunt-bellied urchin to whom might
fittingly have been applied the Spanish appellation
"child of misery."  Long after the hubbub of the
passing tourists had died away in the tortuous city
his meekly cadenced voice drifted on after them:

"Benditos sean, caballeros.  Que Dios se lo
pagará mil veces al cielo!"

A curiosity to know whether such gentleness were
genuine held me for a time in my place across the
way.  Silence had settled down.  Only a shopkeeper
wandering by to a day of drowsing passed now and
then; within the great cathedral stillness reigned.
The urchin ran after each passerby, wailing the
familiar formula, only to be as often ordered off.  At
length he ascended the steps stealthily and, creeping
within a few feet of his master, lay down and was
instantly lost in sleep, a luxury he had evidently not
tasted for a fortnight.

The beggar rocked to and fro on his worthless
stumps, now and again uttering as mournful a wail
as if his soul had lost not one but all save a scattered
half-dozen of its strings.  Gradually the surrounding
silence drew his attention.  He thrust a hand
behind one of his unhuman ears and listened intently.
Not a sound stirred.  He groped with his left hand
along the stones, then with the right and, suddenly
touching the sleeping child, a tremor of rage shivered
through his misshapen carcass.  Feeling with his
finger tips until he had located the boy's face, he
raised his fist, which was massive as that of a
horseshoer, high above his head and brought it down three
times in quick succession.  They were blows to have
shattered the panel of a door; but the boy uttered
only a little stifled whine and, springing to his feet,
took up again his task, now and then wiping away
with a sleeve the blood that dripped from his face
down along his tattered knees.

Before the sun had reached its full strength, I
struck off to explore the barren bluff that overlooks
Jaen on the south and east.  Barely had I gained the
first crest, however, before the inexorable leaden heat
was again upon me, and the rest of the day was a
perspiring labor.  Only the reflection that real travel
and sight-seeing is as truly work as any life's
vocation lent starch to my wilted spirits.

At intervals of two or three hundred yards along
the precipitous cliff that half circles the city stood
the shelter of an octroi guard, built of anything that
might deflect a ray of sunlight.  In the shade of each
crouched a ragged, ennui-eyed man staring away into
the limitless expanse of sunshine.  Their fellows may
be found forming a circle around every city in the
kingdom of Spain, the whole body numbering many
thousands.  The impracticable, the quixotic character
of official Spain stands forth nowhere more clearly
than in this custom of sentencing an army of her sons
to camp in sloth about her cities on the bare chance
of intercepting ten-cent's worth of smuggling, when
the same band working even moderately might
produce tenfold the octroi revenues of the land.

I halted with one of the tattered fellows, whose
gladness for the unusual boon of companionship was
tempered by a diffidence that was almost bashfulness,
so rarely did he come in contact with his fellow-man.
For a long hour we sat together in the shadow of the
hut, our eyes drifting away over the gray-roofed,
closely-packed city below.  When our conversation
touched on the loneliness of his situation the guard
grew vehement in bewailing its dreariness and
desolation.  But when I hinted that the octroi might
perhaps be abolished to advantage, he sprang to his feet
crying almost in terror:

"For los clavos de Cristo, señor!  What then
would become of nosotros?  I have no other trade
whatever than to be guard to the octroi."

A sorry craft indeed, this squatting out a lifetime
under a grass hut.

The bluish haze of a summer evening was gathering
over Jaen when, returning through a winding
street to my lodging, there fell on my ear the thrum
of a solitary guitar and the rich and mellow voice of
a street singer.  The musician was a blind man of
fifty, of burly build and a countenance brimming with
good cheer and contentment, accompanied by a
woman of the same age.  As I joined the little knot
of peasants and townsmen gathered about him, his
song ended and he drew out a packet of hand bills.

"On this sheet, señores," he announced, holding
one up, "are all the songs I have sung for you.
And they are all yours for a perro gordo."

I was among the first to buy, glad to have paid
many times this mere copper to be able to carry
home even one of those languorous ballads so filled
with the serene melancholy of the Moor and the fire
of Andalusia.  But the sheet bore nothing but
printed words.

"Every word is there, señores," continued the
minstrel, as if in response to my disappointment.  "As
for the music, anyone can remember that or make it
up for himself."

To illustrate how simple this might be he threw
a hand carelessly across his guitar and struck up
another of the droning, luring melodies, that rose and
fell and drifted away through the passages of the
dimming city.  Easy, indeed!  One could as easily
remember or make up for one's self the carol of the
meadow lark in spring or the lullaby of the
nightingale in the darkened tree-tops.

That I might catch the five-thirty train my host
awoke me next morning at three-twenty.  I turned
over for a nap and descending in the dawn by the
dust-blanketed Alameda to the station two miles
distant, found this already peopled with a gathering of
all the types of southern Spain.  The train was due in
twenty minutes, wherefore the ticket-office, of course,
was already closed.  After some search I discovered
the agent, in the person of a creature compared with
whom Caliban would have been a beauty, exchanging
stories with a company of fellow-bandits on the
crowded platform.  He informed me in no pleasant
manner that it was too late to buy a ticket.  When
I protested that the legal closing hour was but five
minutes before train time, he shrugged his shoulders
and squinted away down the track as if he fancied
the train was already in sight.  I decoyed him into
the station at last, but even then he refused to sell
a ticket beyond Espeluy.

We reached that junction soon after and I set off
westward along the main line.  The landscape was
rich and rolling, broad stretches of golden grain
alternating with close-shaven plains seething in the
sun.  Giant cacti again bordered the way.  Once, in
the forenoon, I came upon a refreshing forest, but
shadows were rare along the route.  The line was
even more traveled than that below Honda.
Field-laborers passed often, while sear-brown peasant women,
on dwarf donkeys jogged by in almost continual
procession on their way to or from market.

Not once during all my tramps on the railways
of Spain had a train passed of which the engineer
did not give me greeting.  Sometimes it was merely
the short, crisp "Vaya!" more often the complete
expression "Vaya V. con Dios!" not infrequently
accompanied by a few words of good cheer.  Here on
the main line I had occasion to test still further the
politeness of the man at the throttle.  I had rolled a
cigarette only to find that I had burned my last
match.  At that moment the Madrid-bound express
swung out of a shallow cutting in the hills ahead.  I
caught the eye of the engineer and held up the
cigarette in sign of distress.  He saw and understood,
and with a kindly smile and a "Vaya!" as he passed,
dropped two matches at my very feet.

It was not far beyond that I caught my first
glimpse of the Guadalquivir.  Shades of the
Mississippi!  The conquering Moor had the audacity to
name this sluggish, dull-brown stream the "Wad-al-Gkebir,"
the "Great River!"  Yet, after all, things
are great or small merely by comparison.  To a
people accustomed only to such trickles of water as had
thus far crossed my path in the peninsula no doubt
this over-grown brook, bursting suddenly on their
desert eyes, had seemed worthy the appellation.
But many streams wandering by behind the barn of
an American farmer and furnishing the old
swimming-hole are far greater than the Guadalquivir.

I crossed it toward three of the afternoon by an
ancient stone bridge of many arches that seemed
fitted to its work as a giant would be in embroidering
doilies.  Beyond lay Andújar, a hard-baked,
crumbling town of long ago, swirling with sand;
famous through all Spain for its porous clay jars.
In every street sounded the soft slap of the potter; I
peeped into a score of cobble-paved courts where the
newly baked *jarras* were heaped high or were
being wound with straw for shipment.

A long search failed to disclose a casa de comidas
in all the town.  The open market overflowed with
fruit, however, stocked with which I strolled back
across the river to await the midnight train.  It was
packed with all the tribes of Spain, in every sleeping
attitude.  Not until we had passed Córdoba at the
break of day did I find space to sit down and drowse
for an hour before we rumbled into Seville.

I had exhibited my dust-swathed person in at
least half a dozen hotels and fled at announcement
of their charges, when I drifted into the narrow calle
Rosario and entered the "Fonda de las Quatro
Naciones."  There ensued a scene which was often
to be repeated during the summer.  The landlord
greeted me in the orange-scented patio, noted my
foreign accent, and jumped instantly to the conclusion,
as Spaniards will, that I knew no Castilian, in
spite of the fact that I was even then addressing him
with unhesitating glibness.  Motioning to me to be
seated, he raced away into the depths of the fonda
calling for "Pasquale."  That youth soon appeared,
in tuxedo and dazzling expanse of shirt-front,
extolling as he came the uncounted virtues of his house,
in a flowing, unblushing imitation of French.
Among those things that I had not come to Spain
to hear was Spanish mutilation of the Gaelic tongue.
For a long minute I gazed at the speaker with every
possible evidence of astonishment.  Then turning to
the landlord I inquired in most solemn Castilian.

"Está loco, señor?  Is he insane that he jabbers
such a jargon?"

"Cómo, señor!" gasped Pasquale in his own
tongue.  "You are not then a Frenchman?"

"Frenchman, indeed!" I retorted.  "Yo, señor,
soy americano."

"Señor!" cried the landlord, bowing profoundly,
"I ask your pardon on bended knee.  In your
Castilian was that which led me to believe it was not
your native tongue.  Now, of course, I note that it
has merely the little pequeñísimos peculiarities that
make so charming the pronunciation of our people
across the ocean."

A half-hour later I was installed in a third-story
room looking down upon the quiet little calle Rosario,
and destined to be my home for a fortnight to come.
During all that time Pasquale served me at table
without once inflicting upon me a non-Spanish word.
Nor did he once suspect what a hoax I had played
on the "Four Nations" by announcing my nationality
without prefixing the qualification "norte."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE TORERO AT HOME`:

.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER V


.. class:: center medium

   THE TORERO AT HOME

.. vspace:: 2

Even though one deny the right of its
inhabitants to pity the man who must live and die
elsewhere, even he who finds it panting and simmering
in the heat of summer, will still count it no
punishment to spend a fortnight in Seville.  Tranquillity
and that laggard humor so befitting vacation days
reign within its precincts; yet it is a real city, never
falling quite inert even at the hour of siesta, which
is so like the silence of the grave in other towns of
Andalusia.  In the slender calle Rosario itself the
stillness was never supreme, but tempered always by
the droning of a passing *ajero* with his necklace of
garlic, an itinerant baker, or a blind crone hobbling
by with the fifth or the tenth of a lottery ticket,
crooning in mournful voice, "La lotería!  El
numero trienta seis mil quinientos cincuenta y cinco-o-o.
Who will win a fortune in the lotería-a-a?"  Then
above all else the soft, quarter-hourly booming of the
cathedral bells to mark the passing of the day, like
mile-stones on a wandering highway.

Nor with all her languor is Seville slovenly.  Outwardly,
like all that carries the ear-mark of the Moor,
she is bare.  In the first brief survey one may fancy
one's self in a city of dismal hovels.  But this is
because the houses are turned wrong-side out; a
glimpse into one of the marble-paved patios, fragrant
with orange-trees and cooled by fountains
throwing their waters high in the dry air, forever
dispells the illusion.

My first full day in Seville fell on a holiday
dedicated to San Pedro which, chancing also to be my
birthday, it was easy to imagine a personal festival.
In truth, the celebration of the day was marked by
nothing other than a bit more indolence than usual.
The real fiesta began at night in the Alameda of
Hercules.  There, among a hundred booths, the chief
object of interest was a negro, the first of his race,
one might fancy, who ever invaded the city.

By day, indeed, there is little else to do in Seville
than the royal occupation of doing nothing, a stroll
along the Sierpes in the morning, a retreat toward
noisy, glaring noonday to the cool and silent
cathedral or those other churches that rival it as museums
of art, there to wander undisturbed among masterpieces
of Spain's top-most century.  The cathedral,
by the way, houses the most recent traveler in the
calendar of saints.  Saint Anthony of Padua, not
many years ago, released by the dexterous knife of
an impulsive admirer, struck out into the unknown
and journeyed as far as our own New York.  But
there repenting such conduct at his years or daring
to venture no further when his companion found a
sojourn in the Tombs imperative, he returned to his
place, and resumed it so exactly that only the sharpest
eye can detect the evidence of his unseemly excursion.

A city that styles her most important street that
"of the Serpents," even though it harbors no more
of the outcasts of the pavement than many another
famous thoroughfare, may be expected to abound in
other strange names.  Nor are they lacking.  How
unworthy his lodging must the worldly Sevillian feel
who wanders uncertainly homeward in the small hours
to his abode in "Jesús del Gran Poder"--"Powerful
Jesus street."  Or with what face can the merchant
turn off after a day of fleecing his fellow-man toward
his dwelling in "Amor de Dios"?  Top-heavy
nomenclature is not confined to the streets.  There
are many windows in which one may read the
announcement of a "Media Noche de Jamón."  No,
it is not a new law by the cortes, but a "Middle of
the Night of Ham," or, succinctly, the over-worked
ham sandwich.  The uninstructed may be led at sight
of a building proclaiming itself an "Academia del
Tiro al Blanco" into the belief that Seville is
overrun with institutions of higher learning.  Not so,
distinctly not so.  The "Academy of the Shot at
the White" is what less extravagant and imaginative
peoples dub a shooting gallery.

The man in the street is frequently no less
colorful in his language.  Yet the crisp, trenchant word
common to that personage the world over is here,
too, in full force, led by that never idle explosive
"hombre."  Dictionarically speaking, "hombre"
means "man," and nothing more--which only proves
how dismally the dictionary has failed to keep up
with the times.  For child, woman, or hen-pecked
male answers to the expression as readily as to his
own name.  A sevillano leading a pup at the end of
a string may be frequently observed to give a jerk
at the leash and cry over his shoulder, "Hombre!
Vámonos!"--"Come along, man!"

Anent the man in the street, it may be asserted
that the Sevillian is usually there.  Writers of
Spanish romances have for centuries sought to win our
sympathy for their love-lorn heroes by stationing
them in the public way to whisper their pleadings
through the cold bars of a reja.  The picture is
true; the lover of flesh and blood and of to-day still
stands there.  But so, for that matter, does the
butcher's boy, the ol'-clothes man, and even less
reputable persons.  In Spanish newspapers the
national wealth of phrase is too often overshadowed--like
the news columns--by the touching assurance
of personal announcements.  Rare the page that is
not half taken up with a black-bordered inset
conveying the information that:

"Señor and Señora Perez have the honor to advise
their sorrowing friends and business associates that
little Willie Perez, aged six, went up to heaven at
7:32 last evening."

There is nothing like being exact and punctual in
these little matters.

Toward sunset, after the siesta, it is not merely
à la mode but good sense to stroll down to the banks
of the Guadalquivir by the Golden Tower and drift
an hour or two back and forth along the deep-shaded
Alameda.  There one will be in the best company in
Seville--and the worst; for all the city is there,
lolling in its carriage or pattering along the gravel
in its hempen sandals.

But it is only at night that Seville is wholly and
genuinely awake and approaches somewhat to that
fountain of joy her inhabitants would have the world
believe her.  Then at last does she shake off entirely
the daytime lassitude.  The noises of the day are all
there, the street-hawkers have gained a hundredfold
in volume of lung, in number, and in activity, the
cathedral bells seem twice as loud.  Toward nine all
the city and his wife and children and domestics are
gathered or gathering in the great focal point, the
palm-fringed Plaza San Fernando.  The attractions
are several.  First of all is the "cinematagrafo," a
moving-picture machine throwing its mirth and
puerility on a sheet suspended in the center of the
plaza.  Second, a military band, not a caterwauling
of strange noises that one would desire suppressed
by fire or earthquake, but a company seriously and
professionally engaged in producing genuine music,
which it does from near nine till after midnight as
continuously as any band could be expected to until
some invention makes it possible to blow a trombone
and smoke a cigarette at one and the same time.
Third, there is the excitement which the mingling
together in crowds brings every Latin people, and
the supreme pleasure of strolling to and fro admiring
one another and themselves.  Fourth, if so many
excuses are needed, there is fresh air and the nearest
approach to coolness that the city affords.

Yet with all Seville gathered the thousand
roped-off chairs around the curtain are rarely half
filled; for to sit in one costs a "fat dog," as the
Spaniard facetiously dubs his Lacedemonian two-cent
piece.  But what a multitude in the rest of the
square!  Out of doors all Spain mixes freely and
heartily.  Hidalgos with the right to conceal their
premature baldness from Alfonso himself shudder
not in the least at being jostled by beggars; nay,
even exchange with them at times a few words of
banter.  Silly young fops, in misfit imitation of
Parisian style, a near-Panama set coquettishly over one
ear, trip by arm in arm, swinging their jaunty canes.
Workingmen scorning such priggishness stride
slowly by in trim garments set off by bright red
*fajas* in which is stuck a great *navaja*, or clasp-knife
of Albacete.  Rich-bosomed *majas* with their black
masses of mane-like hair, in crimson skirts or
yellow--as yellow as the gown of Buddha--drift
languorously by with restless fan.  No type is missing
from the strolling multitude.  Strolling, too, it is,
in spite of the congestion; for the slow tide-like
movement of the throng not only gives opportunity
but compels any lazy foreigner to walk whether he
will or not.  Everyone is busy with gallantry and
doing nothing--doing it only as the Spaniard can
who, thanks to temperament, climate, and training
knows that peerless art and follows it with pleasure,
not with the air of one who prefers or pretends to
prefer to be working.

The Sevillian is in many things, above all in his
amusements, a full-grown child.  Groups of portly
business men, Seville's very captains of industry, sit
hour by hour watching the unrolling of just such
films, as are shown in our "nickelodeons," shouting
with glee and clapping each other on the shoulder
when a man on the screen falls off a chair or a
baker's boy deluges a passerby with flour.  No less
hilarious are the priests, shaking their fat sides with
merriment at the pictured discomfiture of one of
their guild in eager pursuit of some frail beauty.
As interested as the rest are the policemen--and as
little engaged in the fulfillment of their duties,
whatever those may be.  A poor species, a distressingly
unattractive breed are these city policemen of Spain,
in their uniform closely resembling checkerboard
pajamas, lacking even the Hibernian dignity of size,
stoop-shouldered and sunken-chested with lounging
on their spines and the inordinate sucking of
cigarette smoke into their lungs.  Of the self-respect
and pride of office characteristic of the national
guardia civil they have none whatever.  I recall no
evening in the Plaza San Fernando that at least one
pair of these wind-broken, emasculate caricatures of
manhood did not fall to quarreling, dancing in rage
and shrieking mutual curses in their smoke-ruined
voices, while the throng dogged them on.

Families gather early in the plaza.  There ensues
a moment or two of idle thrumming--for father or
brother is certain to bring his guitar--then out
bursts the sharp, luring *fandango*; the little girls in
snowy white squirm a moment on their seats, spring
suddenly out upon the gravel, and fall to dancing to
the click of their castanets as rhythmically as any
professionals.  They do not dance to "show off,"
they are indeed rarely conscious of attracting
attention; they dance because the fire in them compels,
because they wish to--and what the Andalusian
wishes to do he does then and there, gloriously
indifferent to whoever may be looking on.  Let him
who can imagine an American bringing his guitar to
the public square of a large city and, surrounded by
thousands, play serenely on into the depths of the
night.

.. _`A Sevillian street`:

.. figure:: images/img-096a.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: A Sevillian street

   A Sevillian street


The Andalusian is one of the most truly musical
beings on earth, in the sense that his music expresses
his real emotions.  Song is almost his natural mode
of expression, always spontaneous, with none of the
stiffness of learned music.  He has no prelude,
follows no conscious rules, displays none of that
preliminary affectation and patent evidence of technic
that so frequently makes our northern music stilted
and unenchanting.  He plunges headlong into his
song, anywhere, at any time, as a countryman
unsullied by pedantry enters into conversation.

.. _`The Plaza, San Fernando.  "A'ua!  A'ua fresca!  Quién quiere beber?"`:

.. figure:: images/img-096b.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: The Plaza, San Fernando.  "A'ua!  A'ua fresca!  Quién quiere beber?"

   The Plaza, San Fernando.  "A'ua!  A'ua fresca!  Quién quiere beber?"

Thus wanes the night in the Plaza San Fernando,
marked by the boom of the Giralda's bells, the
bawling of vendors of lottery-tickets, of titbits, of
matches, of *azucarillos*, of *naranjeros* crying their
oranges, of boys carrying miniature roulette-wheels
with a cone of sherbet as prize, that the little
children may be taught to gamble early in life; and
sharply above all else and most incessantly the
alpargata-shod water-seller, with his vessel like a
powder-can slung across one shoulder, his glasses
clinking musically, crying, crying always in his
voluptuous, slovenly dialect:

"A'ua!  A'ua fresca!  A'ua fresca como la nieve!
Quién quiere beber?"

We have street calls in the United States, but he
whose ear is daily assaulted therewith would have
difficulty in imagining how musical these may be when
filled, like the thrum of the guitar, the street ballad,
the "carol of the lusty muleteer," and the wail of the
railway announcer, with the inner soul of Andalusia.

There is to-day very little left of the national
costume of Spain.  One may except the stiff, square-cut
sombrero, the alpargata of workman and beggar, the
garb of the arriero, fitting and suiting him as if it
had grown on him, the blanket which the peasant
wears thrown over one shoulder, not because he
realizes what a charm this adds to his appearance,
but because he often sleeps out of doors or on the
stone floor of public stables.  Last, and least to be
forgotten, is the mantilla.  Except for it the women
of Spain have succumbed to the ugly creations of
Paris; may that day be centuries distant when the
abomination masquerading under the name of
woman's hat makes its way into the peninsula.  Yet
there is never among Spanish women that gaudy
affectation of style so frequent elsewhere.  Give her
the merest strip of gay calico and the española will
make it truly ornamental; with a red flower to wear
over one temple and a mantilla draped across the
back of her head she is more pleasingly adorned than
the best that Paris can offer.

There is something unfailingly coquettish about
the mantilla.  It sets best, perhaps, with a touch of
Arab blood; and in the Plaza San Fernando this
is seldom lacking.  Everywhere are morisco faces
framed in the black mantilla and, as if in further
reminder of Mohammedan days, there still remains the
instinctive habit of holding a corner of the shawl
across the chin.  Thus accoutered only the Castilian
"ojear" can in any sense express the power given
the andaluza by her Oriental ancestry to do or say
so much with a glance of her black eye.  With the
fan, too, she is an adept.  The Japanese geisha is
in comparison a bungler.  The woman of Spain has
her fan in such fine training that it will carry on
extended conversations for her without a word from
her lips, as Spanish peasants can talk from two
hilltops miles apart by the mere motions of their arms.

But who of all the misinformers of humanity first
set afoot the rumor that the sevillana is beautiful?
"Salada" she is, brimming over with that "salt"
for which she is so justly renowned; chic, too, at
times, with her tiny feet and hands and graceful
carriage; and always voluptuous.  But one might wander
long in the music-livened Plaza San Fernando
without espying a woman to whom could be granted the
unqualified adjective beautiful.  On the other hand
it is rare that one meets a sevillana, unless she be
deeply marked by the finger of time, who is ugly;
never, if my search was thorough, one scrawny or
angular.  In Spain is never that blending and
mixture of all types as in our land of boundless
migration; hence one may generalize.  Salada, graceful,
full of languor, above all wholly free from pose, is
the sevillana in her mantilla.  Of education in the
bookish sense she has little, of the striving after
"culture" to the divorce of common sense none
whatever.  She may--and probably does--know
nothing of the sciences, or the wrinkle-browed joys
of the afternoon club.  But she is brimming with
health and sound good sense, above all she is
incontestably charming; and is not this after all--whisper
it not in New England--the chief duty of her sex?

The Andalusian is primarily an out-door people;
not merely in the plain and physical sense, but in
life and character.  He lives his life openly, frankly,
setting his face in no mask of Puritanical pretension
when he sallies forth into the world, being himself
always, in public or in private.  All in all among
the sincerest, he is also the most abstemious and
healthiest of peoples; not yet spoiled by luxury.
His existence is reduced to simplicity; more exactly
he has never lost touch with eternal nature.  He
takes time to live and never admits the philosophy
that he must work before resting, but hinges his
conduct on the creed that he must live first, and do
whatever of work there is time left to do.  In no sense is
he lazy; rather in his sound sanity he has a real
appreciation of the value of life.  To-day is the
great day to him.  Live now is his motto, not put
off living until he has earned enough to live, only
to find it too late to begin.  One would seek through
Seville in vain for that strained, devil-chased air so
stamped on our own national physiognomy.  Whatever
his vocation, or the hour of the day, the Spaniard
has always time to choose the shady side of
the street, time to halt and talk with his friends.  As
I watched him night by night in the Plaza San
Fernando--and this is largely typical of all Spain--there
came the reflection that the lands of continual
striving, the lands where "culture" demands the
repression of every natural emotion and enthusiasm,
are dreary realms, indeed, compared with the Living
Latin South.  Here is not merely animation, but life,
real life everywhere, no mere feigned living.

On my second Sunday in Seville I attended my
second bullfight.  The first I had seen from the
depths of the *sombra*, believing the assertion that
none but a man with Arabic blood in his veins could
endure the unshaded side of the arena.  But my fear
of sun-stroke had melted away; moreover, the
sun-side gate keeper is most easily satisfied.  I bought a
ticket at a corner of las Sierpes and entered the plaza
as soon as the doors were opened.

Not a half-dozen had preceded me when I took a
place on the stone bank directly behind the red *tablas*.
On my heels appeared a rabble of ragged, joyful
fellows, who quickly demonstrated that I had not, as
I supposed, chosen the foremost seat, by coming to
roost along the top of the barrier in front of me.
One shudders to reflect what would befall individuals
in an American baseball crowd who should conduct
themselves as did these habitués of the Sevillian *sol*.
But to the mercurial andaluz, accustomed always and
anywhere to give his idiosyncrasies and enthusiasms
full play, the wildest antics seem quite in place.

If, as many reputed authorities will have us believe,
the Spaniard's love for "toros" is dying out, what
must it have been before the dissolution began?  At
any rate it has not yet sunk to that point where the
vast plaza of Seville will hold all who would come,
even to these *novilladas* in which the bulls are young
and the fighters not yet more famous than a member
of the cortes.  From a dozen entries the spectators
poured into the enclosure; in the blazing semicircle
bronzed peasants and workmen with wine-swollen
*botas*, across the shimmering sand richly attired
señoritas in the white mantilla of festival, attended
by middle-aged duenas and, at respectful distance,
by caballeros of effeminate deportment.  The
española is as ardent a lover of bulls as the men.  One
must not, however, jump to the conclusion that she is
cruel and inhuman.  On the contrary she is in many
things exceedingly tender-hearted.  Habit and the
accustomed way of thinking make vast differences,
and the fact that Spain was for seven hundred years
in continual warfare may account for a certain
callousness to physical suffering.

The Spanish plaza de toros is the nearest modern
prototype of the Roman Coliseum; when it is filled
one may easily form a mental picture of the scene
at a gladiatorial combat.  By four-thirty the voice
of the circular multitude was like the rumble of some
distant Niagara.  Howling vendors of thirst-quenching
fruits climbed over our blistering knees; between
the barriers circulated hawkers of everything that
may be sold to the festive-humored.  Spain may be
tardy in all else, but her bullfights begin sharply on
time.  At the first stroke of five from the Giralda
a bugle sounded, the barrier gates swung open, and
the game was on.

It would be not merely presumptuous, which is
criminal, but trite, which is worse, to attempt at this
late day to picture a scene that has been described a
hundred times in every civilized tongue and in all
the gamut of styles from Byronic verse to
commercial-traveler's prose.  But whereas every bullfight
is the same in its general features, no two were ever
alike in the unexpected incidents that make the
sport of perennial interest to the *aficionados*.  An
"aficionado," be it noted in passing, is a "fan," a
being quite like our own "rooter" except that, his
infirmity being all but universal, he is not looked down
upon with such pity by his fellow-countrymen.

Seville is the acknowledged headquarters of the
taurine art.  In our modern days of migratory
mixture of races and carelessness of social lines, toreros
have arisen from all classes and in all provinces--nay,
even in foreign lands.  One of Spain's famous
*matadores* is a Parisian, and one even more renowned
bears the nickname of the "Mexican Millionaire."
But the majority of bullfighters are still sons of
peasants and small landholders of Andalusia in
general and the vicinity of Seville in particular.  The
torero touring "the provinces" is as fond of
announcing himself a sevillano as are our strolling
players of claiming "New Yawk" as home.  Nowadays,
too, the bulls are bred in all parts of Spain
and by various classes of persons.  But the
*ganaderías* of Andalusia still supply most of the animals
that die in the plazas of Spain, and command the
highest prices.  Among the principal raisers is the
Duke of Veragua, who boasts himself--and can,
it is said, make good the boast--a lineal descendant
of that Christopher Columbus whose wandering ashes
now repose in the cathedral of Seville.  The duke,
however, takes second place to one Eduardo Miúra,
whose bulls are so noted for their fury that a
movement has for some time been on foot to demand
double fees for facing animals from his pastures.

The bulls of both my Sundays in Seville were
"miúras," and fully sustained the fame of their
ganadero.  Each córrida began with the usual
caparisoned parade, the throwing of the key, the
fleeing of the over-cautious *alguaciles* amid the jeering
of the multitude.  Is there another case in history
of a national sport conducted by the vested authorities
of government?  Perhaps so, in Nero's little
matinées in the toasting of Christians.  But here the
rules of the game are altered and to some extent
framed by those authorities.  Imagine the city
fathers of, let us say Boston, debating with fiery
zeal whether a batter should be allowed to run on
the third strike!  Then, too, the mayor or his
representative is the umpire, safely so, however, for he
is securely locked in his box high above the rabble
and there is never a losing team to lie in wait for him
beyond the club-house.

It is the all but universal custom, I note in
skimming through the impressions of a half-hundred
travelers in Spain, to decry bullfighting in the
strongest terms.  Nay, almost without exception, the
chroniclers, who appear in most cases to be
full-grown, able-bodied men, relate how a sickness nigh
unto death came upon them at about the time the
first bull was getting warmed up to his business which
forced them to flee the scene forever.  One must, of
course, believe they are not posing before the gentle
reader, but it comes at times with difficulty.  To be
sure, the game has little in common with croquet or
dominoes; there are stages of it, particularly the
disemboweling of helpless hacks, that give the
newcomer more than one unpleasant quarter of an hour.
Indeed, I am inclined to think that had I a dictator's
power I should abolish bullfighting to-morrow, or
next Monday at least; but so, for that matter, I
should auto races and country billboards, Salome
dancers and politicians, train-boys and ticket
speculators.  Unfortunately--

At any rate, I came out to this second córrida in
Seville and left it with the hope of seeing several
more.  Certainly there is no other "sport" that can
more quickly and fully efface from the mind of the
spectator his personal cares and problems; and is
not this, after all, the chief, if not the only raison
d'être of professional sport?  There is an intensity
in the moment of a matador standing with steeled eye
and bared sword before a bull panting in tired anger,
head lowered, a hush of expectancy in the vast
audience, the *chulos* poised on tiptoe at a little distance,
an equine corpse or two tumbled on the sand to give
the scene reality, compared with which the third man,
third strike in the ninth inning of a 0-0 contest is
as exciting as a game of marbles.  It is his hunger
for such moments of frenetic attention that makes
the Spaniard a lover of the córrida, not the sight
of blood and the injuries to beast and man, which,
in his intoxication at the game itself, he entirely loses
sight of.

The newcomer will long remember his first bull--certainly
if, as in my own case, the first bandarillero
slips at the moment of thrusting his barbed darts
and is booted like a soccer football half across the
ring by the snorting animal.  Still less shall I forget
the chill that shot through me when, with the
fifth bull at the height of his fury, a gaunt and
awkward boy of fifteen sprang suddenly over the
barriers and shook his ragged blouse a dozen times
in the animal's face.  As many times he escaped a
goring by the closest margin.  The toreros did not
for a moment lose their heads.  Calmly and
dexterously they maneuvered until one of them drew the
bull off, when another caught the intruder by the
arm and marched him across the ring to the shade
of the mayor's box.  There the youth, who had taken
this means of gaining an audience, lifted up a
mournful voice and asked for food, asserting that he was
starving--a statement that seemed by no means
improbable.  The response was thumbs down.  But he
gained his point, in a way, for he was given a
fortnight in prison.  Incidents of the sort had grown so
frequent of late in the plaza of Seville as to make
necessary a new law, promulgated in large letters on
that day's programme.  Printed words, in all probability,
meant nothing to this neglected son of Seville.
Such occurrences are not always due to the same
motive.  The impulsive andaluz is frequently not
satisfied with being a mere spectator at the national
game.  A score of times the tattered aficionados
about me pounced upon one of their fellows and
dragged him down just as he was on the point of
bounding into the ring.  Indeed, as at any spectacle
the world over, the audience was as well worth
attention as the performance itself.  On the blistering
stone terraces of an Andalusian sol animation and
comedy are never lacking.  In his excitement at a
clever thrust the Sevillian often sees fit to
fall--quite literally--on the neck of a total stranger;
friends and foes alike embrace each other and dance
about on the feet, shoulders, or heads of their
uncomplaining neighbors.  There is a striking
similarity between the bantering of a famous torero by
the aficionados and the "joshing" of a favorite
pitcher in an American ball park, but the good day
has yet to come when the recorder of a home-run
will be showered in his circuit of the bleachers with
hats and wine-skins, handfuls of copper coins, and
tropical deluges of cigars.  Nor does the most
inexcusable fumble call forth such a storm of derision
as descends upon a cowardly bull.  The jibes have
in them often more of wit than vulgarity, as when an
aficionado rises in his place and solemnly offers the
animal his seat in the shade.  The height of all
insults is to call him a cow.  Through it all, the
leather wine-bottles pass constantly from hand to
hand.  A dozen of these I had thrust upon me during
the fight, and tasted good wine each time.  The
proceeding is so antiseptic as to warm the heart of the
most raving germ-theorist, for the bota is fitted with
a tiny spout out of which the drinker, holding the
receptacle high above his head, lets the wine trickle
down his throat.  The skins so swollen when the
córrida begins are limp and flaccid when it ends.

It seems the custom of travelers to charge that the
apparent bravery of the bullfighter is mere
pseudo-courage.  Of all the detractors, however, not one
records having strolled even once across the arena
while the fight was on.  In truth, the torero's calling
is distinctly dangerous.  The meanest bull that enters
a Spanish ring, one for whom the spectators would
demand "banderillas de fuego"--explosives,--is
a more fearful brute than the king of a Texas
ranch.  Their horns are long, spreading and needle-pointed;
the *empresa* that dared turn into the ring a
bull with the merest tip of a horn blunted or broken
would be jeered into oblivion.  Not a year passes
that scores of toreros are not sent to the hospital.

The Spanish espada is almost invariably "game"
to the last.  The sixth bull of this Sunday's
tournament was, as often happens, the most ferocious.  He
killed six horses, wounded two *picadores*, tossed a
chulo as high as a one-story house and, at the first
pass of Vasquez, the matador, knocked him down and
gored him in the neck.  A coward, one fancies, would
have lost no time in withdrawing.  Vasquez, on the
contrary, crawled to his feet and swung half round
the circle that all might see he was unafraid, though
blood was streaming down his bespangled breast.
The alguaciles between the barriers commanded him
to retire, but it was to be noted that not one of them
showed the least hint of entering the ring to enforce
the order.  The diestro advanced upon the defiant
brute, unfurled his red muleta, poised his sword--and
swooned flat on the sand.  The bull walked
slowly to him, sniffed at his motionless form, and with
an expression almost human of disdain, turned and
trotted away.

"Palmas al toro!" bawled a boisterous fellow at
my elbow, and the vast circle burst out in a thunder
of hand-clapping and cries of "Bravo, toro!" while
the wounded espada still lay senseless in the center of
the ring.

He was carried off by his *cuadrilla*, and the
*sobresaliente*, which is to say the "jumper-over," or
substitute, marched as boldly into the ring as if
accidents were unknown.  Once begun a córrida knows
no intermission, even though a man is killed.  The
newcomer took steady aim and drove the three-foot
sword to the very hilt between the heaving shoulders;
then nonchalantly turned his back and strolled away.
The bull did not fall, but wabbled off into the shade
to lean up against the tablas as if he had suddenly
grown disillusioned and disgusted with life, and the
spectators, no longer to be restrained, swarmed
head-long into the arena.  I pushed toward the animal
with the rest and just as I paused a few feet from
him he dropped suddenly dead, his blood-smeared
horns rattling down along the barrier.

On rare occasions the matador, disobeying the
unwritten law that the animal must be despatched by
a thrust down through the body, places the point of
his sword just behind the horns and with the slightest
of thrusts kills the bull so suddenly that his fall
sounds like the thump of a barrel dropped from a
height.  Then does the spectator, the unseasoned at
least, experience an indefinable depression as if this
striking of a great brute dead by a mere prick in the
back of the neck were a warning of how frail after
all is the hold of the most robust on life.

As we poured out of the plaza, I halted in
the long curving chamber beneath the tribunes.
Twenty-two horses, gaunt, mutilated things, lay
tumbled pellmell together in a vast heap.  Brawny
men in sleeveless shirts were pawing them over.
Whenever they brought to light a mane or tail they
slashed off the hair and stuffed it into sacks; when
they dragged forth a hoof the shoe was quickly added
to the heap of old iron in a corner.  The bulls were
treated with far more deference.  Each lay in his
own space, and the group gathered about him wore
the respectful mien of soldiers viewing the last
remains of some formidable fallen enemy.  On my
heels arrived the jingling mules with the last victim.
Two butchers skinned, quartered, and loaded this into
a wagon from the central markets in exactly eleven
minutes, the vehicle rattled away, and the week's
córrida was over.

The Spanish torero is all but idolized by the rank
and file, being in this respect vastly above our
professional ball players.  There is little society except
the purely bluestocking to which he has not the
entrée; wherever and whenever he appears he is sure
to be surrounded or followed by admiring crowds.
The famous, the Bombita family, for example, which
has given four renowned matadores to the ring--and
one to each of my Sevillian córridas--Machaquito
of Córdoba, and a half-dozen others of highest
rank are distinctly more popular and honored than
the king.  Nor is this popularity, however clouded
by a bad thrust, transient or fleeting.  Pepete, who
departed this life with exceeding suddenness back in
the sixties because a bull bounded after him over the
tablas and nailed him to the inner barrier, is to this
day almost a national hero.

Of course every red-blooded Spanish boy dreams
of becoming a bullfighter and would not think of
being unfamiliar with the features, history,
peculiarities, and batting av--I mean number of *cogidas* or
wounds of the principal fighters.  Rare the boy who
does not carry about his person a pack of portraits
of matadores such as are given away with cigarettes.
On the playground no other game at all rivals
"torero" in popularity.  There is something
distinctly redolent of the baseball diamond in the
dialogues one is sure to hear several times on the way
home after a córrida.  A boy whom fate or the
despotism of the family woodpile has deprived of
the joys of the afternoon, greets his inhuman father
outside the gates with a shout of, "Hóla!  Papa!
Qué tal los toros?--How goes it with the bulls--what
is the score?"  To which father, anxious now
to regain his popularity, answers jovially, "Bueno,
chiquillo!  Tres cogidas y dos al hospital.--Fine,
son!  Three wounded and two in the hospital."

Having thus trod the very boards of the last act of
"Carmen" and passed a splendid setting for the
third in my tramp through the Sierra de Ronda, I
decided to celebrate the otherwise unglorious Fourth
by visiting the scene of the third.  The great
government Fábrica de Tabacos of Seville is one of
the most massive buildings in Spain, and furnishes
well-nigh half the cigarettes and cigars smoked in
Andalusia.  I passed through the outer offices and
crossed the vast patio without interference.  When I
attempted to enter the factory itself, however, an
official barred the way.  I asked why permission was
denied and with a wink he answered:

"Sh!  Hace calor.  It is hot, and las cigarreras
are not dressed to receive visitors.  Come in the
autumn and I shall make it a pleasure to show you
through the fabrica."

"But surely," I protested, "there are men among
the employees who have admittance to the workrooms
even in summer?"

"Claro, hombre!" he replied, with another wink.
"But that is one of the privileges of our trade."

I strolled out around the building.  Back of it,
sure enough, was a cavalry barracks, and any one of
a score of young troopers sitting astride chairs in
the shade of the building might have passed for Don
José.  Some of them were singing, too, in good
clear voices; though rather a sort of dreamy
*malagüeño* than the vivacious music of Bizet.  But,
alas!  With Don Josés and to spare, when the
factory gates opened and the thousands of *cigarreras*
so famed in song and impropriety poured forth, not
one was there who could by any stretch of the
imagination be cast for Carmencita.  Sevillanas there
were of every age, from three-foot childhood
upward; disheveled gypsy girls from Triana across the
river; fat, dumpy majas; hobbling old witches;
slatterns with an infant tucked under one arm; crippled
martyrs of modern invention; hollow-chested victims
of tobacco fumes; painted *sinvergüenzas*; above all,
hundreds of hale, honest women who looked as if they
worked to help support their families and lived life
seriously and not wantonly.  But not a face or even
a form that could have seduced any young recruit to
betray his trust and ruin his career.  Fiction,
frequently, is more picturesque than fact--and far less
pleasing in its morality.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`TRAMPING NORTHWARD`:

.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER VI


.. class:: center medium

   TRAMPING NORTHWARD

.. vspace:: 2

To the man who will travel cheaply, interlarding
his walking trips with such journeys by
train as may be necessary to cover the peninsula in
one summer, Spain offers the advantages of the
"billete kilométrico."  The kilometer ticket is sold
in all classes and for almost any distance, and is
valid on all but a few branch lines.  One applies
at a ticket agency, leaves a small photograph of
one's self, and comes back a couple of days later
to receive a sort of 16mo mileage-book containing
legal information sufficient to furnish reading
matter for spare moments for a week to come and
adorned with the interesting likeness already noted.

I made such application during my second week
in Seville, and received for my pains a book good
for two thousand kilometers (1280 miles) of third-class
travel during the ensuing three months.  The
cost thereof--besides the infelicity of sitting to a
photographer in a sadly mosquito-bitten condition--covering
transportation, government tax on the same,
printing and the tax therefor, the photograph and
the tax for that privilege, and the government stamp
attesting that the government was satisfied it could
tax no more, footed up to seventy-five pesetas, or
concisely, thirteen dollars and thirty cents.

But--if there is anything in official Spain that
has not a "but" attached it should be preserved in
a museum--but, I say, the kilometer-coupons are
printed in fives rather than in ones, and however
small the fraction of distance overlapping, it costs
five kilometers of ticket.  Moreover--there is
usually also a "moreover" following the "but"
clause in Spanish ordinances--moreover, there are
hardly two cities in Spain the railway distance
between which does not terminate in the figures one
or six.  It does not seem reasonable to believe that
the railroads were surveyed round-about to
accomplish this result; it must be, therefore, that in the
hands of Spanish railway measurers the kilometer is
susceptible to such shrinkage as may be needful.
At any rate--and this is the thought I had hoped
to lead up to--at any rate it was very often
possible, by walking six or eleven or sixteen kilometers,
to save ten or fifteen or twenty kilometers of ticket;
and the game of thus outwitting the railway strategists
was incomparably more diverting than either
solitaire or one-hand poker.

Thus it was that, though I planned to reach
Córdoba that evening, I left Seville during the
morning of July 8 on foot.  In my knapsack was a
day's supply of both food and drink, in the form
of three-cent's worth of those fresh figs that abound
in Spain--the one fruit that is certainly descended
directly from the Garden of Eden.  For miles the
route led across a desert-dry land as flat as a
western prairie, grilling in the blazing sunshine.  At
rare intervals an olive-tree cast a dense black shadow.
There was no grass to be seen, but only an occasional
tuft of bright red flowers smiling bravely
above the moistureless soil.

Long hours the retrospect of the city of toreros
remained, the overgrown cathedral bulking gigantic
above all else.  All the day through cream-white
Carmona on her hilltop--a lofty island in a sea
turned sand--gleamed off to the southward, visible
almost in detail through the truly transparent air
of Andalusia.  I did not go to Carmona, near as
she is to Seville; I never care to, for certainly she
cannot be half so bewitching in reality as she looks
on her sheer-faced rock across these burning plains of
sand.  To the north, beyond the brown Guadalquivir,
lay the distance-blue foothills of the Sierra
Morena, dying away in the northern horizon.

It was twenty-one o'clock by her station
timepiece when I descended at Córdoba from the train
I had boarded in the dusk at Tocina.  A mile's
stroll brought me to the city itself, and a lodging.
Poor old Córdoba has fallen on parlous times.
Like those scions of nobility one runs across now
and then "on the road," it is well that she has her
papers to prove she was once what she claims to
have been.  Surely none would guess her to-day a
former imperial city of the Caliphs, the Bagdad
and Mecca of the West.  Her streets, or rather her
alleys, for she has no streets, are bordered for the
most part by veritable village hovels.  Most African
in aspect of all the cities of Spain, this once center
of Arabic civilization looks as if she had been
overwhelmed so often that she has utterly lost heart and
given up, expending what little sporadic energy she
has left in constructing a tolerable Alameda to the
station, either that she may have always open an
avenue of escape, or to entice the unsuspecting
traveler into her misery.

To the imagination the Córdoba of to-day is
wholly a deception.  Yet she may rest assured that
she will not be entirely forgotten so long as her one
lion, the cathedral, or more properly her chief
mosque, remains.  For in spite of Christian
desecration, in spite of the crippled old women who are
incessantly drawing water in its Patio of the
Orange-trees, despite even the flabby, cynical priests that
loaf in the shade of the same, smoking their
cigarettes, and the beggars at its doors like running
sores on the landscape, the Mesdjid al-Dijâmi of
Córdoba does not, like many a far-heralded "sight,"
bring disappointment.  Once in the cool stillness of
its forest of pillars one may still drift back into the
gone centuries and rebuild and repeople in fancy the
sumptuous days of the Moor.

This reconstruction of the past was not uninterrupted,
however, on the morning of my visit.  For in
the church, that heavy-featured intruder within the
mosque like a toadstool that has sprung up through
some broken old Etruscan vase, mass was celebrating.
I crossed before the open door and glanced in.
Some thirty strapping, well-fed priests were
lounging in the richly-carved choir stalls, chanting a
resonant wail that was of vast solace, no doubt, to
some unhappy soul writhing in purgatory.  There
was not the shadow of a worshiper in the building.
Yet these able-bodied and ostensibly sane men
croaked on through their chants as serious-featured
as if all the congregation of Córdoba were
following their every syllable with reverent awe.

They interfered not in the least with sight-seeing,
however, being, as I have said, in the church proper,
an edifice wholly distinct from the mosque and one
which none but a conscientious tourist or a fervent
Catholic would care to enter.  There were,
nevertheless, certain annoyances, in the persons of a
half-dozen blearing crones and as many ragged and
officious urchins, who crowded about offering, nay,
thrusting upon me their services as guides.

In time I shook off all but one ugly fellow of
about fifteen, who hung irrepressibly on my heels.
Mass ended soon after, and the priests filed out into
the mosque chatting and rolling cigarettes, and
wandered gradually away.  One of them, however,
catching sight of me, advanced and clutching my
would-be guide by the slacker portions of his
raiment, sent him spinning toward the door.

"Es medio loco, eso," he said, stepping forward
with a shifty smile and nudging me with an elbow,
"a half-witted fellow who will trouble you no more.
With your permission I will show you all that is to
be seen, and it shall cost you nothing."

I accepted the offer, not because any guidance
was necessary, or even desirable, but glad of every
opportunity for closer acquaintance and observation
of that most disparaged class of Spanish society.
To one to whom not only all creeds, but each of the
world's half-dozen real religions sum up to much the
same total, the general condemnation of the
priesthood of Spain had hitherto seemed but another
example of prejudice.

This member of the order was a man of forty,
stoop-shouldered, his tonsure merging into a frontal
baldness, with the face and manners of a man-about-town
and a frequenter of the Tenderloin.  For three
sentences, perhaps, he conversed as any pleasant
man of the world might with a stranger.  Then we
paused to view several paintings of the Virgin.
They were images deeply revered by all true
Catholics, yet this smirking fellow began suddenly to
comment on them in a string of lascivious indecencies
which even I, who have no reverence for them whatever,
could not hear without being moved to protest.
As we advanced, his sallies and anecdotes grew more
and more obscene, his conduct more insinuating.
When he fell to hinting that I should, in return for
his kindness, bring forward a few tales of a similar
vintage, I professed myself sated with sight-seeing
and, leading the way out into the sunshine to the
stone terrace overlooking the Guadalquivir, with
scanty excuse left him.

A walk across the stately old bridge and around
the century-crumbled city walls lightened my spirits.
In the afternoon, cutting short my siesta, I
ventured back to the cathedral.  The hour was well
chosen; not another human being was within its
walls.  Unattended I entered the famous third
*mihrab* and satisfied myself that its marble floor is
really worn trough-like by the knees of pious
Mohammedans, centuries since departed for whatever
was in store for them in the realm of *houris*.  Free
from the prattle of "guides," I climbed an
improvised ladder into the second mihrab, which was
undergoing repairs; and for a full two hours wandered
undisturbed in the pillared solitude.

Night had fallen when I set out on foot from
Córdoba.  The heat was too intense to have
permitted sleep until towards morning, had I remained.
Over the city behind, in the last glow of evening,
there seemed to rise again the melancholy chant, ages
dead, of the muezzin:

"Allah hû Allah!  There is no God but God.
Come to prayer.  Allah ill Allah!"

The moon was absent, but the stars that looked
down upon the steaming earth seemed more brilliant
and myriad than ever before.  In spite of them the
darkness was profound.  The Spaniard, however, is
still too near akin to the Arab to be wandering in
the open country at such an hour, and I heard not a
sound but my own footsteps and the restless repose
of the summer night until, in the first hour of the
morning, I arrived at the solitary station of
Arcoléa.

There I stretched out on a narrow platform bench,
but was still gazing sleeplessly at the sky above
when a "mixto" rolled in at two-thirty.  The
populous third-class compartment was open at the sides,
and the movement of the train, together with the
chill that comes at this hour even in Spain, made
the temperature distinctly cold.  That of itself
would have been endurable.  But close beside me,
oppressively close in fact, sat a woman to the
leeward of forty, of the general form of a sack of
wheat, in her hand the omnipresent fan.  Regularly
at two-minute intervals she flung this open from
force of habit, sent over me several icy draughts of
air, and noting the time and place, heaved a vast
"ay de mi!" and dropped the fan shut again--for
exactly another two minutes.

I slept not at all and, descending as the night was
fading at the station of Espeluy, shouldered my
bundle and set off toward the sunrise.  Three
kilometers more and there lay before me the great open
highway to Madrid, three hundred and seven kilometers
away.  I struck into it boldly, for all my
drowsiness, reflecting that even the immortal Murillo
had tramped it before me.

The landscape lay desolate on either hand, almost
haggard in the glaring sunshine, offering a
loneliness of view that seemed all at once to stamp with
reality those myriad tales of the land pirates of
Spain.  Indeed, the race has not yet wholly died out.
Since my arrival the peninsula had been ringing with
the exploits of one Pernales, a bandit of the old
caliber, who had thus far outgeneraled even that
world-famous exterminator of brigands, the modern
guardia civil.  His haunt was this very territory to
the left of me, and not a week had passed since a
band of travelers on this national carretera had seen
fit to contribute to his transient larder.

But his was an isolated case, a course that was
sure to be soon run.  The necessity of making one's
will before undertaking a journey through Spain is
no longer imperative.  In fact, few countries offer
more safety to the traveler; certainly not our own.
For the Spaniard is individually one of the most
honest men on the globe, notwithstanding that
collectively, officially he is among the most corrupt.
The old Oriental despotism has left its mark, deep
to this day; and the Spaniard of the masses asks
himself--and not without reason--why he should
show loyalty to a government that is little more than
two parties secretly bound by agreement alternately
to share the spoils.  Hence the law-breaker is as of
yore not merely respected but encouraged.  Pernales
in his short career had become already a hero
and a pride of the Spanish people, a champion
warring single-handed against the common enemy.

Without pose or pretense I may say that I would
gladly have given two or three ten-dollar checks and
as many weeks of a busy life to have fallen into the
clutches of this modern Dick Turpin.  His retreat
would certainly have been a place of interest.  But
fortune did not favor, and I passed unmolested the
long, hot stretch to the stony hilltop village of
Bailen, a name almost better known to Frenchmen
than to Spaniards.

There, however, I was waylaid.  I had finished a
lunch of all that the single grocery-store offered,
which chanced to be stone-hard cheese and water,
and was setting out again, when two civil guards
gruffly demanded my papers.  This was the only
pair I was destined to meet whose manners were not
in the highest degree polished.  The screaming heat
was, perhaps, to blame.  I turned aside into the
shade of a building and handed them my passport,
which they examined with the circumspection of a
French gendarme.  In general, however, it spoke
well of my choice of garb that I was rarely halted
by the guardia as a possible vagrant nor yet by the
officers of the octroi as a possessor of dutiable
articles.

It would seem the part of wisdom in tramping in
southern countries to walk each day until toward
noon and, withdrawing until the fury of the sun is
abated, march on well into the night.  But the plan
is seldom feasible.  In all this southern Spain
especially there is scarcely a patch of grass large enough
whereon to lay one's head, to say nothing of the
body; and shade is rare indeed.  On this day, after
a sleepless night, a siesta seemed imperative.  In
mid-afternoon I came upon a culvert under the
highway and lay down on the scanty, dust-dry leaves at
its mouth, shaded to just below the arm-pits.  But
sleep had I none; for about me swarmed flies like
vultures over a field of battle, and after fighting
them for an hour that seemed a week, I acknowledged
defeat and trudged drowsily on.

Soon began a few habitations and a country
growing much wheat.  In nothing more than in her
methods of husbandry is Spain behind--or as the
Spaniard himself would put it--different from the
rest of the world.  Her peasantry has not reached
even the flail stage of development, not to mention
the threshing machine.  The grain is cut with sickles.
As it arrives from the field it is spread head-down
round and round a saucer-shaped plot of ground.
Into this is introduced a team of mules hitched to a
sled, which amble hour by hour around the
enclosure, sometimes for days, the boy driver squatting
on the cross-piece singing a never-ceasing Oriental
drone of a few tones.  From each such threshing-floor
the chaff, sweeping in great clouds across the
carretera, covered me from head to foot as I passed.

It was some distance beyond the town of Guarramán
and at nightfall that I entered a village of a
few houses like dug-out rocks tossed helter-skelter
on either side of the way.  The dejected little shop
furnished me bread, wine, and dried fish and the
information that another of the hovels passed for a
posada.  This was a single stone room, half floored
with cobbles.  The back, unfloored section housed
several munching asses.  The human portion was
occupied by a stray arriero, the shuffling, crabbed
old woman who kept the place, and by a hearty,
frank-faced blind man in the early thirties, attended
by a frolicsome boy of ten.  It was furnished with
exactly four cooking utensils, a tumbled bundle of
burlap blankets in one corner, a smouldering cluster
of fagots in another, and one stool besides that on
which the blind man was seated.

This I took, reflecting that he who will see Spain
must not expect luxury.  The real Spaniard lives
roughly and shows himself only to those who are
willing to rough it with him.  As I sat down, the blind
man addressed me:

"Hot days these on the road, señor."

"Verdad es," I answered.

"You are a foreigner from the north," he
remarked casually, as if to himself.

"Yes; but how do you know that?"

"Oh, a simple matter," he replied.  "That you
are a foreigner, by your speech.  That you are
from the north, because you only half pronounce the
letter R.  You said 'burro' in speaking of our
four-legged companion there, whereas the word is
'bur-r-r-ro.'  You have walked many leagues."

"What tells you that?"

"Carajo!  Nothing simpler.  Your step is tired,
you sit down heavily, you brush your trousers and a
thick dust arises."

Blindness, I had hitherto fancied, was an advantage
only during certain histrionic moments at the
opera, but here was a man who evidently made it a
positive blessing.

"Your are about twenty-five," he continued.

"Twenty-six.  You will be good enough, perhaps,
to tell me how you guessed that."

"What could be easier?  The tone of your voice;
the pace at which your words fall.  It is strange that
you, a foreigner, should be such an amateur of bulls."

"Caramba!" I gasped.  "You certainly do not
learn that from the tone of my voice!"

"Ah!  We cannot tell all our secrets," he
chuckled; "we who must make a living by them."

Then in the night that had settled down he fell
to telling stories, not intentionally, one would have
said, but unconsciously, fascinating tales as those
of the "Arabian Nights," full of the color and the
extravagance of the East, the twinkle of his
cigarette gleaming forth from time to time and outlining
the boy seated wide-eyed on the floor at his feet
with his head against his master's knee.  He was
as truly a minstrel as any troubadour that wandered
in the days of chivalry, a born story-teller all but
unconscious of his gift.  When after a long time
he left off, we drifted again into conversation.  He
was wholly illiterate and in compensation more filled
with true knowledge and wisdom than a houseful of
schoolmen.  His calling for five and twenty years
had been just this of roaming about Spain telling
his colorful stories.

"Were you born so?" I asked late in the evening.

"Even so, señor."

"A sad misfortune."

"You know best, señor," he answered, with a
hearty laugh.  "I have no notion how useful this
feeling you call sight may be, but with those I have
I live with what enjoyment is reasonable and find no
need for another."

The crippled old crone, who seemed neither to
have known any other life than this nor ever to have
been attired in anything than the piece-meal rags
that now covered her, dragged the heap of burlap
from the corner and spread it in three sections on
the stone floor.  On one she threw herself down with
many sighs and the creaking of rusty joints, the
second fell to my lot, and the blind man and his boy
curled up on the third.  The arriero carried his own
blanket and had long since fallen to snoring with
his head on the saddle of his ass and his *alforjas*
close beside him.

There is one Spanish sentence that expresses the
most with the least breath, perhaps, of any single
word on earth.  It is "Madrugáis?" and means
nothing less than "Is it your intention to get up
early to-morrow morning?"  In these wayside
fondas it calls always for an affirmative answer, for
the bedroom is certain to be turned into the living
room and public hall and stable exit at the first
glimmer of dawn.

I was on the road again by four-thirty.  Three
hours of plodding across a rising country brought
me to La Carolina, a town as pleasing in comparison
with its neighbors as its name.  Its customs,
however, were truly Spanish, even though many of
the ancestors of its light-haired populace were Swiss,
and my untimely quest for breakfast did nothing
more than arouse vast astonishment in its half-dozen
cafés, wrecked and riotous places in charge of
disheveled, heavy-eyed "skittles."  In the open
market I found fresh figs even cheaper than in
Seville and, asking no better fare, turned back
toward the highway.

I had passed through half the town when suddenly
I heard in a side street a familiar voice, singing
to the accompaniment of a guitar.  I turned
thither and found the blind singer I had first
encountered in Jaen, just on the point of drawing out
his bundle of handbills.  While his wife canvassed
the group of early risers, I accosted him with the
information that I had bought one of his sheets in
Jaen a month before.

"Ah!  You too tramp la carretera?" he replied,
turning upon me a glance so sharp that for the
moment I forgot he could not see.

"Sí, señor.  Do you not also sell the music of
your songs?"

"How can music be put on paper?" he laughed.
"It comes as you sing.  Are you going far?"

"To Madrid."

"Vaya!" he cried, once more posing his guitar.
"Well, there is much to be enjoyed on the road--when
the sun is not too high.  Vaya V. con Dios,
young man."

Beyond Las Navas de Tolosa the face of the
landscape changed, the carretera mounting ever higher
through a soilless stretch of angular hills of
dull-gray, slate-colored rock.  Above Santa Elena these
broke up into deep gorges and mountain foothills,
an utterly unpeopled country as silent as the grave.
I halted to gaze across it, and all at once, reflecting
on the stillness as of desolation that hangs over all
rural Spain, there came upon me the recollection
that in all the land I had not once heard the note of
a wild bird.

In the utter quiet I reached a deep slit in the
flanking mountain, and even the stream, that
descended along its bottom was as noiseless as some
phantom river.  It offered all the facilities for a
bath, however, and moreover under an overhanging
mass of rock that warded off the sun had watered
to un-Spanish greenness a patch of grass of a few
feet each way.  There I spent half the afternoon in
slumber.  The highway shortly after plunged
headlong down into the very depths of the earth,
squirmed for a time in the abyss, then clambered
painfully upward between precipitous walls of
gloomy slate to a new level.  When suddenly,
unexpectedly, almost physically there rose before my eyes
the picture of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance,
ambling past, close followed by thickset, hale-cheeked
Sancho on his ass.  For I had traversed the
pass of Despeñaperros; languid Andalusia lay
behind me, and ahead as far as the eye could reach
spread the yet twice more barren and rocky
tableland of La Mancha.





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.. _`SPANISH ROADS AND ROADSTERS`:

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   CHAPTER VII


.. class:: center medium

   SPANISH ROADS AND ROADSTERS

.. vspace:: 2

In the gloom of evening I espied on a dull, sterile
hillside a vast rambling venta, as bare, slate-colored,
and marked with time as the hills themselves.
Here was exactly such a caravansary as that in which
he of the Triste Figura had watched over his arms
by night and won his Micomiconian knighthood.
It consisted of an immense enclosure that was half
farmyard, backed by a great stable of which a strip
around two sides beneath the low vaulted roof had
been marked off for the use of man; the whole dull,
gloomy, cheerless, unrelieved by a touch of color.
Within the building were scattered a score of mules,
borricos and machos.  Several tough-clothed
muleteers, with what had been bright handkerchiefs
wound about their brows, sauntered in the courtyard
or sat eating with their great razor-edged navajas
their lean suppers of brown bread and a knuckle of
ham.  Even the massive wooden pump in the yard
among an array of ponderous carts and wagons was
there to complete the picture.  Indeed, this was none
other than the Venta de Cardenas, reputed the very
same in which Don Greaves passed his vigilant night,
where Sancho was tossed in a blanket and Master
Nicholas, the barber, bearded himself with a cow's tail.

The chance betrayal of my nationality aroused in
the arrieros a suggestion of wonder and even an
occasional question.  But in general their interest
was as meager as their knowledge of the world
outside the national boundaries.  Not once did they
display the eagerness to learn that is so characteristic of
the Italian.  For the Spaniard considers it beneath
his dignity as a caballero and a cristino viejo to show
any marked curiosity, especially concerning a foreign
land, which cannot but be vastly inferior to his own.
Four centuries of national misfortune and shrinkage
have by no means eradicated his firm conviction,
implanted in his mind by Ferdinand and Isabel in the
days of conquest, that he is the salt of the earth,
superior in all things to the rest of the human race.

Spain is one of the most illiterate countries of the
civilized world, yet also one of the best educated,
unless education be merely that mass of undigested
and commonly misapplied information absorbed
within four walls.  Few men have a more exact
knowledge, a more solid footing on the
everyday earth than the peasant, the laborer, the
muleteer of Spain.  One does not marvel merely
at the fluent, powerful, entirely grammatical
language of these unlettered fellows, but at the sound
basic wisdom that stands forth in their every
sentence.  If their illiteracy denies them the advantage
of absorbing the festering rot of the yellow journal,
in compensation they have a wealth of vocabulary
and a forceful simplicity of diction that raises them
many degrees above the corresponding class in more
"advanced" lands.

It is of the "lower" classes that I am speaking,
the common sense and backbone of Spain.  The
so-called upper class is one of the most truly ignorant
and uneducated on earth--though among its
members, be it noted, is no illiteracy.  The maltreated
Miguel was adamantinely right in choosing his hero
from the higher orders; no Spaniard of the masses
could be so far led astray from reason as to become
a Quixote.

It is noticeable that the Spaniard of the laboring
class has almost none of that subservience born in
the blood in the rest of Europe.  Not only does each
man consider himself the equal of any other; he takes
and expects the world to take for granted that this is
the case, and never feels called upon to demonstrate
that equality to himself and the rest of the world by
insolence and rowdyism.  Dissipation he knows not,
except the dissipation of fresh air, sunshine, and a
guitar.  Nowhere in Christian lands is drunkenness
more rare.  Like the Arab the hardy lower-class
Spaniard thrives robustly on a mean and scanty diet;
he can sleep anywhere, at any time, and to the
creature comforts is supremely indifferent.  One can
hardly believe this the country in which Alfonso X
felt it necessary to enact stern laws against the
serving of more than two dishes of meat at a meal or the
wearing of "slashed" silks.  Yet the Spain of
to-day is not really a cheap country; it is merely that
within its borders frugality is universal and held in
honor rather than contempt.

When the evening grew advanced, my fellow guests
lay down on the bare cobble-stones of the venta,
making pillows of the furniture of their mules, and were
soon sleeping peacefully and sonorously.  For me,
soft-skinned product of a more ladylike world, was
spread a muleteer's thick blanket in the embrasure
of a wooden-blinded window, and amid the munching
of asses and the not unpleasant smell of a Spanish
stable I, too, drifted into slumber.

From dawn until early afternoon I marched on
across the rocky vastness of Spain, where fields have
no boundary nor limit, a gnarled and osseous country
and a true despoblado, as fruitless as that sterile neck
of sand that binds Gibraltar to the continent.  It is
in these haggard, unpeopled plateaus of the interior
that one begins to believe that the population of the
peninsula is to-day barely one-third what it was in
the prosperous years of Abd er-Rahman.

At length, across a valley that was like a lake of
heat waves, appeared Santa Cruz, a hard, colorless
town where I was forced to be content with the usual
bread, cheese and wine, the former as ossified as the
surrounding countryside.  In the further outskirts
of the place I found a potter at work in a large open
hovel and halted to pass the most heated hour with
him.  In one end of the building was a great trough
of clay in which a bare-foot boy was slowly treading
up and down.  Now and again he caught up a lump
of the dough and deposited it on a board before the
potter.  This the latter took by the handful and,
placing it on his wheel, whirled it quickly into a
vessel of a shape not unlike a soup-bowl.  I inquired
what these sold for and with a sigh he replied:

"Three small dogs apiece, cocidos (cooked)"--pointing
at the kiln--"y cuantos--how many
break in the glazing!  It is no joyful trade, señor."

Once he left his work to munch a crust and to offer
me a cigarette and a drink from his leather bota, but
soon drifted back to his task with the restless,
harassed look of the piece-worker the world over.  As
I sat watching his agile fingers a bit drowsily, there
came suddenly back to memory the almost forgotten
days when I, too, had toiled thus in the gloomy,
sweltering depths of a factory.  Truer slavery there
never was than that of the piece-worker under our
modern division of labor.  Stroll through a factory
to find a man seated at a machine stamping strips of
tin into canheads at two cents a hundred by a few
simple turns of the wrist, and his task seems easy,
almost a pastime in its simplicity.  But go away for
a year, travel through half the countries of the
globe, go on a honeymoon to Venice and the Grecian
isles, and then come back to find him sitting on the
self-same stool, in the self-same attitude, stamping
strips of tin into canheads at two cents a hundred by
a few simple turns of the wrist.

Three blazing hours passed by, and I found
myself entering a rolling land of vineyards, heralding
wine-famous Valdepeñas.  The vines were low shrubs
not trained on sticks, the grapes touching the ground.
A dip in an exotic stream reduced the grime and
sweat of travel, and just beyond I came again upon
the railway.  A half-hour along it brought me face
to face with the first foreign tramp I had met in
Spain,--a light-haired, muscular youth in tattered,
sun-brown garb, his hob-nailed shoes swung over one
shoulder and around his feet thick bandages of
burlap.  He was a German certainly, perhaps a modern
Benedict Moll whose story would have been equally
interesting in its absurdity.  But he passed me with
the stare of a man absorbed in his personal affairs
and accustomed to keep his own counsel, and stalked
away southward along the scintillant railroad.

I halted for a drink at the stuccoed dwelling of a
track-walker.  In the grassless yard, under the only
imitation of a tree in the neighborhood, slept a
roadster.  Now and again the chickens that scratched
in vain the dry, lifeless earth about him, marched
disconsolately across his prostrate form.

"Poor fellow," said the track-walker's wife at the
well, "he has known misery, more even than the rest
of us.  Vaya como duerme!"

I sat down in the streak of shade that was
crawling eastward across him.  He wore a ten-day beard
and the garb of a Spanish workman of the city, set
off by a broad red faja around his waist.  In one
bulging pocket of his coat appeared to be all his
earthly possessions.

There was no evidence of overwhelming "miseria"
in the cheery greeting with which he awoke, and as
our ways coincided we continued in company.  He
was a Sevillian named Jesús, bound northward in
general and wherever else the gods might lead him.

"For a long time there has been no work in
Seville for nosotros, the carpenters," he explained,
though with no indication of grief.  "This half year
I have been selling apricots and azucarillos in the
bullring and on the Alameda.  But each day more of
Seville comes to sell and less to buy.  I should have
gone away long ago, but my comrade Gáspare would
not leave his amiga.  Gásparo is a stone-polisher
and had work.

"Then one day I am taken by the police for I
know not what.  When after two weeks I come out,
Gásparo is gone.  But he has come north and
somewhere I shall run across him."

Jesús had just passed through a marvelous experience,
which he proceeded to relate in all his Latin
wealth of language--though not in the phraseology,
of a graduate roadster:

"Mira V., hombre!  Two nights ago, when my
feet are worn away with more than ten leguas of
walking on the railroad, I come to Baeza.  It is dark,
and I wander along the track to find a soft bank to
sleep.  On the short railroad that is at each station
there is waiting a train of merchandise.  Suddenly
a great idea comes to me.  'Sh!  Jesús,' I whisper,
'what if you should hide yourself away somewhere
on this train of merchandise?  It would perhaps
bring you to the next station.'

"With great quiet I climb a wagon and hide
myself between bales of cork.  Screech!  Brrr!
Rboom!  The train is off, and all night I am
riding--without a ticket.  But at Vilches the man that goes
with the train with a lantern comes by and it is my
curse to be making some noise, moving to roll a
cigarette.  'Ya te 'pia!' (I spy you!) he cries.  Vaca
que soy!  So of course I must get down.  But mira,
hombre!  There I have traveled more than twelve
miles without paying a perrito!"

I had not the heart to disillusion him with a yarn
or two from the land of the "hobo."

In the telling we had come within sight of
Valdepeñas.  It was a "valley of rocks" indeed, though
a city of good size and considerable evidence of
industry, abounding with great *bodegas*, or wine
warehouses.  As we trudged through the long straight
street that had swallowed up the highway, we passed
the *taller* of a marble-cutter.

"It is in a place like this that Gásparo works,"
sighed Jesús, wandering languidly in at the open
door.  I was strolling slowly on when a whoop as of
a man suddenly beset by a band of savages brought
me running back into the establishment.  Jesús was
shaking wildly by both hands a stockily-built young
fellow in shirt sleeves and white canvas apron, who
was rivaling him in volubility of greeting.  Gásparo
was found.

Still shouting incoherently, the two left the shop
and squatted in the shade along the outside wall.

"Hombre!" panted Jesús, when his excitement had
somewhat died down.  "I have told myself that by
to-morrow we should be tramping the carretera together."

But Gásparo shook his head, sadly yet decisively.

"No, amigo.  Jamás!  Nunca!  Never do I take
to the road again.  I have here a good job, the finest
of patrons.  No.  I shall stay, and send for the
amiga--or find another here."

With the dignity of a caballero, Jesús accepted
the decree without protest, and wished his erstwhile
comrade luck and prosperity.  Then that they might
part in full knowledge, he launched forth in the story
of his journey from Seville.  Gásparo listened
absently, shaking his head sadly from time to time.
When the episode of the amateur hoboing began,
he sat up with renewed interest; before it was ended
he was staring at the speaker with clenched fists, his
eyes bulging, the cigarette between his lips
stone-dead.  From that great epic Jesús jumped without
intermission to a hasty survey of the anticipated joys
that lay between him and Madrid.  Suddenly Gásparo
sprang into the air with an explosive howl, landing
on his feet.

"By the blood of your namesake!" he shouted.
"How can a man stay always in one place?  This
daily drudgery will kill me!  I will throw the job in
the patron's face, and get my wages this very minute,
amaguito, and we will go to Madrid together.  Jesús
Maria!  Who knows but we can hide ourselves on
another freight train!"--and crying over his
shoulder some rendezvous, he disappeared within the
establishment.

We sauntered on to the central plaza.  It was utterly
treeless and paved with cobble-stones; nor could
we find a patch of grass or a shaded bench in all the
neighborhood.

"Look here, señor!" cried Jesús, suddenly rushing
toward a policeman who was loitering in the shade of
a bodega.  "Don't you have any parks or Alamedas
in this val de penas of yours?  You call this a city!"

"Señor," replied the officer in the most apologetic
of voices, "we are not a rich city, and the rain so
seldom falls in La Mancha.  I am very sorry," and
touching a finger respectfully to his cap, he strolled
slowly on.

Though the sun was low it was still wiltingly hot
in the stony streets.  Jesús, as I knew, was penniless.
I suggested therefore that I would willingly pay the
score of two for the privilege of retreating to the
coolness of a wineshop.

"Bueno!" cried the Sevillian.  "The wine of
Valdepeñas is without equal, and of the cheapest--if
you know where to buy.  Vámonos, hombre!"

He led the way down the street and by some
Castilian instinct into a tiny underground shop that was
ostensibly given over to the sale of charcoal.  The
smudged old keeper motioned us to the short rickety
bench on which he had been dreaming away the
afternoon and, descending still lower by a dark hole in the
floor, soon set before us a brown glazed pitcher
holding a *quarto*--about a quart--of wine, for which
I paid him approximately three and a half cents.

In all western Europe I have drunk the common
table wine in whatever quantity it has pleased me, and
suffered from it always the same effect as from so
much clear water.  It may be that the long tramp
under a scorching sun and the distance from my last
meal-place altered conditions.  Certainly there was
no need of the seller's assurance that this was genuine
"valdepeñas" and that what had been sold us
elsewhere as such was atrociously adulterated.  Before
the pitcher was half empty, I noted with wonder that
I was taking an extraordinary interest in the old
man's phillipic against the government and its
exorbitant tax on wine.  Jesús, too, grew in animation,
and when the subterranean Demosthenes ended with a
thundering, "Sí, señores!  If it wasn't for the cursed
government you and I could drink just such wine as
this pure valdepenas anywhere as if it was water!"  I
was startled to hear us both applaud loud and long.
A scant four-cents' worth had seemed so parsimonious
a treat for two full-thirsted men that I had intended
to order in due time a second pitcherful.  But this
strange mirth seemed worthy of investigation.  I
sipped the last of my portion and made no movement
to suggest a replenishing.  A few minutes later the
old man had bade us go with the Almighty, and we
were strolling away arm in arm.

The sun was setting when we reached the plaza.
We sat down on the cathedral steps.  The Sevillian
had suddenly an unaccountable desire to sing.  He
struck up one of the Moorish-descended ballads of
his native city.  To my increasing astonishment I
found myself joining in.  Not only that, but for
the first and last time of my existence I caught the
real Andalusian rhythm.  An appreciative audience
of urchins gathered.  Then the sacristan stepped out
and politely invited us to choose some other stage.

Across the square was a casa de comidas.  We
entered and ordered dinner.  The señora served us
about one-third of what the bill-of-fare promised,
and demanded full price--something that had never
before happened in all my Spanish experience.  I
protested vociferously--another wholly unprecedented
proceeding.  The policeman who had apologized
for the absence of parks sauntered in, and I
laid the case before him.  The señora restated it still
more noisily.  I declared I would not pay more than
one peseta.  The lady took oath that I would pay
two.  The policeman requested me to comply with
her demand.  I refused to the extent of commanding
him to take his hand off the hilt of his sword.  He
apologized and suggested that we split the difference.
This seemed reasonable.  I paid it, and we left.
Dark night had settled down.  We marched aimlessly
away into it.  Somewhere Gásparo fell in with
us.  Somewhere else, on the edge of the city, we
came upon a heap of bright clean straw on a
threshing floor, and fell asleep.





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.. _`ON THE ROAD IN LA MANCHA`:

.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER VIII


.. class:: center medium

   ON THE ROAD IN LA MANCHA

.. vspace:: 2

It was Sunday morning, the market day of
Valdepeñas, when I returned alone to stock my
knapsack.  The plaza that had been so deserted and
peaceful the evening before was packed from casa de
comidas to cathedral steps with canvas booths in
which the peasants of the encircling country were
selling all the products of La Mancha, and among
which circulated all the housewives of Valdepeñas,
basket on arm.  The women of the smaller cities of
Spain cling stoutly to their local costumes, aping
not in the least the world of fashion.  These of
Valdepeñas were strikingly different from the
Andalusians, considering how slight the distance that
separates them from that province.  They were almost
German in their slowness, with hardly a suggestion
of "sal"; a solemn, bronze-tanned multitude who,
parting their hair in the middle and combing it tight
and smooth, much resembled Indian squaws.

From the northern edge of the city the highway
ran straight as the flight of a crow to where it was
lost in a flat, colorless horizon.  The land was
artificially irrigated.  The first place I stopped for
water was a field in which an old man was driving round
and round a blind-folded burro hitched to a noria,
a water-wheel that was an exact replica of the
Egyptian *sakka*, even to its squawk, jars of Andújar being
tied to the endless chain with leather thongs.  The
man, too, had that dreamy, listless air of the
Egyptian *fellah*; had I had a kodak to turn upon him I
should have expected him to run after me crying for
"backsheesh."

Ahead stretched long vistas of low vineyards.  The
only buildings along the way were an occasional bare
uniform stone dwelling of a *peon caminero*, or
government road-tender.  At one of these I halted to
quench my thirst, and the occupant, smoking in
Sabbath ease before it, instantly pronounced me a
"norte americano."  I showed my astonishment, for
hardly once before in the peninsula had I been taken
for other than a Frenchman, or a Spaniard from
some distant province.

The peon's unusual perspicacity was soon
explained; he had been a soldier in Cuba during the
Spanish-American War.  I readily led him into
reminiscences.  Throughout the war, he stated, he
had fought like a hero, not because he was of that
rare breed but because every member of the troop
had been filled with the belief that once captured by
"los yanquis" he would be hanged on the spot.

"And are you still of the opinion?" I asked.

"Qué barbaridad!" he laughed.  "I was taken
at Santiago and carried a prisoner to your country.
What a people!  A whole meal at breakfast!  We
lived as never before, or since.

"You were quite right, vosotros, to take the
island.  I do not blame you.  It was competición, just
competition, like two shop-keepers in the city.  I am
glad the miserable government lost their Cuba."

So often did I hear exactly this view from Spaniards
of the laboring class that it may be considered
typical of their attitude toward the late disagreement.
The strange question has often been asked whether
it is safe so soon after the war for a North American
to travel alone in the interior of Spain.  For answer
we have only to ask ourselves whether a Spaniard
traveling alone in the interior of the United States
would be in any imminent danger of having his
throat cut--even had we been defeated.  In Spain
there is vastly less, for not only is the Spaniard
quicker to forgive and far less belligerent than he
is commonly fancied, but there exists in the
peninsula not one-tenth the rowdyism and hoodlum
"patriotism" of our own country.

I stayed long and left with difficulty.  Gregarious
is man, and on Sunday, when all the world
about him is at rest, even the pedestrian finds it hard
to exert himself.  A league beyond I came upon
the Sevillians lolling in the shadow of another
isolated peon dwelling in what seemed once to have been
a village.

Jesús in his eleven-day beard hailed me from afar;
moreover, the Sunday languor was still upon me.  I
stretched out with them in the shade of the building,
but the flies prevented us from sleeping.  We crawled
into a peasant's cart under the shed--but the flies
quickly found us out.  We crossed the road to the
ruin of a church, split almost exactly through the
middle of tower and all, and one side fallen.  Within
it was a grassy corner where the sun never fell, and
even a bit of breeze fanned us.  But the flies had
made this their Spanish headquarters.  We decided
to go on.

In that only were we unanimous, for the Sevillians
wished to follow the railroad, a furlong away, and I
the carretera.  I had all but won them over when a
freight train labored by.

"Ay!  Ay!  Los toros!" shouted the two in chorus.

"Where?" I asked, seeing no such animals in sight.

"En las jaulas, hombre!  In the cages!" cried
Jesús, pointing to a flat-car on which, set close
together, were six tightly-closed boxes each just large
enough to hold a bull.

"We go by the railroad!" shouted Gásparo,
decisively.  "Alma de Dios!  Who knows but we may
be able to hide ourselves on a train that is carrying
toros to the córrida!"

We separated, therefore, and struck northward,
though we marched side by side within hailing distance
until we were all three swallowed up in the city
of Manzanares.

The bare-faced, truly Manchegan town was half-deserted,
though the reason therefor was not hard to
guess, for the bullring in the outskirts was howling
as I passed.  For all its size the place did not seem
to boast an eating-house of any description.  At last
I halted before an old man seated in a shaded corner
of the plaza, to inquire:

"Señor, what does a stranger in your town do
when he would eat?"

"Vaya, señor!" he replied, with the placid
deliberation of age, and pointing with his cane to the
shops that bordered the square.  "He buys a perrito
of bread in the bakery there, dos perros of ham in
the butchery beyond, fruit of the market-woman--"

"And eats it where?" I interrupted.

"Hi jo de mi alma!" responded the patriarch
with extreme slowness and almost a touch of sarcasm
in his voice.  "Here is the broad plaza, all but
empty.  In all that is there not room to sit down
and eat?"

I continued my quest and entered two posadas.
But for the only time during the summer the
proprietors demanded my *cédula personal*.  I explained
that Americans are not supplied with these government
licenses to live, and showed instead my passport.
Both landlords protested that it was not in Spanish
and refused to admit me.  One might have fancied
one's self in Germany.  It was some time after dark
that I was directed to a private boarding-house that
almost rewarded my long search.  For the supper
set before me was equal to a five-course repast in the
Casa Robledo of Granada, and for the first time since
leaving Seville I slept in a bed, and not in my clothes.

In the morning an absolutely straight road lay
before me across a land treeless but for a few stunted
shrubs, a face of desolation and aridity and solitude
as of Asia Minor.  From the eastward swept a hot,
dry wind across the baked plains of La Mancha that
recalled all too forcibly the derivation of its name
from the Arabic *manxa*--a moistureless land.

At fifteen kilometers the highway swerved slightly
and lost from view for the first time the immense
cathedral of Manzanares behind.  On either hand,
miles visible in every direction, huddled stone towns
on bare hillsides and in rocky vales, each inconspicuous
but for its vast overtowering church.  "Si la
demeure des hommes est pauvre, celle de Dieu est
riche," charges colorful Gautier; which, if the church
of Spain is truly the "demeure de Dieu," is sternly
true.  City, town, village, hamlet, a church always
bulks vast above it like a hen among her chicks--rather
like some violent overpowering tyrant with a
club.  To the right of the turn one might, but for
a slight rise of ground, have espied a bare twelve
kilometers away immortal Argamasilla itself.

During the day there developed a hole in my shoe,
through a sole of those very "custom-made"
oxfords warranted by all the eloquent Broadway
salesman held sacred--whatever that may have been--to
endure at least six months of the hardest
possible wear.  Sand and pebbles drifted in, as sand
and pebbles will the world over under such
circumstances, and for some days to come walking was not
of the smoothest.

Almost exactly at noonday I caught sight of the
first windmills of La Mancha, three of them slowly
toiling together on a curving hillside, too distinctly
visible at this hour to be mistaken by the most
romance-mad for giants.  The few peasants I fell in
with now and then were a more placid, somber people
than the Andaluz and, as is commonly the case in
villages reached by no railway, more courteous to
the roadster than their fellows more directly in touch
with the wide world.

It was that hour when the sun halts lingering
above the edge of the earth, as if loath to leave it,
that I entered the noiseless little hamlet of Puerto
Lápiche.  It contained no public hostelry, but the
woman who kept its single shop cooked me a supper,
chiefly of fried eggs, which I ate sitting on a stool
before the building.  The fried eggs of Spain!
Wherein their preparation differs from that in other
lands I know not, but he who has never eaten them
after a long day's tramp cannot guess to what
Epicurean heights fried eggs may rise.  How, knowing
of them, could Sancho have named cow-heel for his
choice?

The evening was of that soft and gentle texture
that invites openly to a night out-of-doors.  On the
edge of the open country beyond, too, was a
threshing-floor heaped with new straw that would certainly
have been my choice, had not the village guardia
been watching my every movement from across the
way.  When I had returned the porcelain frying-pan
to its owner, I strolled boldly across to the
officer and inquired for a lodging.

"With regret, señor," he replied, raising his hat
and offering me the stool on which he had been
seated, "I am forced to say that we are a small
village so rarely honored by the presence of travelers
that we have no public house.  But--" he hesitated
a moment, then went on "--the weather is fine,
señor; the night is warm, the pure air hurts no one;
why do you not make your bed on the soft, clean straw
of the threshing-floor yonder?"

"Caballero," I responded, with my most Spanish
salute, "a thousand thanks--and may your grace
remain with God."

For the first time during my journey the heat was
tempered next morning, though by no means routed,
by a slightly overcast sky.  The wind continued.
The highway led on through a seared brown country,
for the most part a silent, smokeless, unpeopled land.
The windmills of La Mancha were numerous now
on either hand as the road sank slowly down to a gap
in the low, gaunt mountains of Ciudad Real.  At
last it reached them and, picking its way through
the narrow pass of Lápiche, strode off again across
a still hotter, drier region, unmitigated even by the
wind, which had stopped short at the mountain
barrier--a land flowing not even with ditch-water.  I
halted but briefly at the large village of Madridejos,
peopled by a slow, dreamy-eyed, yet toil-calloused
peasantry, as if their world of fancy and the hard
stony life of reality never quite joined hands.

Hot, thirsty and hungry, I came in mid-afternoon
to an isolated ramshackle venta in a rocky
wilderness.  An enormous shaggy man of a zoölogical cast
of countenance, and a male-limbed girl were harnessing
mules in the yard.  No other living thing showed
itself.  I offered a peseta for food.  The man glared
at me for a time in silence, then growled that he
sold nothing, but that I should find a posada not far
beyond.  He was evidently the champion prevaricator
of that region, for not the suggestion of a hovel
appeared during the rest of the afternoon.  But he
would be a fellow with Sancho indeed, who could not
overrule a few hour's appetite in thinking of higher
things, and no fit traveler in this hard, toilsome land
where overeating is not numbered among the
vices.

The setting of the sun was perhaps an hour off
when the highway, swinging a bit to the left and
surmounting a barren, rocky ridge, laid suddenly
before me an enthralling prospect.  Below, far down
on a distinctly lower level, a flat, ruffled country still
misty with rising waves of heat, stretched away to
the uttermost endless distance.  The whole, glinting
in the oblique rays of the setting sun, was scored in
every direction with dull rock villages huddled
compactly together, while on every hand, like signal fires
on a western prairie, rose from a hundred threshing-floors
columns of chaff straight and slender into the
motionless air to an incredible height before breaking
up.  The road descended with decision, yet in
no unseemly haste and, marching for an hour across
a country traveled only by an occasional donkey
loaded with chopped straw, led me at nightfall into
the scene of Sancho's labors in the wheat-piles--the
village of Tembleque.

In its immense fonda, but for the underground
stables one single, vast, cobble-paved room, a
vacant-eyed old man, a girl, and a leviathan of a woman sat
among the carts, wine-casks, and heaps of harnesses,
the latter knitting.  In strictest Castilian the
establishment was no fonda, but a *parador*, from *parar*,
to stop; and certainly it could not with honesty have
laid claim to any more inviting name, for assuredly
no man in his senses would have dreamed of choosing
it as a *staying*-place.  When I asked if lodging was
to be had, the woman replied with a caustic sneer that
she had always been able thus far to accommodate any
who were able and willing to pay.

"And can one also get supper?" I inquired timorously.

"How on earth do I know?" snapped the woman.

I stared with a puzzled air at the old man and he
in like manner at the knitter, who turned out to be
his wife, espoused in budding maidenhood when his
march in life had well begun.

"How can I cook him supper if he has none with
him?" snarled the no longer maidenly.

"Er--what have you brought to eat?" asked the
preadamite in a quavering voice.

"Nothing to be sure.  What is a fonda for?"

"Ah, then how can la señora mía get you supper?
Over the way is the butcher, beyond, the green-grocer,
further still the panadero--"

I returned some time later with meat, bread,
potatoes, garbanzos, and a variety of vegetables,
supplied with which the señora duly prepared me a
supper--by sitting tight in her chair and issuing a
volley of commands to the girl and the old man.  For
this service she demanded two "fat dogs," and collected
at the same time an equal amount for my lodging.

When I had eaten, the mistress of the house
mumbled a word to the dotard.  He lighted with
trembling hand a sort of miner's lamp and led the
way downward into the subterranean stable and for
what seemed little short of a half-mile through great
stone vaults musty with time, close by the cruppers
of an army of mules and burros.  Opening at last a
door some three feet square and as many above the
floor, he motioned to me to climb through it into a
bin filled with chaff.  This was to all appearances
clean, yet I hesitated.  For in these endless vaults,
to which the outer air seemed not to have penetrated
for a century, it was cold as a November evening.
I glanced at the old man in protest.  He blinked back
at me, shook his ever-quaking head a bit more
forcibly, and turning, shuffled away through the
resounding cavern, the torch casting at first weird,
dancing shadows behind his wavering legs, then
gradually dying out entirely.  I stood in blackest
darkness, undecided.  Before, however, the last faint
sound of his going had wholly passed away, the
scrape of the veteran's faltering feet grew louder
again and in another moment he reappeared,
clutching under one thin arm a heavy blanket.  When I
had taken it, he put a finger to his lips, cast his
sunken eyes about him, whispered "sh!" with a
labored wink, and tottered once more away.  I
climbed into the bin and slept soundly until the
cursing of arrieros harnessing their mules aroused me
shortly before dawn.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE TRAIL OF THE PRIEST`:

.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER IX


.. class:: center medium

   THE TRAIL OF THE PRIEST

.. vspace:: 2

The people of Tembleque had been just certain
enough that none but an arriero could follow
the intricate route thither, and that no man could
cover the distance on foot in one day, to cause me to
awaken determined to leave the Madrid highway and
strike cross-country to Toledo.  The first stage of
the journey was the road to the village of Mora,
which I was long in finding because at its entrance
to--which chanced also to be its exit from--Tembleque
it split up like an unraveled shoe-string.  I
got beyond the loose ends at last, however, and set a
sharp pace--even though the hole in my shoe had
enlarged to the size of a peseta--across a scarred
and weather-beaten landscape that seemed constantly
reminding how aged is the world.

Twenty-four kilometers brought me to Mora, a
sturdy town of countrymen, in time for an early and
stinted dinner and inquiries which led me off in a
new direction up a steadily mounting region to
Mascargne.  There, at a still different point of the
compass, a ruined castle on a hilltop ten kilometers away
was pointed out to me as the landmark of El
Monacail; to which village a rugged and sterile road
clambered over a country hunch-backed with hills.  It was
siesta-time when I arrived, the sun scorching hot, a
burning wind sweeping among the patched and
misshapen hovels that made up the place.  There were
no inhabitants abroad, which argued their good
sense; but in the shadow of the only public building
a trio of soldiers were playing at cards.  They leered
at me for some time when I made inquiry, then burst
out in derisive laughter.

"Claro, hombre!" answered one of them sarcastically.
"You can walk to Toledo la Santa if you
know enough to follow a cow-path."

I stumbled into it just beyond, a cow-path indeed,
though too little used to be clearly marked, and
meandering in and out with it for twenty kilometers
through rocky *barrancas* and across sandy patches,
gained as the day was nearing its close the
wind-bitten village of Nambroca.  A few miles more
through a still greater chaos of rocks and I came out
unexpectedly on the crest of a jagged promontory
that brought me to a sudden halt before one of the
most fascinating panoramas in all Spain.

A still higher rise cutting off the foreground, there
began a few miles beyond, the vast, wrinkled,
verdureless plateau of Castile, rolling away and upward like
an enormous tilted profile-map of the world, sea-blue
with distance and heat rays, all details blended
together into an indistinctness that left only an
undivided impression like a Whistlerian painting.
I pushed forward and at the top of the next ridge
gasped aloud with new wonder.  From this summit
the world fell pell-mell away at my feet into a
bottomless gorge; and beyond, two or three miles away,
the culminating point in a tumultuous landscape of
ravines, gulleys and precipitous chasms, sat an
Oriental city, close-packed and isolated in its rocky
solitude, the sun's last rays casting over its domes
and minaret-like spires a flood of color that seemed
suddenly and bodily to transport the beholder into
the very heart of Asia.  My goal was won; before
me lay the ancient capital of the Goths, history-rich Toledo.

I sat down on the crest of the precipice overhanging
the Tajo, almost beneath the enormous iron cross
set in a rock to mark Toledo as the religious center
of Spain, and remained watching the city across the
gulf, full certain that whatever offered within its
walls could in no degree equal the view from this
facing hilltop.  Richly indeed did this one sight of
her reward the long day's tramp across the choking
hills, even had there not been a pleasure in the
walk itself; and upon me fell a great pity for those
that come to her by railroad in the glare of day and
the swelter of humanity.

As I sat, and the scene was melting away into the
descending night, a voice sounded behind me and a
ragged, slouching son of fortune proffered the
accustomed greeting and, rolling a cigarette, sat down
at my side.  He was a "child of Toledo," and of his
native city we fell to talking.  At length he raised
his flabby fist and, shaking it at the twinkling lights
across the Tajo, cried out:

"O Toledo, my city!  Gaunt, sunken-bellied
Toledo, bound to your rock and devoured by the
vulture horde of bloated churchmen while your children
are starving!

"Señor," he continued, suddenly returning to a
conversational tone, "let me show you but one of a
thousand iniquities of these frailuchos."

He rose and led the way a little further along the
path I had been following, halting at the edge of a
yawning hole in the rocks, like a bottomless well, the
existence of which I was thankful to have learned
before I continued my way.

"Señor," he said, "no man can tell how many
have died here, for it lies, as you see, in the very
center of the trail over these hills.  For a
hundred years, as my grandfather has known, it has
stood so.  But do you think yon cursed priests would
spend a perrito of their blood-sweated booty to
cover it?"

It was black night when I picked my way down
into the valley of the Tajo and, crossing the
Alkántara bridge, climbed painfully upstairs into Toledo.
Even within, the Oriental impression was not lost,
though the Castilian tongue sounded on every side.
With each step forward came some new sign to
recall that for half the past eight hundred years Toledo
was an Arab-ruled and Arabic-speaking city.  Thus
it is still her Eastern fashion to conceal her wealth by
building her houses inwardly, leaving for public
thoroughfare the narrow, haphazard passageways
between them, and giving to the arriving stranger the
sensation of wandering through a haughty crowd of
which each coldly turns his back.

Her medley of streets was such as one might find
in removing the top of an ant-hill, an ant-hill in
which modern improvements have made little
progress; her pavements of round, century-polished
cobble-stones, glinting in the weak light of an occasional
street-lamp, were painful indeed to blistered feet.
Ugly and barn-like outwardly, like the Alhambra, hen
houses frequently resemble that ancient palace, too,
in that they are rich with decoration and comfort
within.  It was an hour or more before I was directed
to a casa de huéspedes in the calle de la Lechuga, or
Lettuce street, a gloomy crack between two rows of
buildings.  The house itself was such as only a man
of courage would have entered by night in any other
city.  I ventured in, however, and found the family
out-of-doors--lolling in the flower and palm-grown
patio beneath the star-riddled sky, the canvas that
formed the roof by day being drawn back.  Even the
well was in the patio, on which opened, like the others,
the room to which I was assigned, presenting toward
the street a blank, windowless wall.

It was late the next forenoon before I had slept the
forty hot and rocky miles out of my legs and sallied
forth to visit a shoemaker.  As he lived only two
streets away, it was my good fortune to find him in
less than an hour, and as Toledo is the last city in the
world in which a man would care to run about in his
socks, I sat on a stool beside his workbench for
something over three hours.  His home and shop consisted
of one cavernous room; his family, of a wife who
sewed so incessantly that one might easily have
fancied her run by machinery, and of a daughter of
six who devised more amusement with a few scraps
of leather than many another might with all the toys
of Nürnberg.  The shoemaker was of that old-fashioned
tribe of careful workmen, taking pride in their
labor, whom it is always a joy to meet--though not
always to sit waiting for.  He, too, hinted at the
misery of life in Toledo, but unlike the specter of the
night before, did not lay the blame for the sunken
condition of his city on the "frailuchos," charging
it rather to the well-known perverseness of fate,
either because he was of an orthodox turn of mind
or because his wife sat close at hand.  When he had
finished, having sewed soles and nailed heels on my
shoes that were to endure until Spain was left behind,
he collected a sum barely equal to forty cents.

In striking contrast to him--indeed, the two well
illustrated the two types of workmen the world
harbors--was the barber who performed the next
service.  He was a mountain of sloth who rose with
almost a growl at being disturbed and, his mind
elsewhere, listlessly proceeded to the task before him.
Though he was over forty and knew no other trade,
he had not learned even this one, but haggled and
clawed as that breed of man will who drifts through
life without training himself to do anything.  The
reflective wanderer comes more and more to respect
only the man, be he merely a street-sweeper, who does
his life's work honestly; the "four-flusher" is ever
a source of nausea and a lowerer of the tone of life,
be he the president of a nation.

While I suffered, a priest dropped in to have his
tonsure renovated and gloriously outdid in the
scrofulousness of his anecdotes not only this clumsy
wielder of the helmet of Mambrino, but exposed poor
timorous Boccaccio for a prude and a Quaker.

Packed away down in a hollow of the congested
city is that famous cathedral surnamed "la Rica."  "The
Rich"--it would be nearer justice to dub her
the Midian, the Ostentatious, for she is so overburdened
and top-heavy with wealth that one experiences
at sight of her a feeling almost of disgust, as for
a woman garish with jewelry.  We of the United
States must see, to conceive what shiploads of riches
are heaped up within the churches of Spain by the
superstitions of her people and the rapacity of her
priests, who, discovering the impossibility of laying
up their booty hereafter, agree with many groans to
stack it here.

"The Spanish church," observes Gautier, "is
scarcely any longer frequented except by tourists,
mendicants, and horrible old women."  If one choose
the right hour of the afternoon even these vexations
are chiefly absent, entirely, perhaps, but for a poor
old crone or two kneeling before some mammoth doll
tricked out to represent the Virgin and bowing down
now and then in true Mohammedan fashion to kiss
the stone flagging.  The Iberian traveler must visit
the cathedrals of the peninsula, not merely because
they offer the only cool retreat on a summer day, but
because they are the museums of Spain's art and
history.  But even the splendor of the setting sun
through her marvelous stained-glass windows cannot
overcome the oppressiveness of "la Rica."

As he stands before the wondrous paintings that
enrich the great religious edifices of Spain, the
matter-of-fact American of to-day is not unlikely to be
assailed by other thoughts than the pure esthetic.
There comes, perhaps, the reflection of how false is
that oft-repeated assertion that the world's truly great
artists exercised their genius solely for pure art's
sake.  Would they then have prostituted their years
on earth to tickling the vanity of their patrons, in
depicting the wife of some rich candle-maker
walking arm in arm with the Nazarene on the Mount of
Olives, or the absurdity of picturing Saint Fulano,
who was fed to Roman lions in A.D. 300, strolling
through a Sevillian garden with the infant Jesus in
his arms and a heavenly smirk on his countenance?
How much greater treasures might we have to-day
had they thrown off the double yoke of contemporaneous
superstitions and servility to wealth and
painted, for example, the real Mary as in their
creative souls they saw her, the simple Jewish housewife
amid her plain Syrian surroundings.  Instead of
which they have set on canvas and ask us to accept as
their real conception voluptuous-faced "Virgins"
who were certainly painted from models of a very
different type, and into whose likeness in spite of the
painter's skill has crept a hint that the poser's
thoughts during the sitting were much less on her
assumed motherhood of a deity than on the coming
evening's amours.

Horror, too, stands boldly forth in Spanish painting.
The Spaniard is, incongruously enough, as
realist of the first water.  He will see things
materially, graphically; the bullfight is his great
delight, not the pretended reality of the theater.
Centuries of fighting the infidel, centuries of
courting self-sacrifice in slaying heretics, the reaction
against the sensuous gentleness of the Moor, have all
combined to make his Christianity fervid, savage,
sanguinary.  Yielding to which characteristic of his
fellow-countrymen, or tainted with it himself, many
a Spanish artist seems to have gloried in depicting
in all gruesome detail martyrs undergoing torture,
limbs and breasts lopped off and lying bleeding close
at hand, unshaven torturers wielding their dripping
knives with fiendish merriment.  These horrors, too,
are set up in public places of worship, where little
children come daily, and even men on occasion.  It
is strange, indeed, if childhood's proneness to
imitation does not make the playground frequently the
scene of similar martyrdoms.  How much better to
treat the tots to a daily visit to the morgue, where
what they see would at least be true to nature--and
far less repulsive.

There are other "sights" in Toledo than the
cathedral for him who is successful in running them
down in her jungle of streets.  Each such chase is
certain sooner or later to bring him out into the
Zocodover, that disheveled central plaza in which the
sunbeams fall like a shower of arrows.  The inferno
into which he seems plunged unwarned chokes at
once the rambler's grumble at the intricacies of the
city and brings him instead to mumble praises of the
Arabs, who had the good sense so to build that the
sun with his best endeavors rarely gets a peep into the
depth of the pavement; and the time is short indeed
before he dives back into the relief of one of the
radiating calles.

As often as I crossed the "Zoco" my eyes were
drawn to a ragged fellow of my own age, with a
six-inch stump for one leg, lolling prone on the
dirt-carpeted earth in a corner of the square, mumbling from
time to time over his cigarette:

"Una limosnita, señores; qué Dios se lo pagará."

There was in his face evidence that he had been
born with fully average gifts, perhaps special
talents; and a sensation of sadness mingled with anger
came upon me with the reflection that through all the
years I had been living and learning and journeying
to and fro upon the earth, this hapless fellow-mortal
had been squatting in the dust of Toledo's Zocodover,
droning the national lamentation:

"A little alms, señores, and may God repay you."

Just another was he of her thousands of sons
that Spain has wantonly let go to waste, until even
at this early age he had sunk to a lump of living
human carrion that all the powers of earth or from
Elsewhere could not remake into the semblance of a man.

Try though one may, one cannot escape the
conviction that the fat of Toledo goes to the priesthood,
both physically and figuratively.  High or low,
the churchmen that overrun the place have all a sleek,
contented air and on their cynical, sordid faces an
all too plain proof of addiction to the flesh pots;
while the layman has always a hungry look, not quite
always of animal hunger for food, but at least for
those things that stand next above.  Nowhere can
one escape the cloth.  Every half-hour one is sure to
run across at least a bishop tottering under a
fortune's-worth of robes and attended by a bodyguard
of acolytes, pausing now and again to shed his
putative blessing on some devout passer-by.  Of lesser
dignitaries, of cowled monks and religious mendicants
there is no lack, while with the common or
garden variety of priest, a cigarette hanging from a
corner of his mouth, his shovel hat set at a rakish
angle, his black gown swinging with the jauntiness
of a stage Mephistopheles, ogling the girls in street
or promenade, the city swarms.  Distressingly close
is the resemblance of these latter to those creatures
one may find loitering about the stage-door toward
the termination of a musical comedy.

I sat one afternoon on a bench of that broken
promenade that partly surrounds Toledo high above
the Tajo, watching the sun set across the western
vega, when my thoughts were suddenly snatched back
through fully a thousand years of time by the
six-o'clock whistle of the Fabrica de Armas below.
When my astonishment had died away, there came
over me the recollection that not once before in all
Spain had I heard that sound, a factory whistle.
Agreeable as that absence of sibilant discord is to
the wanderer's soul, I could not but wonder whether
just there is not the outward mark of one of the chief
reasons why the Spain of to-day straggles where she
does in the procession of nations.

I descended one afternoon from Lettuce street to
the sand-clouded station on the plain and spent the
ensuing night in Aranjuez, a modern checker-board
city planted with exotic elms and royal palaces.  It
was again afternoon before I turned out into the
broad highway that, crossing the Tajo, struck off
with business-like directness across a vega fertile
with wheat.  Before long it swung sharply to the
right and, laboring up the scarified face of a cliff,
gained the great central tableland of Castilla Nueva,
then stalked away across a weird and solemn
landscape as drear and desolate as the hills of Judea.

The crabbed village that I fell upon at dusk
furnished me bread and wine, but no lodging.  I plodded
on, trusting soon to find a more hospitable hamlet.
But the desolation increased with the night; neither
man nor habitation appeared.  Toward eleven I gave
up the search and, stepping off the edge of the
highway, found a bit of space unencumbered with rocks
and lay down until the dawn.

The sun rose murky.  In twenty kilometers the
deserted carretera passed only two squalid
wineshops.  Then rounding in mid-morning a slight
eminence, it presented suddenly to my eyes a smoky,
indistinct, yet vast city stretching on a higher plane
half across the desolate horizon.  It was Madrid.
I tramped hours longer, so uncertainly did the
highway wander to and fro seeking an entrance,
but came at last into a miserable outskirt
village and tossed away the stick that had borne my
knapsack since the day I had fashioned that
convenience in the southern foothills of Andalusia.
Two besmirched street Arabs, pouncing upon it
almost as it fell--so extraordinary a curiosity was
it in this unwooded region--waged pitched battle
until each carried away a half triumphant.  I pushed
on across the massive Puente de Toledo high above
the trickle of water that goes by the name of the
river Manzanares and, mounting through a city as
different from Toledo as Cairo from Damascus,
halted at last in the mildly animated Puerta del Sol,
the center of Spain and, to the Spaniard, of the
universe.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`SHADOWS OF THE PHILIPS`:

.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER X


.. class:: center medium

   SHADOWS OF THE PHILIPS

.. vspace:: 2

A day or two later I was installed for a
fortnight in a casa de huéspedes in the calle San
Bernardo.  In such places as one plans to remain
for any length of time there are few cheaper
arrangements for ample fare in all Europe than these
Spanish "houses of guests."  My room, which was
temporarily on the second-floor front, but solemnly
pledged to be soon changed to the third-floor back,
was all that an unpampered wanderer could have
required.  Breakfast was light; a cup of chocolate and
a roll--no self-respecting traveler ventures to
sample Spanish coffee more than once.  But one
soon grows accustomed and indeed to prefer the
European abstemiousness at the first meal.  In
compensation the *almuerzo* and *comida*, at twelve and
seven, were more than abundant.  A thick soup,
not unseldom redolent of garlic, was followed by a
salad, and that by a *puchero*, which is to say an
entire meal on one platter,--in the center a square
of boiled beef flanked like St. Peter's amid the hills of
Rome by seven varieties of vegetables, the
*garbanzos*--bright yellow chickpeas of the size of
marbles--with the usual disproportion granted that
robust comestible in Spain, overtowering not only
every other eminence but carpeting the intervening
valleys.  That despatched, or seriously disfigured,
there came a second offering from the animal world,--a
*cocido* or an *olla podrida*, after which the
repast descended gradually by fruit, cheese, and
cigarettes to its termination.  Through it all a common
wine flowed generously.

Even on Friday this sturdy good cheer knew no
abatement.  Centuries ago, in the raging days of
the Moor, the faithful of Spain were granted for
their Catholic zeal and bodily behoof this dispensation,
that they might nourish their lean frames on
whatever it should please Santiago, their patron, to
bring within bowshot of their home-made crosspieces.
The Moor has long since removed his dusky shadow
from the land, but the dispensation remains.
Indeed, there is left scarcely a custom the inobservance
of which betrays the non-Catholic; or if one
there be at all general it is this: when he
yawns--which he is not unwont to do even at table--the
devout Spaniard makes over his mouth the sign of
the cross, to keep the devil from gaining a foothold
therein--an exorcism that is not always successful.

There is yet another custom, quite the opposite
of religious in result at least, which the guest at a
casa de huéspedes must school himself to endure.  It
grows out of the Spaniard's infernal politeness.
Figure to yourself that you have just returned from
a morning of tramping through sweltering Madrid
on the ephemeral breakfast already noted, and sit
down at table just as a steaming puchero is served.
With a melodious and self-sacrificing "Serve
yourself, señor," the addle-pated Spaniard across the
way pushes the dish to his neighbor; to which the
neighbor responds by pushing it back again with a
"No!  Serve *yourself*, señor," followed in quick
succession by "No!  No!  Serve yourself, señor;" "No!
No!  No! señor!  Serve yourself!" "No!  No!  No!
No! serve--" and so on to the end of time, or until
a wrathy Anglo-Saxon, rising in his place, picks up
the source of dispute and establishes order.

Our household in the calle San Bernardo consisted
of a lawyer, a "man of affairs"--using the
latter word in its widest signification--of two young
Germans, "Don Hermann" and "Don Ricardo,"
for some time employed in the city, and of the family
itself.  Of this the husband, a slouching, toothless
fellow of fifty, and the grandmother were mere
supernumeraries.  The speaking parts were taken by
the wife and daughter, the former an enormous,
unpolished woman with a well-developed mustache
and the over-developed voice of a stevedore.
Indeed, a stentorian, grating voice and a habit of
speaking always at the tiptop of it is one of the
chief afflictions of the Spanish women of the
masses--and of their hearers.  Is it by chance due to the
custom of studying and reciting always aloud and
in chorus during their few years of schooling?  Quién
sabe?  There was presented during my stay in
Madrid the play, or more properly playlet--zarzuela--"Levantar
Mueros--Raising the Dead"; but I
dared not go lest it turn out to be a dramatized
sewing circle.

But it remains to introduce the star member of the
cast, the center of that San Bernardo universe around
which revolved mother, supernumeraries, and guests
like planets in their orbits--the daughter.  I fully
expect to wander many a weary mile before I again
behold so beautiful a maid--or one that I should
take more pleasure in being a long way distant from.
She was sixteen--which in Spain is past childhood--a
glorious, faultless blonde in a land where
blondes are at high premium, her lips forming what
the Spaniard calls a "nido de besos"--a nest of
osculatory delights--and--  But why drive the
impossible task further?  Such radiant perfections
in human form must be seen at least to be appreciated.
It is sufficient, perhaps, to mention that her
likeness was on sale in every novelty shop in Madrid
and found more purchasers than that of Machaquito,
King of the Toreros.  In short, a supreme beauty--had
she been captured early and suitably polished
instead of remaining at home with mother until she
had acquired mother's voice, and mother's roughshod
manners, and a slothful habit of life that was
destined, alas, in all probability to end by reproducing
her mother's bulk and mustache.

There are two things worth seeing in howling,
meeowling, brawling, blistering Madrid--her
outdoor life and the Prado museum.  It was the latter
that I viewed by day, for when relentless August has
settled down the capital is not merely hot, it is
plutonic, cowering under a dead, sultry heat without the
relief of a breath of air, a heat that weighs down
like a leaden blanket and makes Seville seem by
comparison a northern seaport.  A saying as old as its
foolish founder's grave credits the city with three
month's invierno and nine months' infierno, a
characterization that loses much in symmetry, though
gaining, perhaps, in force by translation.  It was
my fortune to have happened into the place when
the lowest circle of the latter region was having its
inning.

Wherefore I went often to the Prado; and came as
often away more physically fatigued than after a
four-hour watch in a stokehole, and with my head
in a bewildered whirl that even a long stroll in the
Buen Retiro only partly reduced.  It is like the
irrationality of man to bring together these
thousands of masterpieces, so close together that not
one of them can produce a tenth of its proper effect.
Of the pictures in the Prado the seeing alone would
require two years of continuous work, the attempt to
describe, a lifetime; pictures running through all
the gamut of art from the fading of the pre-Raphaelites
down to Goya, that plain-spoken Goya who
seems to have stood afar off and thrown paint by
the bucketful at his canvas--with marvelous
results.  A pandemonium of paintings, not one of
which but off by itself would bring daily inspiration
to all beholders.  It is the tendency of all things to
crowd together--wealth, art, learning, work, leisure,
poverty; man's duty to combat this tendency by
working for a sane and equitable distribution.  The
Prado collection would be a treasure, indeed, had
those who exerted themselves to bring these paintings
together given half that exertion to spreading them
out.  Then it might be that in a land as rich with
art as Spain one would not find daubs and
beer-calendars hung in the place of honor in the homes
and fondas of "the masses."  When the good day
comes that the accumulation of the Prado is
dispersed I shall bespeak as my share the "Borrachos"
or "Vulcan's Forge" of sturdy Velazquez.

.. _`La Puerta del Sol, Madrid: the Spaniard'`:

.. figure:: images/img-176a.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: La Puerta del Sol, Madrid: the Spaniard'

   La Puerta del Sol, Madrid: the Spaniard'

center of the universe]

Those who are curious may also visit, at
seasons and with permissions, the unpleasing royal
palace, about the outer walls of which sleep scores
of fly-proof vagrants in the shade of half leafless
trees, and sundry other government buildings, all of
which--except the vagrants--are duly and fully
described in the guide-books.  There is, too, the daily
*juego de Pelota*, imported from the Basque provinces,
a sort of enlarged handball played in a slate-walled
chamber in which the screaming of gamblers
for bids and their insults to the players know no
cessation.  Wandering aimlessly through her streets, as
the sojourner in Madrid must who cannot daily sleep
the day through, I found myself often pausing to
admire the splendid displays in the windows of her
tailors.  Spain has no wool schedule, and as I gazed
a deep regret came over me that I could not always
be a dweller in Madrid when my garb grows threadbare
or a tailor bill falls due.  But there was sure
remedy for such melancholy.  When it grew acute
I had but to turn and note the fitting of these
splendid fabrics on the passer-by, and the sadness
changed to a wonder that the madrileño tailor has
the audacity to charge at all for his services.

.. _`An Alameda by day--chairs stacked until busy night-time`:

.. figure:: images/img-176b.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: An Alameda by day--chairs stacked until busy night-time

   An Alameda by day--chairs stacked until busy night-time

So bare and uninviting are her environs--and she
has no suburbs--that Madrid never retires
outwardly as other cities for her picnics and holidays,
but crowds more closely together in the Buen Retiro.
The congestion is greatest about the Estanque
Grande.  The largest body of water the normal
madrileño ever sees is this artificial pond of about the
area--though not the depth--of a college
swimming-pool.  On it are marooned a few venerable
rowboats, for a ride in which most of the residents of
Madrid have been politely quarreling every fair day
since they reached a quarrelsome age.  Small wonder
dwellers in the capital cry out in horror at the idea
of drinking water.  One might as sanely talk of
burning wood for fuel.

Obviously no untraveled native of "las Cortes"
has more than a vague conception of the sea.
Indeed, the ignorance on this point is nothing short
of pathetic, if one may judge from the popular sea
novel that fell into my hands during my stay.  The
writer evidently dwelt in the usual hotbox that
constitutes a Madrid lodging and had not the remotest,
wildest notion what thing a sea may be, nor the
ability to tell a mainsail from a missionary's mule.
But he was a clever man--to have concocted such a
yarn and escaped persecution.

Madrid, however, like all urban Spain, comes
thoroughly to life only with the fall of night.
Occasionally a special celebration carries her populace
to some strange corner of the city, but the fixed
rendezvous is the Paseo de Recoletos, a broader
Alameda where reigns by day an un-Spanish opulence
of shade enjoyed only by the chairs stacked house-high
beneath the trees.  There is nothing hurried
about the congregating.  Dinner leisurely finished,
the madrileño of high or low degree begins to drift
slowly thither.  By nine the public benches are taken;
by ten one can and must move only with the throng
at the accepted pace, or pay a copper to sit in
haughty state in one of the now unstacked chairs.
Toward ten-thirty a military band straggles in from
the four points of the compass, finishes its cigarette,
languidly unlimbers its instruments, and near eleven
falls to work--or play.  About the same time there
come wandering through the trees, as if drawn here
by merest chance, five threadbare blind men, each
with a battered violin or horn tucked tenderly under
one arm.  During the opening number they listen
attentively, in silence, after the manner of musicians.
Then as the official players pause to roll new
cigarettes the sightless ragamuffins take their stand near
at hand and strike up a music that more than one
city of the western world could do worse than
subsidize.  Thereafter melody is incessant; and with it
the murmur of countless voices, the scrape of leisurely
feet on the gravel, the cries of the hawkers of all
that may by any chance be sought, and louder and
more insistent than all else the baying of newsboys--aged
forty to sixty and of both sexes--"*El País!*"
"*El Heraldo!*" "*La Cor-r-respondencia-a-a-a!*"

Midnight!  Why, midnight is only late in the
afternoon in Madrid.  The concert does not end until
three and half the babies of the city are playing in
the sand along the Paseo de Recoletos when the
musicians leave.  Besides, what else is to be done?  Even
did one feel the slightest desire to turn in there is
not the remotest possibility of finding one's room
less than a sweatbox.  The populace shows little
inclination to disperse, and though many saunter
unwillingly homeward for form's sake, it is not to
sleep, for one may still hear chatting and the muffled
twang of guitars behind the blinds of the open
windows.  As for myself, I drifted commonly after the
concert into the "Circo Americano" or a zarzuela,
though such entertainments demonstrated nothing
except how easily the madrileño is amused.  Yet even
these close early--for Madrid; and rambling
gradually into my adopted section, it was usually my
fortune to run across a "friend of the house"--of
whom more anon--to retire with him to the nearest
*Juego de Billar*, or billiard-hall, there to play the
night gray-headed.

The doors of Madrid close at midnight, and neither
the madrileño nor his guests have yet reached that
stage of civilization where they can be entrusted with
their own latch-key.  But it is easy for all that to
gain admittance.  One has only to halt before one's
door, clap one's hands soundly three or six or nine
or fifteen times, bawl in one's most musical and
top-most voice, "Ser-r-r-r-reno!" not forgetting to roll
the r like the whir of a broken emery-wheel, and
then sit calmly down on the curb and wait.  Within
a half-hour, or an hour at most, the watchman is
almost sure to appear, rattling with gigantic keys,
carrying staff and lantern, and greeting the exile
with all the compliments of the Spanish season,
unlocks, furnishes him a lighted wax taper, wishes him
a "good night" and a long day's sleep, and
gracefully pockets his two-cent fee.

Theoretically the sereno is supposed to keep order--or
at least orderly.  But nothing is more noted
for its absence in Madrid by night than order.  The
sereno of the calle San Bernardo showed great liking
for the immediate neighborhood of our casa de
huéspedes--after I had been admitted.  Rare the
night--that is, morning--that he did not sit down
beneath my window--for my promotion to the third-floor
back was postponed until I left the city--with a
pair of hackmen or day-hawks and fall to rehearsing
in a foghorn-voice the story of his noble past.
Twice or thrice I let drop a hint in the form of what
water was in my pitcher.  But the serenos of Madrid
are imperturbable, and water is precious.  On each
such occasion the romancer moved over some two
feet and serenely continued his tale until the rising
sun sent him strolling homeward.

"Don Ricardo," of our German boarders, aspired
to change from his stool in a banking-house to the
bullring.  He had taken a course in Madrid's
Escuela Taurina and was already testing his prowess
each Sunday as a banderillero in the little plaza of
Tetuan, a few miles outside the city.  In consequence--for
"Ricardo" was a companionable youth for
all his ragged Spanish--our casa de huéspedes
became a rendezvous of lesser lights in the taurine
world.  Two or three toreros were sure to drop in
each evening before we had sipped the last of our
wine, to spend an hour or two in informal *tertulia*.
I had not been a week in the city before I numbered
among my acquaintances Curdito, Capita de
Carmona, Pepete, and Moreno de Alcala, all men whose
names have decorated many a ringside poster.

There appeared one evening among the "friends
of the house" a young man of twenty, of singularly
attractive appearance and personality.  Clear-eyed,
of lithe yet muscular frame, and a spring-like
quickness in every movement, he was noticeable
above all for his modest deportment, having barely
a touch of that arrogant self-esteem that is so
frequently the dominating characteristic of the
Spaniard.  His speech was the soft, musical Andalusian;
his conversation quickly demonstrated him a man of
a high rate of intelligence.

Such was Faustino Posadas, bullfighter, already
a favorite among the aficionados of Spain, though it
is by no means often that a youth of twenty finds
himself vested with the red muleta.  Son of the
spare-limbed old herder who has been keeper for
many years of the Tabladas, or bull pastures, of
Seville, he had been familiar with the animals and
their ways from early childhood.  At sixteen he was
already a banderillero.  A famous espada carried
him in his caudrilla to Peru and an accident to a
fellow torero gave him the opportunity to
despatch his first two bulls in the plaza of Lima.  He
returned to Spain a full-fledged "novillero" and
was rapidly advancing to the rank of graduate
espada, with the right to appear before bulls of any age.

Once introduced, Posadas appeared often in the
calle San Bernardo; much too often in fact to leave
any suspicion that either his friendship for "Don
Ricardo" or the charms of our conversation was the
chief cause of his coming.  A very few days passed
before it had become a fixed and accepted custom
for him to set out toward nine for the Paseo with
the radiant daughter of the house--though
mother waddled between, of course, after the dictates
of Spanish etiquette.  Within a week he was
received by the family on the footing of a declared
suitor; and of his favor with the señorita there was
no room for doubt.

There was always a long hour between the termination
of supper and the time when Madrid began
its nightly promenade, during which it was natural
that our conversation should touch chiefly upon
affairs of the ring.

"Don Henrico," asked Capita one evening--for
I was known to the company as "Henrico
Franco"--"is it true that there are no bullfights
in your country?"

"Vaya que gente!" burst out Moreno, when I
had at length succeeded in making clear to them
our national objections to the sport.  "What
rubbish!  What does it matter if a few old hacks that
would soon fall dead of themselves are killed to
make sport for the aficionados?  As for the
bull--  Carajo, hombre!  You yourself, if you were in such
a rage as the toro, would no more feel the thrust of a
sword than the pricking of a gadfly."

Posadas, on the other hand, readily grasped the
American point of view.  He even admitted that he
found the goring of the horses unpleasant and that
he would gladly see that feature of the córrida
eliminated if there were any other way of tiring
the bull before the last act.  But for the bull
himself he professed no sympathy whatever.

"What would you have us do?" he cried in
conclusion.  "Spain offers nothing else for a son of
the people without political pull than to become
torero.  Without that we must work as peasants on
black bread and a peseta a day."

"As in any other trade," I inquired, "I suppose
you enter the ring without any thought of danger,
any feeling of fear?"

"No, I don't remember ever being afraid,"
laughed the Sevillian, "though when Miúra furnishes
the stock I like to hear mass before the córrida."

"What are the secrets of success?"

"I know only one," answered Posadas, "and that
is no secret.  Every move the bull makes shows
first in the whites of his eyes.  Never for an
instant do I take my eyes off his.  So it has been
my luck not to be once wounded," he concluded,
making the sign of the cross.

"Cogidas!" cried Capita, passing a hand over
a dull brown welt on his neck.  "Caramba!  I have
five of them, and every one by a cursed miúra.  No,
I never felt pain, only a cold chill that runs down
to your very toes.  But afterward--in the
hospital!  Carajo!"

One would suppose that men engaged in so
perilous a calling would take extreme bodily care of
themselves.  Not a torero among them, however,
knew the meaning of "training" as the word is
used by our athletes.  They drank, smoked--even
during the córrida--ate what and when they
pleased, and more commonly spent the night
strolling in the Paseo with an "amiga" or carousing
in a wineshop than sleeping.  Whether it is a
leaving of the Moor or native to this blear, rocky
land, there is much of the fatalist in the Spaniard,
especially the Andalusian.  He is by nature a
gambler; be he torero, beggar, or senator, he is
always ready and willing to "take a chance."

"If a man is marked to be killed in the ring he
will be killed there," asserted Pepete.  "He cannot
change his fate by robbing himself of the pleasures
of life."

Posadas was engaged to appear in the plaza of
Madrid on the first Sunday of our acquaintance.
When I descended to the street at three the city
was already drifting ringward, a picador in full
trim now and then cantering by on his Rozinante--a
sight fully as exciting to the populace as the
circus parade of our own land.  I had reached the
edge of the Puerta del Sol when I heard a "Hola,
amigo!" behind me and turning, beheld none other
than Jesús the Sevillian bearing down upon me with
outstretched hand.  He had found work at his trade
in the city--though not yet a barber apparently.

"And Gásparo?" I asked.

"Perdido, señor!  Lost again!" he sighed.
"Perhaps he has found a new amiga.  But I much
more fear he has fallen into the fingers of the
police.  Mira V., señor.  In all the journey we
have not been able once to hide ourselves on a
freight train.  At last, señor, in Castillejo,
Gásparo goes mad and swears he will ride once for
nothing.  With twenty people looking on he climbs
a wagon.  A man shouts 'thief!' and around the
station comes running a guardia civil.  I have not
been able to find Gásparo since.  Señor, I have
come to think it is not right to ride on the
railroad without a ticket.  Gásparo, perhaps, is in
prison.  But we will meet again when he comes out,"
he concluded cheerfully, as I turned away.

At the plaza fully twelve thousand were
gathered.  The córrida was distinguished particularly
for its clumsiness, though the fighters, while young,
were not without reputation.  Falls and bruises were
innumerable and the entire performance a chapter
of accidents that kept the aficionados in an uproar
and gave no small amount of work to the attendant
surgeons.  Of the three matadores, Serenito, a
hulking fellow whose place seemed last of all in
the bullring, was gored across the loins by his first
bull and forced to abandon his task and fee to the
sobresaliente.  Then Platerito--"Silver-plated"--a
mere whisp of a man, having dedicated to the populace
as is the custom in Madrid the death of the fifth
bull, gasconaded up to the animal, fell immediately
foul of a horn, whirled about like a rag caught on
a fly-wheel, and landed on his shoulders fully sixty
feet away.  To the astonishment even of the aficionados
he sprang to his feet as jaunty as ever and duly
despatched the animal, though not over handily.

The misfortunes of his fellows served to bring out
by contrast the skill of Posadas.  Not only did he
pass the day unscathed, but killed both his bulls at
the first thrust so instantly that the thud of their fall
might be heard outside the plaza, how rare a feat
only he knows who has watched the hacking and
butchering of many a "novillero."  Indeed, so
pleasing was his work that he was at once engaged,
contrary to all precedent, to appear again on the
ensuing Sunday.

By that time I had learned enough of the "fine
points of the game" to recognize that the Sevillian
was approaching already true matador "form,"
and as I took leave of him next day it was with
the conviction that success in his chosen career
was as sure as the certainty of soon winning his
most cherished reward.

"Vaya, Don Henrico," he laughed as we shook
hands.  "We shall see each other again.  Some
day when I go to Mexico or the Americas of the
south I shall come by New York and you shall show
me all you have told us of."

There are few countries in which it is more difficult
to lay out an itinerary that will take in the
principal points of interest without often
doubling on one's track than Spain.  By dint of
long calculation and nice adjustment of details I
sketched a labyrinthian route that my kilometer-book,
together with what walking I should have time
for, would cover.  As for my check-book there was
left exactly three pesetas a day for the remainder
of my time in the peninsula.

So one cloudy morning in early August I took
train at the Estación del Norte and wound away
upward through the gorges of the Guardarrama to
Segovia.  Only there did I realize that the rumble
of Madrid had been absolutely incessant in my ears;
the stillness of the ancient city was almost oppressive,
even more than in Toledo one felt peculiarly out
of the world and a sensation that he must not remain
too long lest he be wholly forgotten and lose his
place in life's procession.

In the morning I set off by the highway that
follows for some miles the great unmortared
aqueduct, that chief feature of Segovia, a thing indeed
far greater than the town, as if a man's gullet, or
his thirst should be larger than himself, so difficult
is it for a city to obtain water in this thirsty
land.  Where the road abandoned the monument it
continued across a country brown and sear, with
almost the aspect of an American meadow in
autumn, steadily rising all but imperceptibly.
Well on in the morning I entered a forest, at a
side road of which I was joined by two guardias
civiles, who marched for an hour with me exchanging
information and marveling that I had wandered
so far afield.  It has been my lot to become
well, nay, intimately acquainted with the police of
many lands, and I know of none that, as a body,
are more nearly what police should be than these
civil guards of Spain, to whom is due the
suppression of all the old picturesque insecurities of the
road.  They have neither the bully-ism of our own
club-wielders nor the childishness of Asiatic officers.
Except in blistering Bailen the bearing of every
pair I met--they never travel singly--was such
as to win at once the confidence of the stranger
and to draw out of him such facts as it is their
duty to learn so naturally that it seemed but a
mutual exchange of politenesses.  There are, no
doubt, petty corruptions in so large a body, but in
the presence of almost any of them one has a
conviction that their first thought is their duty.

The highway ended its climb at noon in La Granja--The
Grange--residence of the king in spring
and autumn, a town little Spanish in aspect
seated in a carefully cropped forest at the base of
a thickly wooded mountain.  I roamed unchallenged
for half the afternoon through the royal
park, replete with fountains compared with which
those of Versailles are mere water-squirts;
playthings that Philip the half-mad accused of
costing three million and amusing him three minutes.
I was more fortunate, for they cost me nothing and
amused me fully half an hour.

After which I picked up the highway again and,
winding around the regal village, struck upward into
the mountains of Guardarrama.  At the hamlet
of Valsain I had just paused at the public spring
when the third or fourth tramp I had seen on the
road in all Spain swung around a bend ahead,
marching doggedly northward.  As I stooped to drink,
a moan and a thud sounded behind me.  I turned
quickly around to behold the roadster writhing in
the middle of the highway, the gravel of which had
cut and gashed one side of his face.  The simple
villagers, swarming wide-eyed out of their houses,
would have it at first that he was my companion and
I to blame for his mishap.  He bore patent signs
of months on the road, being burned a tawny brown
in garb and face by the sun that was evidently the
author of his misfortune.  For a time the village
stood open-mouthed about him, the brawny
housewives now and then giving vent to their sympathy
and helpless perplexity by a long-drawn "ay de
mi!"  I suggested water, and a dozen women,
dashing away with the agility of middle-aged cows,
brought it in such abundance that the victim was
all but drenched to the skin before I could drive
them off.  He revived a bit and while a woman
clumsily washed the blood and gravel from his face,
I addressed him in all the languages I could muster,
for he was evidently no Spaniard.  The only
response was a few inarticulate groans, and when he
had been carried to a grassy slope in the shade,
I went on, knowing him in kind if awkward hands.

A half-perpendicular hour passed by, and I
seemed to have left Spain behind.  The road was
toiling sharply upward through deep forests of
evergreen, cool as an Alpine valley, opening now
and then to offer a vista of thick treetops and a
glimpse of red-tiled villages; a scene as different
from sterile, colorless, sunken-cheeked Castille as
could well be imagined.  Nor did the dusk descend
so swiftly in these upper heights.  The sun had
set when I reached the summit at six thousand feet
and, passing through the Puerto de Navacerrada,
started swiftly downward in the thickening gloom;
but it was some time before the night had settled
down in earnest.

I had marched well into it when I was suddenly
startled by a sound of muffled voices out of the
darkness ahead.  I moved forward noiselessly, for
this lonely pass has many a story to tell.  A dim
light shone through what appeared to be a window.
I shouted for admittance and a moment later found
myself in the hovel of a peon caminero.

Within, besides the family, were two educated
Spaniards, one indeed who had been a secretary in
the American Legation up to the outbreak of the
recent war.  When he had been apprised of my
mode of travel and my goal, he stared wonderingly
at me for a moment and then stepped out with me
into the night.  Marching a few paces down the
highway until we had rounded some obstruction, he
pointed away into the void.

"Do you see those lights?" he asked.

Far away and to the right, so far and so high
in the heavens that they seemed constellations,
twinkled three clusters of lights, almost in a row
but far separated one from another.

"The third and farthest," said my companion,
"is El Escorial; and your time is well-chosen, for
to-morrow is the day of Saint Lawrence, her patron
saint."

We returned to the hut, where the wife of the peon
was moved to cook me a bowl of garbanzos and
spread me a blanket on the stone floor.  In the
morning the sharply descending highway carried me
quickly down the mountain, and by sunrise I was
back once more in the familiar Castille.  It was
verging on noon when, surmounting a sterile rise,
I caught sight of the dome and towers of the
Escorial.  A roadside stream, of which the water was
lukewarm, removed the grime of travel, and I
climbed sweltering into the village of Escorial de
Arriba, pitched on a jagged shoulder of the calcined
mountain high above the monastery.

Spain is wont to show her originality and indifference
to the convenience of travelers, and on this, the
anniversary of the grilling of him in whose honor
it was built, the great monastery was closed for the
only time during the year.  I experienced no regret,
however, for the vast gloomy structure against its
background of barren, rocky hills had far too much
the aspect of some dank prison to awaken any desire
to enter.  Least impressive of famous buildings, the
Escorial is certainly the most oppressive.  There
is poetry, inspiration in many a building, in the Taj
Mahal, the Cathedral of Cologne; but not in the
Escorial.  It suggests some frowning, bulky
bourgeois of forty whose mother thinks him and who
would fain believe himself one of the most poetic
and spiritual of men.

I wandered away the day in the town, drifting
in the afternoon down into the village "de Abajo."
There, in the multitude about the stone-pile of a
bullring, I ran across Curdito in festive garb.  He
was scheduled to kill all three bulls of the day's
córrida, but in spite of his urgent invitation I felt
in no mood to sit out the blistering afternoon on
a bare stone slab of this rough-and-tumble plaza.

El Escorial was so overrun with visitors to her
annual celebration that not a lodging of any sort
was to be had in either the upper or the lower
village.  The discovery brought me no shock, for
a night out of doors I neither dreaded nor
regretted.  But as I sauntered at dusk down past the
great building into the flanking "woods of
Herrera," I could not but wonder how those
travelers who bewail the accommodations of the "only
possible hotel" would have met the situation.

Behind the monastery extends a broad, silent
forest, not over thick, and beneath the trees squat
bushes and brown heather.  I spread the day's copy
of the *Heraldo* between two shrubs and, stretching
out at my ease, fell to munching the lunch I had
bought in the village market.  Let the circumstances
be right and I know few more genuine joys
than to sleep the night out of doors.  Lie down in
the open while a bit of daylight still lingers, or
awaken there when the dawn has come, and there is a
feeling of sordidness, mixed with the ludicrous, a
sense of being an outcast prone on the common
earth.  But while the night, obscuring all details,
hangs its canopy over the world there are few
situations more pleasing.

When I had listened a while to the panting of the
August night I fell asleep.  For weeks past I had
been viewing too many famous spots, perhaps, had
been delving too constantly into the story of Spain,
My constant use of Castilian, too, had borne fruit;
English words no longer intruded even on my inner
meditations.  Was it possible also that the market
lunch had been too heavy, or the nearness of the
gloomy monastery too oppressive?  At any rate
I fell to dreaming.

At first there passed a procession of all
Spain,--arrieros, peasants, Andalusian maidens, toreros,
priests, Jesús the tramp, a chanting water-seller,
merchants and beggars; close followed by two
guardias civiles who looked at me intently as they
passed.  Then suddenly in their place Moors of
every garb and size were dancing about me.  They
seemed to be celebrating a victory and to be
preparing for some Mohammedan sacrifice.  A mullah
advanced upon me, clutching a knife.  I started to
my feet, a distant bell boomed heavily, and the
throng vanished like a puff of smoke.

Away off above, in a hollow in the gaunt
mountain, I made out gradually the form of a man
sitting pensive, elbows on knees, gazing
dark-browed down upon me.  He was in royal robes, and
all at once he seemed to start, to grow in size,
and a line across his breast expanded to the letters
"Felipe II."  Larger and larger he grew until he
overtowered the mountain itself; then slowly,
scowlingly he rose and strode down upon me.  A
women joined him, a scrawny woman who laid a
hand inertly in his, and I recognized Bloody Mary,
who seemed thus in an instant to have leaped over
the seas from her island kingdom to join her gloomy
husband.

In rapid succession new figures appeared,--Herrera
first, a torpid, lugubrious man strangely
like the building he has left behind; then quickly
a multitude, through which strolled a man whose
crown bore the name "Pedro," running his sword
with a chuckle of devilish laughter through any
that came within easy reach, young or old, asleep
or awake.  Of a sudden there stalked forth from
nowhere a lean, deep-eyed man of fifty, a huge
parchment volume under one arm, an almost
cynical, yet indulgent smile on his countenance; and
as if to prove who he was there raced down over
the mountain a man not unlike him in appearance,
astride a caricature of a horse, and behind him a
dumpy, wondering peasant ambling on an ass.  The
cavalier sprang suddenly from his hack and fell
affectionately on the shoulder of the parchment-bearer,
then bounding back into the saddle he
charged straight for Felipe, who, stepping to one
side, flung, backhanded, Mary his wife far out of
sight over the mountain.

A sound drew my attention to another side.
Across the plain was marching with stately tread
a long file of Moors, each carrying in one hand his
head, by the hair.

"Los Abencerrajes!" I seemed to shout; and
almost before it was uttered there remained only
Felipe and behind him a score of indistinct forms.
He waved a hand toward me and turned his back,
and the company moved down upon me unlimbering
a hundred instruments of torture.  Distant bells were
tolling mournfully.  A priest advanced holding
aloft a crucifix and chanting in sepulchral voice:

.. class:: center

   "The hour of heretics sounds."

.. vspace:: 2

Louder and funereally rang the dismal bells; the
torturers drew near; I struggled to rise to my
feet--and awoke.

The bells of the monastery were booming out
over the night.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CRUMBLING CITIES`:

.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER XI


.. class:: center medium

   CRUMBLING CITIES

.. vspace:: 2

It was well along in the next afternoon that I
descended at the station of Avila and climbed
a long dusty mile into the city.  A scent of the dim,
half-forgotten past hovered over the close-walled,
peculiarly garbed place.  When I had made a
circuit of her ancient wall, through which her no
less time-worn cathedral thrusts its hips, I drifted
down into the dusty vega below, where in the church
of Santo Tomás sleeps the dead hope of "los reyes
católicos."  If the sculptor be trustworthy the
prince would have been an intelligent, kindly lad,
even though his martial valor might never have
rivaled that of his stout-hearted mother.  Returned
to the city, I strolled for an hour along the lofty
Paséo del Rastro, watching the sun sink red behind
the serrated jumble of mountains on the far western
horizon, beyond which lay my next stopping-place;
and so to bed in the Posada de la Estrella amid the
munching asses and snoring arrieros.

Avila is connected with Salamanca by rail, but the
route forms a sharp angle with its apex many miles
to the north.  I had decided, therefore, to walk.
Swinging down through the western city gate and
across the babbling Adaja by the aged stone
bridge, I clambered again upward to where a huge
stone cross invites to a rest in its shade and a final
retrospect of crumbling Avila and her many-turreted,
constraining wall.  An easy two-days' walk
lay before me.  For had not Heir Baedeker, so
seldom in error as to plain facts, announced the
distance as thirty-five miles?

As I wended on up the hillside, however, I was
suddenly stricken profane by a stone sign-post
rising before me with the dismal greeting:

.. class:: center

   "Salamanca 99 kilómetres."

.. vspace:: 2

Herr Baedeker was wrong by a little matter of
thirty miles.

But I had set the time of my entrance into
Salamanca; delay would bring havoc to my delicately
adjusted itinerary.  I doubled my pace.

The way led through a country as savage of
aspect as any in Spain, waterless, dusty, glaring,
overspread with huge rocks tumbled pell-mell as if
the Mason of the universe had thrown here the
materials left over from His building.  By
afternoon a few lean farms began to crowd their way
in between the rocks, now and then a sturdy, thick-set
tree found place, and over all nature hovered
great clouds of locusts whose refrain reminded how
euphonious is the Spaniard's name for what we dub
"dog days,"--"canta la chicharra--the locust
sings."  The inhabitants of the region seemed
somewhat more in fortune's favor than the rest
of the peninsula.  Passing peasants, though rare,
had none a hungry look; their carts were fancifully
carved and painted both on body and wheels,
while the trappings of their cattle were decorative
in the extreme.

All a summer day I tramped forward over hill
and hollow toward the great jagged range, the
hardy trees dying out, the fields growing in size and
number, but the sierra seeming to hold ever as far
aloof.  Beyond a small withered forest in which
were roaming flocks of brown goats, I climbed a
steady five miles to a summit village exhibiting every
outward sign of poverty and most fittingly named
"Salvadios--God save us."  The keeper of its
one quasi-public house deigned after long argument
to set before me a lame excuse for supper, but
loudly declined to furnish lodging.  I withdrew,
therefore, to a threshing-floor across the way,
heaped high with still unbroken bundles of wheat,
and put in a shiveringly cold night--so great is
the contrast between the seething plains by day and
this hilltop bitten by every wind--not once falling
into a sound sleep for the gaunt, savage curs that
prowled about me.

At dawn I was already afoot and three hours
later entered the city of Penaranda, in the
outskirts of which a fine plaza de toros was building,
but within all the confines of which was no evidence
of school, library, nor indeed of restaurant.  I
contented myself with a bit of fruit and trudged on.
This may not, perhaps, have been the hottest day
of all that Spanish summer, but it bore certainly all
the earmarks thereof.  The earth lay cracked and
blistered about me, the trees writhing with the heat,
the rays rising from the rocky soil like a dense
stage-curtain of steam.  In a shriveled and parched
pueblo of mud huts, exactly resembling the villages
of Palestine, I routed out a kindly old woman for
a foreshortened lunch; and then on again in the
inferno, choking fields of grain and vineyards soon
becoming numerous on either hand.  The wise
husbandmen, however, had sought refuge, and in all
the grilling landscape was not a human being to
be seen, save and except a sweat-dripping
pedestrian from foreign parts straining along the
scorching highway.

This swung at length to the right, swooped
down through a river that had not a drop of water,
and staggering to the top of an abrupt knoll,
showed me far off, yet in all distinctness, a rich
reddish-brown city gathered together on a low
hilltop and terminating in glinting spires.  It was
Salamanca; and of all the cities I have come thus
upon unheralded and from the unpeopled highway
none can rival her in richness of color, like ripe old
wine, a city that has grown old gracefully and with
increasing beauty.  So fascinating the sight that
I sat down beneath the solitary tree by the way to
gaze upon it--and to swing half round the circuit
of the shrub as the sun drove the scanty shadow
before it.

But I was still far off the golden-brown city and,
setting slowly onward in the descending evening, I
all but encircled the place before the carretera,
coming upon the ancient puente romano, clambered
upward into its unrivaled Blaza Mayor.

Just back of this, four stories above the Plaza
de la Verduga, or Place of the Green Stuff, lives
a widow whose little spare chamber is let in the
winter season to some unpretentious student of the
now unpretentious university.  I engaged this,
together with what of physical nourishment should
be reasonable, at three pesetas a day.  As I took
possession, the daughter of the hostess, a muchacha
of eight, peered in upon me hugging a doll under
one arm.

"Qué muñeca más bonita!" I hazarded, which
turned out to be unwise, for the homage so
overcame her diffidence that she came in not only to
offer the information that my complexion strangely
resembled that of a lobster in the salmantino
museum, but such a fund of further information that
it was long before I had inveigled her outside the
door and, throwing myself on the bed, slept the
clock round.

As in many another city it had been my fortune
to reach Salamanca on the eve of one of her great
festivals.  Indeed, that must be a foresighted
traveler who can journey through Spain without
being frequently caught up in the whirlpool of some
local fiesta.  The excuse this time was Assumption
Day.  The festivities within the city walls offered
nothing of extraordinary, being chiefly confined to
a band concert in the central plaza.  Richer by far
would be the richest city of the earth could she
purchase and transplant into her own midst the
Plaza Mayor of Salamanca, with its small forest
of palms, the rich brown medallioned façades and
surrounding colonnades beneath which the
salmantino is wont to stroll, la salmantina on his arm,
while the band plays in the flower-shrouded stand
in its center.  Salamanca might sell, too, in spite
of her boast that it is the finest in Spain, being
poorer than the proverbial church mouse, were she
not also Spanish and prouder than she is poor.

The real fiesta, however, took the form of a
bullfight that had a character all its own.
Salamanca, as I have hinted, is no longer a city of
wealth.  Indeed, those occasions are rare in these
modern days when she can indulge in a round of
the national sport, even though she possesses one
of the largest bullrings in Spain.  On this great
holiday, however, the city fathers had decided that
nothing within the bounds of reason was too good
for the recreating of Salamanca's long unfeasted
children.  A full-sized bullfight would, to be sure,
have far overstepped the bounds above mentioned.
But after long debate and deep investigation it had
been concluded that a córrida with four bulls, no
horses, one real matador, and seats of all shades and
distinctions at one peseta each might be conceded.

With this unlimited choice of vantage-points at
my own price I went out early to the plaza and
picked my place in the sombra in what was evidently
a section reserved for the guardia civil; for before
long the guards, in full uniform and their
three-cornered hats, began to gather about me, first in
pairs, then in groups, then in swarms, until I was
wholly, shut in and surrounded by guardias civiles
like a dandelion in the center of a bed of tulips.
Far from resenting my intrusion, however, if such
it was, they initiated me into their order with botas
and cigarettes and included me in their conversation
and merriment during the rest of the day.

The entertainment began at four.  With that
exception, however, it had few points of similarity
with the regulation córrida.  The procession
entered, fully six men in torero garb--though that
of two or three of them fitted like amateur theatrical
costumes--followed by two horsemen, two, in
their shirt-sleeves, as was also señor el alcalde in
his box.  The key thrown, the fight began; with
the elimination of the one unquestionably
unpleasant feature,--the killing of horses.  Even
aged hacks cost money and, as I have already more
than once suggested, money is a rare commodity in
Salamanca.  When the bull had been worried a bit
with the cloaks, the banderilleros proceeded at once
to plant their darts.  The professional matador, a
young man rejoicing in the name of
Trueno--"Thunder"--had, therefore, a far more difficult
task than usual, for more than anything else it is
the venting of his rage and strength on the
blindfolded steeds that tires the bull, and on this
occasion it was a still wild and comparatively fresh
animal which the diestro was called upon to face.
He despatched his three allotted bulls, however,
without accident and to the vociferous satisfaction
of the audience, which filled even at the low price
only a bit more than the shaded section.  It was
not, as the guardia beside me was at some pains
to explain, that there were not salmantinos quite
sufficient to pack the plaza to overflowing, but that there
were not pesetas enough in town to go round.  In
the throng, too, were no small number of peasants
from all the widely surrounding country, some in
the old dress with knee breeches.

But to touch upon the unusual features of the
córrida.  As a part of the worrying of the second
bull a chulo placed a chair in the ring and,
standing upon it with neither weapon nor cloak, awaited
the charge.  When the bull had all but reached him
he sprang suddenly into the air, the animal dashed
under him and, falling upon the unoffending article
of furniture, dissolved it thoroughly into its
component parts and scattered them broadcast about the
arena.

The most nerve-thrilling performance, however,
that it was my privilege to see in all the devil-may-care
land of Spain was the feat that followed
immediately on the death of the chair-wrecker.  It
was the "star attraction" of the day and was
announced on the posters in all the Spaniard's richness
of superlatives--and he is a born and instinctive
writer of "ads."  Clinging as closely as possible to
the eloquent phraseology of the original the
announcement may be set forth in near-English as
follows:

"Various are the chances (tricks) which are
executed in the different plazas of Spain inside
the taurine art, but none that has more called
attention than that which is practised by JOSÉ
VILLAR son of the memorable matador (killer,
murderer) of bulls Villarillo who"--not father
Illo, who has left off all earthly sport, but son
José--"locating himself in the center of the arena and
placed with the head towards below and the feet by
above imploring the public to maintain the most
impressive silence during the risk (fate) consummates
the trick (chance) of Tancredo; very well, this
Management not reflecting on (sparing) either
expense or sacrifice has contracted with him in order
that he shall fulfill (lift, pull off; *sic.*) this trick
(risk) on the third bull to the end that the salmantinos
shall know it, with which program this Management
believes to have filled to the full the desires of
the aficionados (rooters, fans, amateurs)."

The second bull, therefore, having been ignominiously
dragged to oblivion and the butcher-shop, and
the blood patches of the arena resanded, there sallied
forth from the further gate a small, athletic man
of thirty-five or so, hatless--and partly hairless--dressed
from head to foot in the brightest red, of a
material so thin that the movement of his every
muscle could be plainly seen beneath it.  He was
entirely empty-handed.  He marched with sprightly
stride across the ring and, bowing low to the alcalde
in his box above, addressed to the public a warning
and an entreaty to maintain the utmost silence during
the "consummation of the risk."  An assistant then
appeared, carrying a small wooden box with a piece of
gas-pipe six feet long fixed upright in the top of it.
This Villar placed exactly in the center of the ring,
a hundred yards or more in every direction from the
barrier.  Across the gas-pipe, near the top, he
fastened a much shorter piece, thus forming a cross.
On the box he placed a circular roll of cloth, stood on
his head thereon, hooked his toes over the cross-piece,
waved a hand gaily to the public, and folded his arms.
Every other torero stepped outside the ring, and the
toril gate swung open.

A wild snort, and there plunged into the arena as
powerful and savage a brute as it had ever yet been
my lot to see.  For an instant he stood motionless,
blinking in the blinding sunlight.  Then suddenly
catching sight of the statue flaming with the hated
color, he shot away toward it with the speed of an
express-train--a Spanish express at least--until,
a bare three feet from it, he stopped instantly
stone-still by thrusting out his forelegs like a
Western broncho, then slowly, gingerly tiptoed up to the
motionless figure, sniffed at it, and turned and
trotted away.

The public burst forth in a thunderclap of
applause.  Villar got right end up as calmly and
gracefully as a French count in a drawing-room, laid a
hand on his heart, and smiling serenely, bowed once,
twice, th---- and just then a startled roar went up
from the tribunes, for the bull had suddenly turned
and, espying the man in red, dashed at him with
lowered horns and a bellow of anger.

There is nowhere registered, so far as my investigations
carry, the record of José Villar, son of Villarillo,
in the hundred-yard dash.  But this much
may be asserted with all assurance, that it has in it
nothing of that slow, languid, snail-like pace of the
ten-second college champion.  Which was well; for
some two inches below his flying heels, as he set a new
record likewise in the vaulting of barriers, the
murderous horns crashed into the oak plank tablas with the
sound of a freight collision and an earnestness that
gave work to the plaza carpenters for some twenty
minutes to come.

Therein Villar was more fortunate than the
Mexican Tancredo, inventor of the "suerte," and for
whom it was named.  Tancredo, like Dr. Guillotin,
was overreached by his own invention, for while his
record for the hundred was but a second or two less
than that of Villar, it was just this paltry margin
that made him, on the day next following his last
professional appearance, the chief though passive
actor in a spectacle of quite a different character.

The "Suerte de Tancredo" has never won any
vast amount of popularity in Spain, except with the
spectators.  Toreros in general manifest a hesitation
akin to bashfulness in thus seeking the plaudits of
the multitude.  By reason of which diffidence among
his fellows, José, son of Villarillo, memorable matador
de toros, pockets after each such recreation a sum
that might not seem overwhelming to an American
captain of industry or to a world-famous tenor, but
one which the average Spaniard cannot name in a
single breath.

Salamanca's day of amusement did not, however,
by any means end here.  Beneath the name of
"Thunder," the professional matador, there was
printed with equal bombast that of FERNANDO
MARTÍN.  Now Fernando was quite evidently a
salmantino butt, a tall gawky fellow whose place in
the society of Salamanca was apparently very
similar to that of those would-be or has-been baseball
players to be found vegetating in many of our
smaller towns.  Like them, too, Fernando was in all
probability wont to hover about the pool-rooms and
dispensing-parlors of his native city, boasting of his
untested prowess at the national game.  That his
talents might not, therefore, forever remain hidden
under a wineglass, and also, perhaps, because his
services might be engaged at five hundred pesetas less
than the five hundred that a professional sobresaliente
would have demanded, the thoughtful city fathers had
caused him to be set down on the program,
likewise in striking type, as "SUBSTITUTE WITH
NECESSITY (CON NECESIDAD) TO KILL THE FOURTH BULL."

It was this "necesidad" that worked the undoing
of Fernando Martín.  When the customary by-play
had been practised on the fourth animal, enter
Fernando with bright red muleta, false pigtail, glinting
sword, and anything but the sure-of-one's-self
countenance of a professional espada.  He faced the
brute first directly in front of the block of guardias
civiles, and the nearest he came to laying the animal
low at the first thrust was to impale on a horn and
sadly mutilate a sleeve of his own gay and rented
jacket.  The crowd jeered, as crowds will the world
over at the sight of a man whose father and mother
and even grandfather they have known for years
trying to prove himself the equal of men imported
from elsewhere.  Fernando advanced again,
maneuvering for position, though with a peculiar
movement of the knees not usual among toreros, and
which was all too visible to every eye in the hooting
multitude.  Trueno, the professional, stuck close at
his side in spite of the clamorous demand of the
public that he leave the salmantino to play out his
own game unhampered.  Martín hazarded two or
three more nerveless thrusts, with no other damage,
thanks to the watchful eye and cloak of Trueno, than
one toss of ten feet and a bleeding groin.  By this
time the jeering of his fellow-townsmen had so
overshadowed the tyro's modicum of good sense that he
turned savagely on his protector and ordered him to
leave the ring.  Fortunately Trueno was not of the
stuff to take umbrage at the insults of a foolish man
in a rage, or the population of Salamanca would
incontestably have been reduced by one before that
merry day was done.

The utmost length of time between the entrance of
a professional matador for the last act and the death
of the bull is four or five minutes.  Fernando
Martín trembled and toiled away ten, twenty, thirty,
forty.  Slowly, but certainly and visibly his bit of
courage oozed away; the peculiar movement of his
knees grew more and more pronounced.  No longer
daring to meet the bull face to face, he skulked along
the barrier until the animal's tail was turned and,
dashing past him at full speed, stabbed backward
at his neck as he ran, to the uproarious merriment
of the spectators.  Trueno saved his life certainly
a score of times.  At last, when the farce had run
close upon fifty minutes, a signal from the alcalde
sent across the arena the sharp note of a bugle, two
*cabestros*, or trained steers were turned into the ring,
and the bull, losing at once all belligerency, trotted
docilely away with them.  The star of Fernando
Martín, would-be matador de toros, was forever set,
and if he be not all immune to ridicule his native
city surely knows him no more.

It is law that no bull that has once entered the
ring shall live.  Curious to know what was to be the
fate of this animal, I sprang over the barrier and
hurried across to the gate by which he had
disappeared.  There I beheld a scene that forever
dispelled any notion that the task of the matador is an
easy one, however simple it may look from the
tribunes.  The bull was threshing to and fro within a
small corral, bellowing with rage and lashing the air
with his tail.  It required six men and a half-hour of
time to lasso and drag him to the fence.  With a
hundred straining at the rope his head was drawn
down under the gate, a man struck him several blows
with a sledge, and another, watching his opportunity,
swung his great navaja and laid wide open the
animal's throat.

It was late when, having mingled for some time
with the country folk dancing on the sandy plain
before the plaza, I returned to the city for my
bundle and repaired to the station.  A twelve-hour
ride was before me.  For I had decided to explore a
territory where even the scent of tourists is
unknown,--the northwest province of Galicia.

The train that I boarded at eleven was crowded
with countrymen returning from the day's festival,
a merry but in no sense intoxicated company, in
which I saw my first wooden-shod Galicians.  The
car was, for once, of the American pattern--though
of Spanish width--with thirty seats each
large enough for three persons.  The brakeman,
too, who stood lantern on arm in the open door,
bore an unusual resemblance to an American "shack."

A dozen men were standing in the aisle, but to my
surprise one seat near the center of the car seemed
to be unoccupied.  When I reached it, however, I
found a priest stretched out on his back, his hands
clasped over his paunch, snoring impressively.  I
carried a protest to the brakeman and with a snort
he swooped down upon the sleeper.  At sight of him,
however, he recoiled.

"Carajo!" he cried.  "Es un padre!  I could n't
disturb his reverence."

I stooped and touched the monopolist on the
shoulder, being in no mood to remain standing all
night.  Moreover, I had long been curious to know
the Spaniard's attitude toward a man who should
treat a priest as an ordinary human being.  "His
reverence" grunted.  I touched him again.  His
snore lost a beat or two and began once more.  I
shook him more forcibly.  He opened his blood-shot
eyes, snorted "Huh!" so much like a certain
monopolist of the animal kingdom that even the passengers
about me laughed at the resemblance--and fell again
to snoring.  I sat down gently on his fat legs and,
when he kicked me off, confiscated a place.  He sat
up with the look of a man whose known world has
suddenly crumbled about his ears and glared at me
with bulging eyes a full two minutes, while over the
faces of the onlookers flitted a series of winks and
smiles.

He was just huddling himself up again in the two-thirds
of the seat that remained to him when the door
opened and Trueno, the matador, his little *coleta*
peeping out from beneath his hat, his sword-case
under one arm, entered and, spying the extra place,
sat down in it with scant ceremony.  We fell to
talking.  The torero was a jovial, explosive,
devil-may-care fellow who looked and dressed his character
well.  The priest slunk off somewhere in the thickest
hours and his place was taken by a peasant who had
been standing near me since leaving Salamanca.
When he found opportunity to break into the
conversation he addressed me with an amused smile:

"You are not then a Catholic, señor?"

"No."

"Ah!  A socialist!" he cried with assurance.

For to the masses of southern Europe socialist
and non-Catholic are synonymous.

"I doubt, señor," I observed, "whether you
yourself are a Catholic."

"Cómo, señor!" he cried, raising his hands in a
comical gesture of quasi-horror.  "I, a cristino
viejo, no Catholic!"

"Do you go to church and do what your cura commands?"

"What nonsense!" he cried, using a still more
forcible term.  "Who does?  My wife goes now
and then to confession.  I go to church, señor, to
be baptized, married, and buried."

"Why go then?"

"Caramba!" he gasped.  "How else shall a man
be buried, married, and baptized?"

Toward morning I fell into a doze, from which I
was awakened by the extraordinary sensation of
feeling cold.  Dawn was touching the far horizon.  The
train was straining upward through a sharply rising
country.  As the sun rose we came in sight of
Astorga, standing drearily on her bleak hilltop, and in
memory of Gil Blas and for the unlimbering of my
legs I alighted and climbed into the town.  It proved
as uninteresting as any in Spain, and before the
morning was old I was again riding northwestward.
Soon there came an utter change of scene; tunnels
grew unaccountable, the railroad winding its way
doggedly upward through a wild, heavily wooded
mountain region that had little in common with
familiar Spanish landscapes.  In mid-afternoon I
dismounted at the station of Lugo, the capital of Galicia.





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.. _`WILDEST SPAIN`:

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   CHAPTER XII


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   WILDEST SPAIN

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Nearest of all the Iberian peninsula to our
own land, the ancient kingdom of Galicia is
as well-nigh unknown to us as any section of Europe.
As far back as mankind's memory carries it has been
Spain's "last ditch."  Up into this wild mountain
corner of the peninsula retreated in its turn each
subdued race as conqueror after conqueror swept
over the land,--the aboriginal Iberians before the
Celts, the Celtiberians before the coast-hugging
Phoenicians and Carthaginians, these before the
omniverous Romans, followed as the centuries rolled
on by Vandal, Suevi, Goth and Moor.  Further
they could not flee, for behind them the world falls
away by sheer cragged cliffs into the fathomless
sea.  Here the fugitives melted together into a
racial amalgam, an uncourageous amalgam on the
whole, for in each case those who reached the
fastnesses were that remnant of the race that preferred
life to honor, those who "fought and ran away,"
or who took to their heels even earlier in the proceedings.

Yet it was a long two centuries after Hannibal
had followed his father Hasdrubal into the Stygian
realms of the defeated, after Rome had covered
the rest of the peninsula with that network of roads
that remains to this day, that the power of the
outside world pushed its way into this tumbled
wilderness.  But for the necessity of loot to pay the
gambling debts of his merry youth the conqueror indeed
might never have appeared.  Yet appear he did,--a
young Roman just beginning to display a
crownal baldness, known to his legions as Caesar and
answering to his friends of the Roman boulevards
and casinos to the name of Julius.  He conquered;
and when he, too, had written his memoirs and
passed his perforated way, that lucky heir of all
Roman striving caused to be built in these his
mountains a city that should--like all that sprouted or
grew under his reign--bear his name,--"Lucus
Augusti--Gus's place."

To-day it is Lugo, a modest city ensconced in the
lap of a plain near a thousand feet above the railway
station that bears its name.  Politically Spanish, it
is so in little else.  The last traces of the Arab, so
indelible in the rest of the peninsula, have
disappeared.  The racial amalgam, now the gallego, is
close akin to the Portuguese, like all long dominated
peoples docile, unassertive, born to be a servant
to mankind.  He is the chief butt, the low comedian
of the Spanish stage, slow, loutish, heavy of mind
and body, without a suggestion of the fire of that
bubbling child of enthusiasm, the Andaluz; none of
the native dignity and consciousness of personal
worth of the Castilian, not even the dreaminess of the
Manchegan.  He is fitted to be what he is,--the
domestic, the server of his fellow-countrymen.

From the posada at the city gate I climbed to
Lugo's chief promenade and Alameda, the top of
her surrounding wall.  This is some forty feet high,
of flat, irregular slabs of slate-stone on Roman
foundations, with a circuit of nearly a mile and a
half.  The town within and below is of the same
material, the dull gray or drab so predominating
as to give the place the somberness of a stone village
of Wales.  The inhabitants, moreover, have little of
the Spaniard's love of color, being as sober in garb
as in demeanor.  It is noteworthy that those
communities that are least embellished by nature are most
prone to garb themselves in all the colors of the
spectrum.  The Venetian above his muddy water
has been noted in all times as a colorist; the
peasants of the Apennines barely a hundred miles away
have very little brightness of dress.

So the Lugense; for if the town itself is somber
gray, the moss and vines that overrun the low,
leaden houses, the gardens scattered among them,
the flowers that trail from the windows of the
dwellings built medieval-fashion into the walls make the
scene gay even within.  While outwardly it is
unsurpassed.  From the wall-top promenade the eye
commands an endless vista of richest green landscape,
a labyrinth of munificent hill forms and mountain
ridges dense-wooded with veritable Alpine forests
rolling away on every side to the uttermost horizon.

In the town itself is almost nothing of what the
tourist calls "sights"; which is, perhaps, a chief
reason why his shadow almost never falls within it.
There is only the dull, bluish-stone cathedral, and
an atmosphere wholly individual; nothing exciting,
nothing extraordinary, though one amusing detail
of life is sure to attract attention.  Like many
towns of Spain, Lugo obtains her water through the
mouths of stone lions in her central plaza.  But here
the fountain spouts are for some Gallegan reason
high above the flagging, far out of reach.  Whence
the plaza and the streets of the city are at all hours
overrun with housewives and domestics carrying not
merely pitchers but a tin tube some ten feet long
through which to conduct the water into their
receptacles.  In nothing does the town differ from
familiar Spain more than in temperature.  Her
climate is like that of Bar Harbor.  A change in a
few hours as from Florida in August to Mount
Desert brought quickly home to me the fact that my
garb was fitted only for perpetual summer.  Almost
with the setting sun I fell visibly to shivering, and
by dark I was forced to take refuge in bed.

I had come into Galicia proposing to strike across
country to Oviedo, capital of the Asturias, in the
hope of getting wholly and thoroughly "off the
beaten track."  Therein I seemed fully to have
succeeded.  Inquiries in Lugo elicited the information
that Oviedo was reputed to lie somewhere to the
eastward.  Nothing more; except some nebulous
notion of a highway beginning at the base of the
city wall leading for a day or two in that direction.
For which uncertainty I was in no sense sorry,
delighted with the prospect of exploring by a route of
my own that wooded wilderness of mountains that
spreads endlessly away from Lugo's promenade,
certain of finding a land and a people unsullied by
tourists.

Dinner over on the day after my arrival, I
descended from the city of Augustus by the unpaved
road that was to set me a little way on my journey.
It was soon burrowing through dense, scented
forests, broken by scores of little deep green meadows
along the way; so many and so inviting that it
required a strong tug of the will to keep from lying
down for a nap in each of them, in memory of the
many grassless, siestaless, fly-bitten days in the rest
of the peninsula.  Truly the good things of this
world are unevenly distributed.  In fact, only by
a dead lift of the imagination could one
comprehend that this also was Spain.  Switzerland,
perhaps, but never a part and portion of the same
country with the sear, deforested uplands of Castille, the
sandy stretches of Andalusia, with osseous and all
but treeless La Mancha.  The division line between
Europe and Africa was meant surely to be the
Pyrenees and this Cantabrian range rather than the
Mediterranean.

When darkness settled down I halted at a jumbled
stone hamlet, where payment was refused except for
the few cents' worth of peasant fare I ate.  For my
bed, was spread in an open stable a bundle of newly
threshed wheat-straw that was longer than myself.
A half-day's tramp had not left me sleepy.  The
night lay cool and silent about me, and I sank into
that reverie of contentment that comes most surely
upon the wanderer when he has left the traveled
world behind and turns his face care-free toward the
unknown, that mysterious land across which
beckons the aërial little sprite men name *Wanderlust*.
For the joy of travel is not in arriving but in setting
forth, in moving onward; how fast matters little,
where, even less, but ever on and on, forgetting, for
the supremest satisfaction, that there is a goal to
attain.  Let a man wander away into unknown lands
smiling with summer, his journey's end little more
than conjecture, his day of arrival a matter of
indifference, and if he feel not then the joy of the
open road he may know for a certainty that he is
a hug-the-hearth, and no gipsy and a vagabond.

In the morning continued a roadway hobble-skirted
by forests, a country as pleasing as Caruso's
voice, as soothing to the traveler from stony Spain
as McDowell's music.  To enumerate the details of
life and landscape here is merely to tell by contrast
what the rest of Spain is not.  The inhabitants were
in the highest degree laconic, as taciturn as the
central and southern Spaniard is garrulous,
self-conscious to the point of bashfulness, a characteristic
as uncommon in the rest of the country as among
the Jews or Arabs; a heavy-handed, unobserving
peasantry that passed the stranger unaccosted,
almost unnoticed.  Such conversation as exchanged
must be introduced by the traveler.  The cheering
"Vaya!" was heard no more, the stock greeting
being a mumbled "Buenos."

In appearance, be the inspection not too close, this
mountain people well deserves the outworn epithet
"picturesque."  The women young and old wore
on their heads large kerchiefs of brilliant red, and
most of them a waist of the same color, offering
striking contrast to the rich green background, as the
latter was sure to be.  As footwear, except those
unpossessed of any, both sexes had wooden shoes
painted black and fancifully carved, which,
scraping along the highway, carried the thoughts quickly
back to Japan.  At nearer sight, however, something
of the picturesqueness was lost in the unfailing
evidences of a general avoidance of the bath and
washtub.

Of least interest were the dwellings of this
peasantry,--villages neither frequent nor large, more
properly mere heaps of gray huts built without
order or plan of the slate-stone of which the
province itself is chiefly formed, as was seen wherever
the outer soil had been stripped away and the
skeleton of the mountain laid bare.  For all the
character of the country abundance of rain and a
pains-taking agriculture gave good crops.  Galicia indeed
supports, though in poverty, the densest population
of the peninsula.  Wheat, Indian corn, and hay
abounded.  The former was stacked, and threshed
with flails--two customs unknown in Spain, as the
latter products are entirely.  The maize was sown.
A species of cabbage on a stalk some two feet long
was among the most common of the vegetables.

All these products grew, not on the level, but in
little isolated, precipitous fields in which it seemed
impossible that the laborers, male and female with
sickles or mattocks, could stand upright.  Flocks of
sheep and goats were many, and as the final change
from the Spain that I had hitherto known there was
nowhere silence.  The forests on either hand were
vocal with the songs of birds.  Mountain streams
came plunging, headlong down the ravines, or
brawled along through stony channels beside the
winding way.  The water was of the purest and
clearest, which may, perhaps, have led the inhabitants
to give most of their mundifying attention to
the vessels in which it was carried,--great oaken
buckets each with three wide hoops scoured spotless
and shining as a Hindu's *lota*.

But most unfailing breakers of the silence and
most characteristic of all the features of the province
was its vehicles.  The Phrygian peasants who
dragged their produce into Troy before the siege
had certainly as up-to-date a conveyance.  The
traveler's first encounter with one of these Homeric
contrivances is sure to be startling.  There is only one
word that exactly expresses their sound from afar,--the
French *bourdonner*--the noise of the bumblebee.
Indeed, when first I heard it I fell to
threshing about my ears, sure that one of those
insects was upon me.  Slowly the sound grew to the
meowling of a thousand cats, and around a turn of
the forest-hedged road came a peasant's cart drawn
by little brown oxen--they are as often cows--much
like our Jerseys in appearance, a great sheepskin
thrown over their heads, to the horns of which
the yoke was fastened.  The unwieldy edifice,
wabbling drunkenly as it came, consisted of little
more than two solid disks of wood like cistern covers
turning on a wooden axle, the whole having about
it neither an ounce of iron nor a smell of axle-grease.
Its pace certainly did not exceed a mile an hour,
the oxen see-sawing from side to side of the road,
twisting their burdened heads to stare at me with
curious, sad eyes.  As it passed, my ears literally
ached with its scream.  I doubled my pace to flee the
torture.  But there was no entire escape; hardly
once thereafter was I out of sound of a cart or two,
now screaming by, now "bourdonning" away across
some valley, buzzing at times even after the night
had settled down.

Early on this second day, which was Sunday, there
appeared a far more precipitous and rocky country
through which the road began to wind its way
upward amid a chaos of rugged tumbled valleys,
gaining by early afternoon an elevation above the line
of vegetation.  For two hours I kept lookout for a
bit of level space for a siesta, without finding a patch
of flat ground as large as my knapsack.  I stepped
over the edge of the highway and lay down on a
bank so sheer that I was obliged to brace my stick
against the small of my back to keep from pitching
down the thousand-foot slope into a brook; and even
as it was I awoke to find I had shifted some ten
feet down the hill.

The ascent thereafter grew still sharper, the
surrounding world being at last wholly enveloped in a
dense cloud.  From out of this I heard, at what I
fancied must be toward sunset, sounds of revelry, by
which, marching onward, I was soon encompassed,
though still unseeing and unseen.  Suddenly there
came waltzing toward me out of the fog a couple in
each other's arms, disappearing again as another
pair whirled forth out of the unknown.  Wandering
on through a merry but invisible multitude I ran all
but into the arms of two guardias civiles leaning on
their muskets.  They greeted me with vast surprise,
welcoming me to their mountain-top town of
Fonsagrada and, far from demanding my papers,
offered to find me a partner that I might join the
village in its Sunday celebration on the green.  I
declined such hilarity, but for an hour stood chatting
with them while the dancers whirled unseen about us.

Fonsagrada has no regular accommodations for
strangers.  The peregrinating band of musicians,
however, furnishing the day's melody, was to be
cared for in a sort of grocery, to which I repaired
with them when the dance was over.  Having
partaken of a substantial supper in which the far-famed
*bacalao*--cod preserved in great chunks in barrels
like salt pork; a main staple in this region--made
its initial appearance, I laid my case before the
proprietor.  He was a Yankee-like man in the middle
thirties, of modern business methods even though he
knew next to nothing of the world outside his
cloud-bound village.  Notwithstanding, therefore, that
there was no "costumbre" to sanction it, he bade
me spend the night under his roof--which I did all
too literally, for when I had left off swapping yarns
with the melodious nomads my host led the way to
the garret, half-filled with straw, where in the midst
of a too realistic dream I rose up suddenly and all
but shattered my head on the roof in question.

In the morning the clouds were still wandering like
lost souls through the streets of Fonsagrada.  A
mist that barely escaped being a rain was falling
when I set off in an attempt to follow the voluminous
directions of the dubious village.  According to these,
when I had passed the "Mesón de Galo," a lonely
stone tavern a few miles out, I left the road, which
was bending toward Gijón on the north coast, and
fell into a descending mountain path.  A tang of the
salt sea was in the air.  All the day through I
climbed, slipped, and scrambled over jagged mountain
slopes and through deep, rocky barrancas.  There
develops with much wandering an instinct to follow
the right fork of a mountain trail, slight hints that
could not be explained, but without the half-unconscious
noting of which I must have gone a score of
times astray.  Twice or thrice I stumbled into a
hamlet in some wrinkle of the range, a village of five or
six hovels huddling in the shadow of an enormous,
overtowering church, all built of flat field stones and
swarming with huge white dogs.

At Grandas, a bit larger village overhung by
massed up mountains, I was at length so fortunate
as to get after much search an intangible imitation
of a meal.  From there I panted a long time upward
and came out at last above a seemingly bottomless
gorge, a gorge so deep that I had scrambled nearly
a half-hour along its brink before I noted that far
down in its depths was a town, encircled by vertical
vineyards, like embroidery on the lower skirts of its
overhanging mountains.  My path lay plainly visible
on the opposite slope, only a long jump away, but a
jump for Pegasus or the princess of the Rosstrappe,
and I, mere mortal, was forced to wind a long hour
and a half to and fro on the rubbled face of the
mountain before I entered the town below, called Saline.

Before me lay the most laborious task of all my
Spanish journey.  A mountain as nearly perpendicular
as man could hope to ascend, without a break
or a knoll in all its slope, rose, a sheer wall, certainly
four thousand feet above.  The gorge seemed some
boundary set by the gods between two worlds.  Up
the face of the cliff a path had been laid out with
mathematical precision, every one of its score of legs
a toilsome climb over loose stones, with the sun,
untempered by a breath of wind, pouring down its fury
upon my back.  It was hot as Spain in the depth of
the canyon; it was chilling cold when I reached the
summit heavily crested in clouds and threw myself
down breathless on my back.  Darkness was coming
on, and I fell soon to shivering in the biting mountain
air and must rise and hurry forward.  It was not
strange that in the fog and darkness instinct failed
and that when finally I reached a village of eight or
nine hovels and inquired its name the inhabitants
replied "Figuerina," not in the least like the "La
Mesa" I had expected.

Of a brawny, weather-beaten girl milking a cow
by the light of a torch in what passed for the
principal street, I asked:

"Is there a posada in town?"

"No sé, señor," she answered.

"Don't know!  When your town has only nine houses?"

But she only stared dully at me through the gloom,
and I carried my inquiry elsewhere.  With no
better result, however, for each one I asked returned the
same laconic, "I don't know."  I had sat down on a
boulder in the center of the hamlet to puzzle over
this strange ignorance when a strapping mountaineer
approached through the darkness and led me with
few words to the house of the head man.  The latter
was in bed with a broken leg, having had the
misfortune to fall off his farm a few days before.  I was
taken before him as he lay propped up with pillows
and, after a few brief questions, he commanded his
family to make me at home.

Only at a distance are these mountain hamlets of
northern Spain inviting.  For the good people live,
indoors and out, in peace and equality with their pigs
and chickens, not because they are by nature unclean,
but because they know no other life than this, nor any
reason why their domestic animals should not be
treated as equals.  The wife of the village chief led
me into the living-room and kitchen.  I knew it was
that, for she said so.  The place was absolutely
dark.  Since leaving Lugo I had not seen a pane of
glass, and lamps of any sort appear to be unknown
in these hamlets of the Sierra de Rañadoiro.
There was, to be sure, a bit of fire in one corner,
but it gave not the slightest illumination, only a
thick smoke that wandered about looking for an exit,
and unsuccessfully, for there was nothing whatever in
the way of chimney, and the door had been closed
as we entered.  Smoker though I am, I began to
weep and did not once leave off while I remained in
the room.

The mustiness of a dungeon assailed the nostrils;
the silence was broken by a continual droning.  The
floor was stone.  In the room were six or eight men
and women, as I discovered little by little from their
voices.  Supper was announced, and a match I
struck showed an indistinct group of which I was a
part humped over a steaming kettle in the center of
the floor.  Into this all began to dip their bread.
I hung back, which the wife discovering by some
instinct, she made an exclamation I did not
understand and soon after there was thrust into my hands
a private bowl of the concoction.

It turned out to be a "caldo gallego"--an all
but tasteless thick soup of which the chief ingredient,
besides water, is the long-stemmed cabbage
indigenous to the region.  A spoon was then handed me.
It was of wood, homemade, and flat as a canoe-paddle.
What most aroused my wonder was the bread.
A glimpse I had caught of it in the flicker of my
match seemed to show a loaf of about the size of a
large grindstone--though I charged this to optical
illusion--from which wedges were cut, one of them
being laid in my lap.  It was coarse as mortar, yet
as savory, and proved later to be as sustaining a
bread as I have yet run across on the earth.  This
and the caldo being no match for a mountain-climbing
appetite, I asked the privilege of buying a bowl of
milk.  From my unseen companions arose many
ejaculations of wonder that I could afford such a
luxury, but a bowl of it was soon put in my hands.
A better milk I never broke bread in.

Still I was at a loss to account for the incessant
droning in the room, like the croak of a distant
ox-cart.  Since my entrance, too, I had been struck a
thousand times lightly in the face, as with bread
crumbs or the paper-wads indigenous to the old
country schoolhouse.  When it occurred to me to put
the two mysteries together both were solved.  The
flies were so thick in the room that they made this
sound in flying blindly back and forth.

But once upstairs the dwelling assumed a new
rating.  Here was, it is true, no luxury; but the
rough-fashioned chamber, partly store-room and
partly spare bedroom, was capacious and clean, of
the rough, unused sort of cleanliness of a farmer's
"best room," opened only on extraordinary occasions.
The one sheet of the massive bed was as stiff
as any windjammer's mainsail, the blanket as rough
as the robe of a Cistercian monk.  Among a score of
multiform articles stored in the room was a stack of
bread such as I had eaten below, some forty loaves
each fully as large as a half-bushel measure.  It is
baked from four to six months ahead, twice or thrice
a year, and has a crust hard and impervious as a
glazed pot, which keeps it fresh and savory for an
almost unlimited period.

As I bade farewell to my host next morning I held
out to him two pesetas.  He resented the offer as an
Arab or a Castilian might have, but being of those
accustomed to express themselves less in words than in
actions, did so laconically.  When I offered it again
he rose half up on his elbows and bellowed "No!"  His
gruffness was in no sense from anger, but merely
his mode of speaking emphatically, and a way of
hiding that bashfulness so common to mountaineers,
who are usually, as here, a shy and kindly people with
much more genuine benevolence than grace of
manner.  I protested that I should at least be permitted
to pay for my extravagance, the milk, arguing that
even a wanderer on his feet was better able to spare a
peseta than a village chief on his back.  But he
roared "No!" again, and furthermore commanded
his wife to cut me a wedge of the longevious bread,
"to carry me over the day."

Once escaped from the tangle of inhabited stone-piles,
I strode away down rock-jumbled ravines, one
close succeeding another and carrying me all but
headlong downward.  In the depths of the third I
risked a plunge into a mountain brook, though the
water was icy and the air still almost wintry cold.
The day was warming, however, by the time I
descended upon the hamlet of Berducedo, where I got
fried eggs and a new highway.

To chronicle the vagaries of the latter during the
rest of the day would be a thankless task.  For miles
it wound around and upward, ever upward on the face
of bare stony mountains like a spiral stairway to
heaven.  Then suddenly from each giddy height it
dived headlong down into deep-wooded, fertile
valleys; then up again round and round another
mountain shoulder far beyond the last stunted shrub.
Later in the day it took to rounding these peaks
almost on the level, coming a score of times so close
to itself that I could all but toss my bundle across,
only to buckle back upon itself for miles around some
narrow but apparently bottomless gulley.

Somewhere during the previous afternoon I had
crossed the unmarked boundary between Galicia and
the still more rugged kingdom of Asturias, to-day
the province of Oviedo.  A new style of architecture
gradually became prevalent.  The buildings were of
two stories, the lower, of stone, housing the animals,
while the dwelling proper was of wood and perched
a foot or more above the lower story on four
cone-shaped cornerstones, like some great awkward bird
ready to take flight.

But for this peculiarity the village in which night
overhauled me differed but little from that of the
evening before, except in being many hundred feet
nearer sea level.  It was called San Fecundo.  As
before, my inquiry for an inn was each time answered
by a terse "I don't know."  I found the head man in
good health, however,--a stalwart fellow little past
thirty who was shoveling manure in his front yard.
Yet so local is the dialect of every village in this
region that I tried for some time in vain to make
known my wants to him.

"Can't you speak Spanish, señor?" I cried out.

"No, señor," he replied like the report of a gun,
and apparently angered at the allegation.  We
managed nevertheless by patience and repetition to
establish communication between us, and I found out
at last why my inquiry for a posada had evoked so
surprising an answer.  Public hostelries being
unknown among them, the mountaineers understand the
question "Is there an inn in town?" to mean "Do
you suppose any resident will furnish me accommodations?"

The head man did in this case, in spite of my
unfortunate blunder in calling him a gallego.  So
great is the sectionalism in these Cantabrian ranges
that a man from one village deeply resents even being
taken for a resident of another a mile distant; while
the Asturians, a blending of the aboriginal Iberian
and the Goth, in whose caves of Covadonga was kept
alight the last flicker of Spanish liberty and
Christianity, consider themselves free and independent
hidalgos infinitely superior to the submissive gallego.
There were in truth some noticeable differences of
character and customs, that were to increase as I
advanced.

We spent the evening in another ventless, smoky,
fly-buzzing kitchen, though this time the fireplace
gave a bit of blaze and from time to time the rugged
faces of the eight or ten men, who had gathered at
the invitation of the village leader, flashed visible.
I entertained them with such stories of America as
are most customary and popular on such occasions.
This was no light task.  Not only were there many
words entirely indigenous to the village, but such
Castilian as my hearers used would scarcely be
recognized in Castille.  The expression "For allà" (over
there) they reduced to "Pa cá"; "horse" was never
"caballo," but either "cabalo" or "cabayo."  Worst
of all, the infinitive of the verb served indifferently
for all persons and tenses.  "Yo ir" might
mean "I go," "I was going," "I shall go," "I
should go" and even "I would have gone" and "I
should be going."

Most taking of all the stories I could produce
were those concerning the high buildings of New
York.  I had developed this popular subject at some
length when a mountaineer interposed a question that
I made out at length to be a query whether those who
live in these great houses spend all their time in them
or take an hour or two every morning to climb the
stairs.

"Hay ascensores, señores," I explained, "elevators;
some expresses, some mixtos, as on your railroads."

A long, unaccountable silence followed.  I filled
and lighted my pipe, and still only the heavy
breathing of the untutored sons of the hills about me
sounded.  Finally one of them cleared his throat
and inquired in humble voice:

"Would you be so kind, señor, as to tell us what
is an elevator?"

It was by no means easy.  Long explanation
gave them only the conception of a train that ran up
and down the walls of the building.  How this
overcame the force of gravity I did not succeed in
making clear to them; moreover there was only one of the
group that had ever seen a train.

In the morning the head man accepted with some
protest two *reales*--half a peseta.  The highway
again raced away downward, describing its parabolas
and boomerang movements as before, and gradually
bringing me to a realization of how high I had
climbed into the sky.  On every hand rocky gorges
and sheer cliffs; now and again a group of charcoal-burners
on the summit of a slope stood out against
the dull sky-line like Millet's figures--for the sun
was rarely visible.  As I descended still lower, more
pretentious, red-roofed villages appeared, and by
mid-afternoon I entered the large town of Tineo.
As I was leaving one of its shops a courtly youth
introduced himself as a student in the University of
Valladolid, and as he knew a bit of English it was
with no small difficulty that I resisted his entreaties
to talk that tongue with him in the mile or two he
walked with me.  That night for the first time since
leaving Lugo I paid for my lodging in a public
posada.

Salas, a long town in a longer green valley, was
so far down and sheltered that figs sold--by number
here rather than weight--nine for a cent.  Beyond,
the highway strolled for miles through orchards of
apples and pears, while figs dropped thick in the road
and were trodden under foot.  For the first time I
understood the force of the expression, "not worth a fig."

In the wineshop where I halted for an afternoon
lunch I got the shock of that summer's journey.
Casually I picked up the first newspaper I had seen
in a week; and stared a full moment at it unbelieving.
The entire front page was taken up by a photograph
showing Posadas lying in bed, his familiar
face gaunt with pain, and about him his father, a
priest, and a fellow-torero.

"Carajo!" I gasped.  "What's this; Posadas wounded?"

"Más," replied the innkeeper shortly.  "Killed
last Sunday.  Too bad; he made good sport for the
aficionados."

An accompanying article gave particulars.  The
Sevillian had been engaged to alternate with a
well-known diestro in the humble little plaza of San Lucar
de Barrameda on the lower reaches of the Guadalquivir.
The end of the day would have seen him a
graduate matador.  The bulls were "miúras" five
years old.  As he faced the first, Posadas executed
some pass that delighted the spectators.  For once,
evidently, he forgot his one "secret of success"; he
turned to acknowledge the applause.  In a flash
the animal charged and gored him in the neck.  He
tried to go on, poised his sword, and fainted; and
was carried to the little lazaret beneath the
amphitheater, while the festival continued.  Toward
morning he died.

All this had passed while I was climbing into the
cloud-cloaked village of Fonsagrada, two weeks to an
hour since I had last seen the skilful Sevillian in the
ring.  The article ended with the vulgarity common
to the yellow journal tribe:

"We have paid the dying Posadas one thousand
pesetas for the privilege of taking this picture,
which is almost all the unfortunate torero left his
sorrowing family."

I trudged on deep in such reflections as such
occurrences awaken, noting little of the scene.  At
sunset I found myself tramping through a warmer, less
abrupt country, half conscious of having passed
Grado, with its palaces, nurse-girls, and conventional
costumes.  As dusk fell I paused to ask for an inn.
"A bit further on," replied the householder.  I
continued, still pensive.  Several times I halted, always
to receive the same reply, "A bit further, señor."  Being
in no sense tired, I gave the matter little attention
until suddenly the seventh or eighth repetition
of the unveracity aroused a touch of anger and
a realization that the night was already well advanced.
A lame man hobbling along the dark road gave me
once more the threadbare answer, but walked some
two miles at my side and left me at the door of a
wayside wineshop that I should certainly not have
missed even without him.

The chief sources of the boisterousness within were
three young vagabonds who were displaying their
accomplishments to the gathering.  One was playing
tunes on a comb covered with a strip of paper,
another produced a peculiarly weird music in a high
falsetto, while the third was a really remarkable
imitator of the various dialects of Spain.  With the
three I ascended near midnight to the loft of the
building, where a supply of hay offered comfortable
quarters.  For an hour he of the falsetto sat
smoking cigarettes and singing an endless ditty of his
native city, the refrain of which rang out at
frequent intervals:

   |   "Más bonita que hay,
   |   A Zaragoza me voy
   |   Dentro de Ar-r-r-rago-o-ón."
   |

It was with genuine regret that I noted next
morning the reapproach of civilization.  Rough as is
the life of these mountaineers of the north their
entire freedom from convention, the contact with real
men who know not even what pose and pretense are,
the drinking into my lungs of the exhilarating
mountain air had made the trip that was just ending
by far the most joyful portion of all my Spanish
experiences.  Not since the morning I climbed into
Astorga had I heard the whine of a beggar; not
once in all the northwest had I caught the faintest
scent of a tourist.  The trip had likewise been the
most inexpensive, for in the week's tramp I had
spent less than twelve pesetas.

A few hours more down the mountainside brought
me into Oviedo, where I took up my abode in the
Calle de la Luna.  The boyhood home of Gil Blas
is a sober, almost gloomy town, where the sun is
reputed to shine but one day in four.  Its
inhabitants have much in common with the slow-witted
Lugense, though they are on the whole more wide-awake
and self-satisfied.  Of window displays the most
frequent was that of a volume in richly illustrated paper
cover entitled, "Los Envenenadores (poisoners) de
Chicago."  It was, possibly, an exposé of the
packing houses, but I did not find time to read it.
August was nearing its close, and there was still a
considerable portion of Spain to be seen.  Luckily my
kilometer-book was scarcely half-used up; but of the
joyful days of freedom on the open road there could
not be many more.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE LAND OF THE BASQUE`:

.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER XIII


.. class:: center medium

   THE LAND OF THE BASQUE

.. vspace:: 2

My knapsack garnished, I turned my back on
Oviedo early on Sunday morning.  The
train wound slowly away toward the lofty serrated
range that shuts off the world on the south.  As
we approached the mountains, the line began to tie
itself in knots, climbing ever upward.  In one section
two stations seven miles apart had twenty-six miles
of railroad between them.  At the second of the two
a flushed and puffing Spaniard burst into our
compartment with the information that, having reached
the former after the train had departed, he had
overtaken us on foot.

Still we climbed until, at the turning of the day,
high up where clouds should have been we
surmounted the ridgepole of the range and, racing,
roaring downward, were almost in a moment back
in the barren, rocky, sun-baked Spain of old, dust
swirling everywhere, the heat wrapping us round as
with a woolen blanket, drying up the very tobacco
in my pouch; a change almost as decided as from
the forests of Norway to the plains of India.

Arrived in León at three, I set off at once
tourist-fashion for the cathedral, with its soaring Gothic
towers and delicate, airy flying-buttresses the first
truly inspiring bit of Christian architecture I had
seen in Spain; the first indeed whose exterior was
anything.  Much of the edifice, however, was glaringly
new, the scaffolds of the renovators being still in
place.

But here again "if the house of God is rich that
of man is poor," pauperous in fact.  When once the
traveler has forced himself to believe that León was
not many centuries since the rich capital of a vast
empire he must surely fall sad and pensive
reflecting how mutable and fleeting indeed are the things
of earth.  The León of to-day is a large village,
a dried-up, dirty, dilapidated, depopulated,
cobble-streeted village of snarling, meretricious-minded
inhabitants jumbled together inside a wall that with
the cathedral is the only remaining proof of former
importance.  Here once more was the beggar with
his distressing whine, his brow of bronze, and his all
too evident injuries; not numerously but constituting
a large percentage of the population.  In all Spain
the devise of insurance companies on the fronts of
buildings is more than frequent; in León there was
barely a hovel without one or more.  Which could
not but awaken profound wonder, for not only are
there no wooden houses within her walls to make
danger of fire imminent, but a greater blessing could
hardly be imagined for León than a general and
all-embracing conflagration.

It was, perhaps, because of the unbroken misery
with which they were surrounded that the Leónese
were individually crabbed and cynical.  Not a
courteous word do I remember having received in all the
town, and in vitriolic remarks the keepers and guests
of the tumble-down parador where I was forced to
put up outdid all others.

I was off in the morning at the first opportunity,
again by train, which, passing in the early afternoon
through a blinding sand-storm near the village of
Cisneros, landed me soon after at Palencia.  This
was a counterpart of León; a trifle less sulky and
universally miserable, but as sprawling, sun-parched,
and slovenly.  Its surrounding plains were utterly
verdureless, their flanking hills ossified, its gardens,
promenades, and Alameda past all hope of relief by
sprinkling even had its river not long since gone
desert-dry as the rest.  I left the place quickly,
riding into the night and descending at length to
march to the inspiriting music of a military band
along a broad, thick-peopled Alameda, at the end of
which a giant statue of Columbus bulked massive
against the moonlit sky, into Valladolid.

I had come again upon a real city, almost the
first since leaving Madrid; whence accommodations,
while in no sense lacking, were high in price.  In
the course of an hour of prowling, however, I was
apprised of the existence of a modest casa eta
huéspedes in a canyon-like side street.  I rang the
great doorbell below several times in vain; which was
as I had expected, for foolish indeed would have
been the Spaniard who remained within doors on
such a night, while the band played and the city
strolled in the Alameda.  I dropped my bundle at
my feet and leaned against the lintel of the massive
doorway.

Within an hour there arrived another seeker after
quarters, a slender Spaniard in the early summer of
life, who carried two heavy portmanteaus and a
leather swordcase.  Almost at the opening of our
conversation he surprised me by inquiring, "You are
a foreigner, verdad, señor?"  I commended his penetration
and, as we chatted, sought for some sign of his
profession or place in society.  All at once the long,
slender swordcase caught my eye.

"Ah!  Es usted torero, señor," I observed with
assurance.

The youth awakened the echoes of the narrow
street with his laughter.

"Bullfighter!  No, indeed!  I am happy to say
no.  I am a student in the national cavalry school
here, just returned from my month's furlough.
But your error is natural," he went on, "and my
fault.  I have really no right to appear in civilian
garb.  It would mean a month of bread and water
at least if one of our officers caught a glimpse of
me.  But carajo!  The family above may not be
back by midnight.  We can leave our baggage with
the portier next door."

We strolled slowly back to the brilliantly lighted
Plaza de la Constitutión.  Suddenly the youth interrupted
an anecdote of the tan-bark to exclaim in a
calm but earnest voice:

"Caramba!  There come my commandante and
the first lieutenant."

Two men of forty-five or fifty, in resplendent
uniforms and tall red caps, their swords clinking along
the pavement, were sauntering down upon us.  I
stepped quickly to the opposite side of my
companion, being taller--and likewise curious.

"Hombre!" he protested sharply, stepping back
again.  "No tenga V. cuidado.  It is not our way
to hide from our officers."

With head erect and military stride he marched
straight on before him.  Luckily the officers were so
engrossed in conversation that neither glanced up
as they passed.

We drifted into a café and ordered "helado," that
Spanish imitation of ice-cream the calling of which
in the streets had so frequently caused me to whirl
about in astonishment, so much does it sound like our
"hello."  Over it we fell to discussing things
American, in which we were gradually joined by several
well-dressed men at the adjoining marble tables.  In
the course of the evening I chanced to remark that
one of the surprises of my summer's trip had been
to find so little resentment against the United States.

"Señor," said the youth, while each and all of
our companions gave signs of agreement, "nothing
more fortunate has befallen our country in a century
than the loss of Cuba and the Philippines.  Not only
has it taken a load off the Spanish people; it has
brought more relief than you can guess to us of
the army.  The colonies were the dumping-ground
of our profession.  Once let an officer show ability
and he was forthwith shipped off to the islands to
die.  Now they are taken away, Spain has already
begun to regain her lost place among the nations.
No, señor; we of the army at least think nothing but
kindness to your people for the relief."

Returned to the casa de huéspedes, the student
and I were given adjoining rooms and saw much of
Valladolid together before I took train the second
morning after to Burgos.  There, were regulation
"sights" in abundance; on every hand memories of
the Cid Campeador, even the spot where stood his
dwelling--all as authentic as the popular landmarks
of Jerusalem.  Two miles or more out along the
shallow mill-race that Burgos calls a river I visited
the nunnery of Las Huelgas, which claims for its
distinction never in its centuries of existence to have
admitted to the veil less than a daughter of the
nobility.  The stroll is pleasant, but the place, noble
though it be, unexciting--at least outwardly.  Of
the cathedral, the finest in Spain, much might be
said--that has been often said before.

It was in Burgos that I saw for the first time what
I might have seen earlier and frequently had my
tastes run that way,--a Spanish cemetery.  More
exactly it was a corpse-file, a perpendicular hillside
in which hundreds of bodies had been pigeon-holed
for future reference, with the name and a charitably
indulgent characterization of the deceased on the
end of his coffin.  The Spaniard, with his superstitions,
prefers this style of tomb for much the same
reason, it seems, that the Arab seals his graves with
cement,--that the emissaries from the less popular
regions may not bear away the departed before the
agents of the better and hence slower realm put in an
appearance.

The greatest experience of my day in Burgos was
the view from the summit of the hot, dry Cerro de San
Miguel.  Not merely does it offer a mighty and
comprehensive vista of half the stony-bare face of
Castilla Vieja, but a bird's-eye view as it were of all
Spain and her history.  Of the city spread out at
one's feet fully three-fourths the space is taken up
by cathedral, churches, convents, monasteries, casas
de misericordia, the vast bulk of the castle, the
barracks, the bullring,--all the countless buildings of
non-producers; while between them in the nooks and
corners wherever a crack offers are packed and
huddled the hovels of the mere inhabitants.  There, in
plain sight, is Spain's malady.  She is a land of
non-producers.  Ecclesiastics, soldiers, useless octroi
guards, beggars rotten with the notion fostered by
the omnivorous priesthood that mendicancy is an
honorable profession, make up almost the bulk of her
population of productive age.  Not without reason
does nomadic Borrow lift up his clench-fisted wail
against "Batuschca."

There is one road to redemption for Spain,--that
she shoot her priests and set her soldiers to work.
As isolated individuals the merry, dissolute fellows
of the cloth might be permitted to live on as they
have, and suffer the natural end of such living.
But as a class they are beyond reform; their point
of view is so utterly warped and incorrigible, they
have grown so pestiferous with laziness and "graft"
that there is no other remedy, "no hay otro
remedio" as the Spaniard himself would say could
his throttled mind cast off the rubbish of superstition
and cant for one clear thought.  Let him who
protests that they are teachers of the youth go once and
see what they teach,--the vapid, senseless lies about
"saints" so far from truth as to be an abomination,
so far above the possible aspirations and attainments
of real humanity as to force the rising generations
from very hopelessness of imitation to lose heart and
sink to iniquity as the priesthood has done before
them.  Or are there some who still credit them with
feeding the poor?  A high praise, indeed, exactly
equal to that due the footpad who refunds his victim
carfare that he may be the more quickly rid of him.

Therein lies the chief weakness of Spain.  It is not
because she is ruled by a slender youth chosen by the
accident of birth rather than by a more portly man
chosen more or less by his fellow-citizens; not
because her religion happens to be that of Rome rather
than the austerities of Calvin or the fatalism of
Mohammed; not because her national sport is a bit more
dramatically brutal than that of other lands; not
because her soil is dry and stony and her rains and
rivers slight; not because her people are decadent,
her human stock run down--I have plowed in the
sea in the foregoing pages if I have not made it clear
that her real manhood, the workman, the peasant, the
arriero, the muscle and sinew of the nation, are as
hardy, toilsome and all-enduring as the world
harbors.  But in the long centuries of warfare her
attention was drawn away from internal affairs, she fell
among thieves within, and the force of example, the
helplessness of the individual drove her people in the
line of least resistance,--to become thieves too,
nationally, officially, until mad
grab-what-you-can-and-the-devil-grab-the-ungrabbing
has her by the throat
gasping for life.  If she is not to sink down for
the vultures of the nations to pick clean of her
meager scraps of flesh there must arise within her
boundaries a man, a movement, a sweeping change
that shall cast off the burden of precedent and turn
her officials to doing honestly with all their might
what now they do with all their might dishonestly.
She must regain confidence in the necessity and
prevalence of honesty.  She must learn that patent yet
rarely comprehended truth that work and work only
is the real source of life; she must cease to be the
sworn enemy of the innovator, thinking her ways
best and those of the rest of the world abnormal,
unable to see a yard beyond her national boundaries,
scorning all ideas and arguments from the outside
like the most hide-bound of Orientals.

The next afternoon found me in Vitoria, in the
land of the Basque; yet another kind of Spain.
Vitoria is a city of to-day, clean, bustling, almost
American in her streets and architecture and the
wide-awake air of the *Vascongado*.  The *boína*--round
cap without visor and the end of a string for
tassel--had all at once become universal, worn, like the
fez in Damascus, by every age and grade of man from
bootblack to mayor.  So pleasing was this prosaic
city that even though her prices were high I loitered
in her shade until the next afternoon before seeking
out the highway to Bilbáo.

There lay sixty-seven kilometers to the seaport, a
half of which I hoped to cover before halting for the
night.  For on the following day Bilbáo was to
celebrate in honor of the king.  The way led me
through a country fertile for all its stoniness, made
so by the energy and diligence of the Basque, whose
strong features, bold curved nose, piercing eyes and
sturdy form was to be seen on every hand.  With the
southern Spaniard this new race had almost
nothing in common, and though as serious of deportment
as the gallego there was neither his bashfulness nor
stupidity.  The Castilian spoken in the region was
excellent, the farming implements of modern
manufacture and the methods of the husbandman thousands
of years ahead of Andalusia.

As the day was fading I began to clamber my way
upward into the mountains that rose high in the
darkening sky ahead.  The night grew to one of
the blackest, the heavens being overcast; but he who
marches on into the darkness without contact with
artificial light may still see almost plainly.  It was
two hours, perhaps, after nightfall, and the road was
winding ever higher around the shoulder of a
mammoth peak, its edge a sheer precipice above
unfathomable depths, when suddenly I saw a man, a denser
blackness against the sea of obscurity, standing
stock-still on the utmost edge of the highway.

"Buenos tardes," I greeted in a low voice, almost
afraid that a hearty tone would send him toppling
backward to his death.

He neither answered nor moved.  I stepped closer.

"You have rather a dangerous position, verdad, señor?"

Still he stared motionless at me through the
darkness.  Could he be some sleep-walker?  I moved
quietly forward and, thrusting out a hand, touched
him on the sleeve.  It was hard as if frozen!  For
an instant I recoiled, then with a sudden instinctive
movement passed a hand quickly and lightly over his
face.  Was I dreaming?  That, too, was hard and
cold.  I sprang back and, rummaging hastily
through my pockets, found one broken match.  The
wind was rushing up from the bottomless gulf below.
I struck a light, holding it in the hollow of my hand,
and in the instant before it was blown out I caught
a few words of an inscription on a pedestal:

.. class:: center medium white-space-pre-line

   "ERECTED TO THE MEM--
   THROWN OVER THIS PRECIPICE--
   BANDITS--NIGHT OF--"

and before I had made out date or name I was again
in darkness.

Over the summit, on a lower, less wind-swept level,
I came upon a long mining town scattered on either
side of the highway.  I dropped in at a wineshop
and bespoke supper and lodging.  A dish of the now
omnipresent bacalao was set before me, but for a time
the keeper showed strong disinclination to house a
wandering stranger falling upon him at this advanced hour.

The young woman who served me at table and
answered the demands for wine of the half-dozen
youthful miners about me seemed strangely out of place
in such surroundings.  Nothing was plainer than
that she was not of the barmaid type.  One would
have said rather the convent-reared daughter of some
well-to-do merchant or large farmer.  This surmise
turned out to be close to the truth.  When the
carousing miners had drifted into the night and I, by dint
of talking and acting my best Castilian, had found
my way into the good graces of the family, I heard
the girl's story--for rightly approached the
Spaniard is easily led to talk of his private affairs.
Her father had been the principal shop-keeper of the
mining town, and had died a few weeks before.  His
debts were heavy and when all claims had been
settled there remained to his orphaned daughter five
hundred pesetas.

"But," I cried, "five hundred pesetas!  It is a
fortune, señorita, in Spain.  You could have started
a shop, or lived well until the novio appeared."

"Jesus Maria!" cried the girl, looking at me with
wondering eyes.  "Do you forget purgatory?  For
the repose of my father's soul five hundred masses
must be said; no less, the cura himself told me; and
each mass costs a peseta.  Then I have come to work here."

There was that in the air next morning that
reminded me, as I wound down into a wooded,
well-peopled valley, that summer was drawing toward its
close.  The day grew quickly warm, however.  In the
knowledge that the king was sojourning in the city
upon which I was marching, I was fully prepared to
endure long catechizing and examination by guardias
civiles.  My wonder was not slight, therefore, when
I was suffered to pass through one, two, three
villages without being once challenged.

But the expected meeting came at last and quite
made up for the lack of others.  The third village
lay already behind me when I heard an authoritative
shout and, turning around, saw a bareheaded man
of thirty, dressed half in peasant, half in village
garb, beckoning to me with a commanding gesture to
return.  Fancying him some wily shop-keeper, I
swung on my heel and set off again.  He shouted
loudly, and racing after me, caught me by an arm.
I shook him off with an indignation that sent him
spinning half across the highway.  Instead of
retreating he sprang at me again and we should
certainly have been soon entangled in a crude performance
of the manly art had he not cried out in a voice
quaking with anger:

"Have a care, señor, in resisting the law.  I am
a miñón."

"Miñón!" I cried, recalling suddenly that in the
Basque provinces the national guardias are
reënforced by local officers thus named.  "Then why the
devil don't you wear your uniform?  How shall I
know you are not a footpad?"

"I shall prove that soon enough," he replied, still
visibly shaking with the rage of a Spaniard whose
"pundonor" has been sullied.

I returned with him to the casa de ayuntamiento,
in the doorway of which he halted, and, examining me
for concealed weapons, demanded that I untie my
knapsack.  Never before had this been more than
superficially inspected, but the thoroughness with
which the angry miñón overhauled it, examining even
my letters and fingering my clothes-brush over and
over as if convinced that it could be opened by some
secret spring, fully made up for any possible
carelessness of his fellow-officers elsewhere.  When he
had lost hope of finding evidence of treason he
handed back my possessions reluctantly and bade me
with a scowl the conventional "Go with God;" to
which I answered, "Queda V. con el mismisimo
diablo"--but the thrust was too subtle for his
bullet-headed intellect.

Toward noon the green slopes and cool forests
turned to a cindered soil and the sooty aspect of a
factory town.  I mounted a last hill and descended
quickly through a smoke-laden atmosphere into
Bilbáo.  Here was the first entirely modern city I had
seen in Spain; one might easily have fancied one's
self in Newcastle or Seattle.  The Spanish casa de
huéspedes seemed not even known by name, and in
its place were only boisterous taverns, smacking of
sea-faring custom and overrun with the touts that
feed on the simple mariner.

As I sat toward evening in one of these establishments,
there entered a man something over thirty-five,
dressed in boína and workingman's garb that showed
but slight wear.  I noted him only half consciously,
being at that moment expressing to the landlord my
surprise that the king, instead of being in Bilbáo as
he was reported by the newspapers, was ten or twelve
miles away on his yacht at the mouth of the river.
The keeper, a stocky Basque of much better parts
than the average of his guild, glanced up from his
spigots and replied in a smooth and pleasant voice:

"Porque, señor, no quiere morir tan joven--Because
he does not care to die so young."

"Y con mujer tan bella y fresca--And with a wife
so beautiful and fresh," added a thick-set fellow at
a neighboring table without looking up from his cards.

Love for Alfonso is not one of the characteristics
of the masses in this section of the country.

Meanwhile the newcomer, whose eye had been
wandering leisurely over the assembly, threaded his
way half across the room to sit down at my table.  I
wondered a bit at the preference, but certain he was
no tout, gave him the customary greeting.  By the
time I had accepted a glass and treated in turn we
were exchanging personal information.  He
announced himself a cobbler, and even before I had
broached the subject suggested that he could find me
a lodging with an old woman above his shop.  This
workroom, when we reached it, proved to be nothing
but a kit of tools and a few strips of leather
scattered about the small hallway at the foot of the stairs.
I found above the hospitality he had promised,
however, and paying two night's lodging in an
unusually pleasant room, descended.

The shoemaker appeared more obliging than
industrious, for he at once laid aside the shoe he was
hammering and announced that he was going to give
himself the pleasure of spending the evening with
me and of finding me the best place to take in the
fireworks that were to be set off in honor of the king.
I explained that it was rather my plan to attend the
city theater, where I might both see that remarkable
personage in the flesh and hear one of Molière's best
comedies in Spanish.

"There is more than time for both," replied the
cobbler, and forthwith fell to extolling the coming
spectacle so highly that he came near to arousing
within me, too, an interest in the fireworks.

At the end of an hour's stroll we found ourselves
on the summit of a knoll in the outskirts, in
a compact sea of Bilbaoans watching a tame imitation
of a Fourth of July celebration on the slope of one
of the surrounding hills.  The display was, as I
have said, in honor of the king; though it turned out
that his indifferent majesty was at that moment
dining and wining a company of fellow-sportsmen on
board the *Giralda* twelve miles away.

The cobbler set a more than leisurely pace back to
the city, but we regained at length the bank of the
river and, crossing the wooded Paseo Arenal,
approached the theater.  Before it, was packed a vast
and compact multitude through which I struggled my
way to the entrance, only to be informed in the
customary box-office tones that there was not another
ticket to be had.  The shoemaker was no theater-goer,
and as my own disappointment was not overwhelming,
we set out to fight our way back to the Paséo.

Long before we had succeeded in that venturesome
undertaking, however, there burst forth a sudden,
unheralded roar of uncounted voices, the immense
throng surged riverward with an abruptness that all
but swept us off our feet, the thunder of thousands
of hoofs swelled nearer, and down upon us rode an
entire regiment of guardias civiles in uniforms so
new they seemed but that moment to have left the
tailor, and astride finer horses than I had dreamed
existed in Spain.  Straight into the crowd they
dashed, headlong, at full canter, like cowboys into
a drove of steers, sweeping all before them,
scattering luckless individuals in all directions, and
completely surrounding the theater in solid phalanx.
Before I had recovered breath there arose another
mighty shout, and, some three hundred more horsemen,
with a richly caparisoned carriage in their midst,
dashed through the throng from a landing-stage on
the river bank behind us to the door of the theater.
I caught a fleeting glimpse of a slight figure in a
rakish overcoat, a burst of music sounded from the
theater, and died as suddenly away as the doors closed
behind the royal arrival.  Again the cavalry charged,
driving men, women and children pellmell back a
hundred yards from the building and, forming a yet
wider circle around it, settled down to sit their horses
like statues until the play should be ended.

When my wonder had somewhat subsided there
came upon me an all but uncontrollable desire to
shout with laughter.  The ludicrousness, the
ridiculousness of it all!  A vast concourse of humanity
driven helter-skelter like as many cattle, scores of
persons jostled and bruised, thirteen hundred of the
most able-bodied men in Spain to sit motionless on
horseback around a theater late into the night, all
for the mere protection of one slight youth whose
equal was easily to be found in every town or village
of the land!  Truly this institution of kingship is as
humorous a hoax as has been played upon mankind
since man was.

A hoax on all concerned.  For the incumbent
himself, the slender youth inside, who must spend his
brief span of years amid such mummery, commands
of himself a bit of mild admiration.  I fell to
wondering what he would give for the right to wander
freely and unnoticed all a summer's day along the
open highway.  Let him who can imagine himself
born a king, discovering as early as such notions can
penetrate to his infant intellect that his
fellow-mortals have placed him high on a pedestal, have
given him even without the asking power, riches,
and almost reverence as a superior being, when at
heart he knows full well he is of quite the same clay
as they; and he may well ask himself whether he would
have grown up even as manly as the youth who goes
by the name of Alfonso XIII.  Recalling that
former kings of Spain could not be touched by other than
a royal finger, we may surely grant common sense
to this sovereign who dances uncondescendingly with
daughters of the middle class, who chats freely with
bullfighters, peasants, or apple-women.  Pleasing,
too, is his devil-may-carelessness.  On this same
night, for instance, after reboarding his yacht, he
took it suddenly into his mad young head to return
at once through this, his most hostile province, to his
queen.  At one in the morning he was rowed ashore
with one companion, stepped into his automobile,
himself playing chauffeur, and tore away through
Bilbáo and a hundred miles along the craggy coast
to San Sebastian.  It is not hard to guess what
might have happened had he punctured a tire among
those stony mountains and been chanced upon by
a homing band of peasants brave with wine.

Musing all which I turned to address the
cobbler and found him gone.  The crowd was slowly
melting away.  I sat down in the Paseo and waited an
hour, but my erstwhile companion did not reappear.
When I descended from my lodging next morning
there remained not a trace of his "shop" at the foot
of the stairs.  Had the village miñón done me the
honor of telegraphing my description to the seaport,
or was my road-worn garb the livery of suspicion?
This only I know; when, that Sunday evening after
my return from a glimpse of the open sea, I asked
my hostess whether her fellow renter were really a
shoemaker, she screwed up her parchment-like
features into a smile and answered:

"Sí, señor, one of the shoemakers of his majesty."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`A DESCENT INTO ARAGON`:

.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER XIV


.. class:: center medium

   A DESCENT INTO ARAGON

.. vspace:: 2

There was an unwonted excitement in the air
when I boarded the train next morning for the
longest unbroken ride of my Spanish journey.
Pernales, the anachronism, the twentieth-century bandit
of the environs of Córdoba, had fallen.  Aboard the
train newspapers were as numerous as on the New
York "Elevated" at a similar hour.  I bought one
and was soon lost like the rest in the adventures of
this last defier of the mighty guardia civil.

The story was simple.  Two evenings before,
about the time I had been yawning over the king's
fireworks, Pernales had met a village arriero among
the foothills of his retreat, and asked him some
question about the road.  The rustic gave him the
desired information, but guessing with whom he was
speaking, had raced away, once he was out of sight,
as fast as he could drive his ass before him, to carry
his suspicions to the village alcalde.  The rest was
commonplace.  A dozen guardias stalked the
unsuspecting bandolero among the hills, and coming
upon him toward sunrise, brought his unsanctioned
career abruptly to a close.

.. _`The Roman walls of Leon`:

.. figure:: images/img-264a.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: The Roman walls of Leon

   The Roman walls of Leon


"Our special correspondent" had dismally failed
to cast over his account the glamour of romance, but
in compensation had taken a reporter's care to give
the precise point in the right temple where the ball
had entered, with the exact dimensions of the orifice,
as well as the life story of the hero who had bored
it.  Nay, with almost American haste and resourcefulness
the paper printed a full-length portrait of
the successful hunter--or one at least of a man who
could not have been vastly different in appearance,
in a uniform that was certainly very similar.  Alas!
The good old days of the bandit and the contrabandista
are forever gone in Spain; the humdrum era of
the civil guard is come.  Pernales' is but another
story of a man born a century too late.

.. _`The land of the boina.  Alfonso XII at a picnic`:

.. figure:: images/img-264b.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: The land of the boina.  Alfonso XII at a picnic

   The land of the boina.  Alfonso XII at a picnic

All day long as we toiled and twisted over the
Cantabrian range and descended southward, this only
was the topic of conversation of all grades and sexes
of travelers.  An hour's halt at Miranda and we
creaked on along the bank of Spain's greatest river,
the Ebro, talking still of bandoleros and the regret
of their passing.  Slowly the green tinge in the
landscape faded away and in its place came reddish cliffs
and a sun-seared and all but desert country spreading
away from either bank of the red-dyed river,
sterile rolling plains relieved only by small oases of
fertility and isolated and in all probability bigoted
villages standing colorless on colorless hillsides.  As
central Spain may be likened to rocky Judea, so this
resembles in some degree Egypt, with the Ebro as the
Nile.

It was late in the evening when I arrived in
Saragossa and, crossing the broad river by the Puente de
Piedra, found myself in one of the most labyrinthian
cities of Spain.  But so practiced had I grown in
such quest that in less than an hour I had engaged
accommodation at my own price, which by this time
had descended to two and a half pesetas.

The "sight" par excellence of Saragossa is of
course her "Virgen del Pilar."  The story runs that
Santiago, who is none other than Saint James, while
wandering about Spain, as he was wont to ramble in
various corners of the earth, was favored one evening
by a call from the Mother of Christ, who, during all
their little chat, stood on the top of a stone pillar.
That the tale is true there seems little chance for
doubt, for they have the pillar yet; and it is over this
that has been erected the vast cathedral to which flock
thousands of pilgrims during every month of the year.

I repaired to it early, but was soon turned melancholy
with the recollection of Puck's profound saying
anent the folly of mankind.  The interior of the
edifice is as impressive as that of an empty warehouse.
Under the main dome is a large chapel screaming with
riches, in the back of which, on her pillar, stands the
Virgin--turned to black, half-decayed wood--dressed
in more thousands of dollars' worth of gold
and silver, of resplendent robes and vociferous
gaudiness than god Juggernaut of India ever possessed at
the height of his influence.  Before it worshipers are
always kneeling.  In the back wall of the chapel is an
opening through which one can touch the pillar--and
find a cup-shaped hole worn in it by such action
during the centuries.  I sat down on a bench near the
far-famed orifice, and for close upon an hour watched
the unbroken procession file past.  Beggar women,
rag-pickers, ladies of wealth, cankerous old men,
merchants, city sports, lawyers--Saragossa is the
one city of Spain where even men go to church--every
grade and variety of Aragonese pressed close
upon the heels one of another, each bowing down as
he passed to kiss the hole deeper into the pillar.  At
bottom the difference is slight indeed between the
religion of the Spaniard and that of the Hindu.

In the city swarms a hungry, ragged people, more
often than not without shoes, yet one and all with
the proverbial haughty pride and somber mood of
Aragon in face and bearing, stiff-shouldered,
bristling with a touch-me-not-with-a-pole expression.
Here, too, may still be found, especially among the
peasants from the further districts, the old provincial
costume,--knee breeches, a jacket reaching
barely to the waist, and a red cloth wound about the head.

Tiring of such things, there is a pleasant promenade
along the banks of the Ebro, whence one will
drift naturally through the Portillo gate where the
"flying Gaul was foil'd by a woman's hand."  It is
startling to find the settings of two such world-famed
dramas so close together, but from the gate one has
only to saunter a few yards along the Madrid
highway to come upon the weather-battered Aljafería
of "Trovatore" fame.  To-day it is a barracks.
Within its towers, through now unbarred windows,
may be seen soldiers polishing their spurs and
muskets, humming now and then a snatch of popular
song; but one may wait in vain to hear some tuneful
prisoner strike up the expected "miserere."

There is one stroll in Saragossa that I would
commend to the wanderer who finds pleasure in gaining
elevations whence he may look down, as it were, on
the world.  It is out along the Canal Imperial, past
the swollen-paunched statue of its sponsor Pignatelli,
and across the Huerva; then winding lazily southwest
and upward the stroller comes suddenly out on the
crown of a bald hillock.  There, below him in its flat
valley, spreads all Saragossa, far enough away to
lose the crassness of detail, yet distinct, the two
finished towers of the Pilar rising above it like
minarets, the whole girded by the green huerta, and
beyond and all around the desert in gashed and gnarled
hills like the Libyan range of another continent.
Here I lounged until the setting sun, peering over
my shoulder, cast the radiant flush of evening on the
city below, which gradually fading away was at
length effaced in the night, its sounds mingling
together in a sort of music that drifted up to me long
after the scene itself had wholly disappeared.

I descended for supper.  It is the lot of man that
he has no sooner climbed to a height where he may
look down calmly on the scramble of life than he must
again plunge down into it to *eat*--or to earn more
bread.  To-morrow I must set my face toward the
frontier, toward New York and a return to labor.

On my way to the five-o'clock train next morning
I passed through Saragossa's vast covered market and
halted to lay in a last supply of figs.  The cheery old
woman who sold them grasped my fifteen céntimos
tightly in her hand and solemnly made with it the
sign of the cross.  I expressed surprise, and a
misgiving lest I had unwittingly parted with coppers
possessing peculiar virtues.

"Cómo, señor!" she cried, in wonder at my ignorance.
"It is the first money of the day.  If I do
not say a paternoster with it I may sit here until
nightfall without selling another perrito-worth, you
may be sure."

The train labored back along the Ebro to Castejon,
where I changed cars and journeyed northward,
every click of the wheels seeming to cry out that my
Spanish summer was nearing its end.  At high noon
I descended in a dusty plain before the sheer face of
the rock on which stands Pamplona of Navarre.
When I had climbed into the city I inquired of the
first policeman for a modest casa de huéspedes.  He
rubbed his head a moment and set off with me along
the street, chatting sociably as we went.  Soon we
came upon another officer, to whom the first repeated
my question.  He scratched his head a moment and
fell in beside us, babbling cheerily.  Fully a half-mile
beyond we accosted a third officer.  He rasped his
close-shaven poll yet another moment and joined us
in the quest, adding a new stock of anecdotes.  Here
was courtesy extraordinary, even for Spain.  Had
the police force of Pamplona discovered in me some
prince incognito, or was mine to be the rôle of the
rolling pancake?  We rambled on, but without
success, for not another officer could we find in all our
circuit of the city.  It was certainly close upon an
hour after my original inquiry, and something like
a hundred yards from the same spot, that we entered
a side street and mounted, still in quartet, to a cheap
but homelike boarding-house high up in an aged
building.  The courtesy was quickly explained.  The
landlady, having expressed her deep gratitude for
being brought a new guest, begged each of the officers
to do her the favor of accepting a glass of wine.
They smacked their lips over it, exchanged with the
household the customary salutations and banter, and
sauntered back to their beats.

When I had eaten, I descended for a turn about
the city with the uncle of my grateful hostess, a
mountain-hardened Basque of sixty, in the universal
boína, who had but recently retired from a lifetime
of rocky hillside farming.  Of both his province of
Navarre and of himself he talked freely until
suddenly my tongue stumbled upon some question of
military conscription.  He fell at once silent, his jaws
stiffened, and into his face came the reflection of a
bitter sadness.  For the Basques are by no means
reconciled to the loss of their cherished *fueros*, or
special political privileges.  In silence the sturdy old
man led the way half across the city to one of her
gates and, climbing a knoll that gave a good view
of the surrounding fortifications, said in cheerless
tones:

"Don Henrico, we have here the strongest city
walls in Spain.  But what use are they now against
the king's modern artillery?  No hay remedio.  We
must serve in his armies."

As we threaded our way slowly back to the
boarding-house I halted at a money changer's to buy a
twenty-franc piece.  The transaction left me only a
handful of coppers in Spanish currency, and I went
early to bed lest there be not enough remaining to
carry me out of the country.

On a glorious clear September morning I turned
my back on Spain and set forth from Pamplona to
tramp over the Pyrenees by the pass of Roncesvalles,
being just uncertain enough of the road to lend zest
to the undertaking.  At the edge of the plain to the
northward of the city a highway began to wind its
way upward along the bank of a young river, not
laboriously, but steadily rising.  Habitations were
rare.  Late in the morning a spot above whirling
rapids in shaded solitude suggested a plunge; but as
I pulled off my coat a sound fell on my ear and,
looking across the stream, I saw a half-dozen women
kneeling on the bank and staring curiously across at me.
When I retreated, they laughed heartily and fell once
more to pounding away at their laundry-work on the
stones.

Some distance higher I found another pool in
which, by rolling over and over, I won the afterglow
of a real swim.  Sharper ascents succeeded, though
still none steep.  I was soon surrounded by a Tyrolian
scenery of forest and deep-cut valleys, and among
up-to-date people--the farming implements being of
modern type and the smallest villages having electric
lights run by power from the mountain streams.
Every fellow-mortal, young or old, as is usual in
mountain regions, gave me greeting, not with the
familiar "Vaya!" nor the "Buenos!" of Galicia,
but with "Adiós!" which seemed here to mean much
more than the grammatical "Good-by."  In the
place of guardias civiles were carabineros in a
provincial uniform, whose advances, if less warm and
companionable, were none the less kindly.

Toward evening the road flowed up into a broad,
oblong meadow, ankle-deep in greenest grass, musical
with the sound of cow-bells, across which it drifted as
if content to rest for a time on its oars before taking
the final climb.  The sun was setting when I reached
Burguete at forty-four kilometers, station of the
trans-Pyrenean diligence and the point that I had
been assured I should do well to reach in a two-day's
walk.  But I felt as unwearied as at the outset; the
towers of Roncesvalles stood plainly visible five
kilometers ahead across the green tableland.  I rambled
on in the cool of evening and by dark was housed in
a good inn of the mountain village.

When the supper hour arrived, the landlord stepped
across to me to ask whether I would eat as a guest
or as a member of the family.  I inquired what the
distinction might be.

"No difference," he answered, "except that as a
member of the family you pay a peseta upon leaving,
and as a guest you pay two."

It was of course en famille that I supped, and
right royally, at a board merry with good-humored
peasants and arrieros rather than in the silent,
gloomy company of a half-dozen convention-ridden
travelers in an adjoining room.

Roncesvalles would have been an unequaled spot
in which to pass an autumn week, roaming in the
forest glens of the mountains, dreaming of the heroic
days of Roland.  But the hour of reckoning and of
New York was near at hand.  Of all sensations I
most abhor the feeling that I must be in a given
place at a given time.

A short climb through wooded hillsides strewn with
gigantic rocks and I found myself all at once and
unexpectedly on the very summit of the Pyrenees.  In
no sense had the ascent been toilsome, vastly less so
than several scrambles of two or three hours'
duration between Lugo and Oviedo.  From the French
side, no doubt, it would have been far more of a task.
Gazing northward I recognized for the first time that
I stood high indeed above the common level of the
earth.  Miles below, blue as the sea, lay France, the
forested mountains at my feet rolling themselves out
into hills, the hills growing lower and lower and
spreading away into the far, far distance like
another world.  The modern world--and I was all at
once assailed with a desire to ask what it had been
doing in all the days I had been gone.  Then the
highway seized me in its grasp and hurried me away
down, racing, rushing, almost stumbling, so fast I
was forced to break away from it and clamber down
at my own pace through dense unpeopled forests, to
fall upon it again far below and stalk with it at
lunch-time into the village of Val Carlos.  Yet another
hour's descent and I crossed a small stream into the
little hamlet of Arneguy; the long-forgotten figure of
a French gendarme slouched forth from a hut to
shout as I passed, "Anything dutiable, monsieur?"
and my Spanish journey was among the things that
have been.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`EMIGRATING HOMEWARD`:

.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER XV


.. class:: center medium

   EMIGRATING HOMEWARD

.. vspace:: 2

In reality almost as much as in fancy I had
entered another world.  It is chiefly in retrospect
that a journey through Spain, as through Palestine,
brings home to the traveler the full difference
between those gaunt regions of the earth and the world
to which he is accustomed.  Here the change was
like that from a squatter's cabin, a bachelor's quarters
to a residence of opulence.

Arrived while the day was still in its prime at
St. Jean Pied de Port, I found myself undecided how to
continue.  The rescuing forty dollars awaited
me--postal errors precluded--in Bordeaux; but
Baedeker having now become mere lumber, I had no means
of knowing which of two routes to follow to that city.
I halted to make inquiries of an old Spaniard
drowsing before his shop--so like one of mine own
people he seemed amid this babble of French.  But
though he received me with Castilian courtesy he
could give me no real information.  Under the
awning of a café a hundred paces beyond, two
well-dressed men were sipping cooling drinks.  Their
touring-car stood before the building, and not far
away, in the shade of an overhanging shoulder of the
Pyrenees, loitered a chauffeur, in all the accustomed
accoutrements of that genus.  He had the appearance
of an obliging fellow.  I strolled across to him,
hastily summoning up my dormant French.

"Monsieur," I began, "vous me pardonnerez,
mais pour aller d'ici à Bordeaux vaut il mieux passer
par Bayonne ou bien par Mont de--"

He was grinning at me sheepishly and shifting
from one leg to the other.  As I paused he blurted
out:

"Aw, I don't talk no French!"

"Then I suppose it 'll have to be English," I
answered, in the first words of that language I had
spoken in ninety-six days--and in truth they came
with difficulty.

"Go' bly' me!" burst out the astounded knight of
the steering-wheel.  "'Ow ever 'd you get in this
corner o' the world?  Say, I ayn't said more 'n 'yes,
sir' or 'no, sir' to their lordships--" with a slight
jerk of the head toward the men under the awning--"in
so long I 've bally near forgot 'ow.  'Ere it
is Sunday an'--"

"Saturday," I interrupted.

"Sunday, I say," repeated the chauffeur, drawing
out a card on which were penciled many crude
crosses.  "Ere 's 'ow I keep track--"

"Señora," I asked, turning to a woman who was
filling a pitcher at a hydrant behind me, "qué día
tenemos hoy?"

Her lip curled disdainfully as she answered:

"Tiens!  Vous me croyez un de ces barbares-là?"--tossing
her head toward the mountain range  behind us.

"Mille pardons," I laughed.  "Force of habit.
This monsieur and I are disputing whether to-day is
Saturday or Sunday."

"Out again without your nurses!" she cried
sarcastically.  "Saturday, of course."

"Now 'ear that!" said the chauffeur, almost tearfully,
when I interpreted.  "'Ow ever can a man keep
track of anything in this bally country?  Say, what
was that question you was tryin' to ask me?"

"I 'm walking from Gib to Bordeaux," I remarked
casually, and repeated my former inquiry.  His
expression changed slowly from incredulity to
commiseration.  Suddenly he thrust a hand into his
pocket.

"I say, won't you 'ave a mite of a lift?  Why,
we took near all yesterday to come from that place.
You couldn't walk there in a month."

"No, thanks, I 'm fairly well heeled," I answered.

"Better 'ave a yellow-boy," he persisted, drawing
out several English sovereigns.  "Lord, you 're
more 'n welcome, y' know.  They ayn't no bloomin'
use to me 'ere!"

At that moment I noted that the milords under the
awning had spread out before them a large touring
map, and I left the chauffeur gasping at my audacity
as I stepped across to them.  The older was
struggling to give an order to the waiter, who crouched
towel on arm over them.  There is a strange
similarity between a full-grown Briton attempting to
speak French and a strong man playing with a doll.

"Beg pawdon, gentlemen," I said, when I had
helped them out of the difficulty, "but would you
mind my glancing at your map?  I want to find--"

"Ah--why, certainly," gasped one of the startled
nobles.

But even with the chart before me I was no nearer
a decision, for the two roads appeared of almost
equal length.  As I turned away, however, a poster
on a nearby wall quickly settled my plans.  It
announced a great bullfight in Bayonne the next
afternoon, with Quinito, Mazzatinito, and Regaterm,
among the most famous of Spain's matadores--far
more so than any it had been my fortune to see in
that country.

I sped away at once along a macadamed highway
at the base of the Pyrenees beside a clear river--a
mere "rivière" to the French, but one that would
have been a mighty stream in Spain.  Its banks
were thickly grown with willows.  On the other hand
the mountain wall, no less green, rose sheer above
me, bringing an unusually early sunset.  Along the
way I met several old men, all Basques, who noting
that I also wore the boína greeted me in their native
"Eúscarra."  Not a word of any other tongue
could they speak; and when I shook my head
hopelessly at their hermetical language, they halted to
gaze after me with expressions of deep perplexity.
So, too, in the mountain-top village of Bidarry to
which I climbed long after dark after a dip in the
river, all speech was Basque; though some of the
younger inhabitants, finding I was of their race only
from the cap upward, fell to talking to me in fluent
French or Spanish.

The first hours of the following clay were in the
highest degree pleasant.  Thereafter the country
grew hilly, the sun torrid, and as I was forced to
set the sharpest pace to reach the bullring by four.
I put in as dripping a half-day as at any time
during the summer; and I have yet to be more nearly
incinerated in this life than in the sol of the great
"Place des Taureaux" of Bayonne, crushed between
a workman in corduroys and a Zouave in the
thickest woolen uniform the loom weaves.

The fight, like the ring, was Spanish in every
particular, though the programmes were printed in
French.  It was by all odds the greatest córrida I
was privileged to attend during the summer, for the
three matadores stand in the front rank of their
profession.  Yet it was somehow far less exhilarating
than those I had seen in Spain.  One had a feeling
that these past masters were running far less
risk than their younger colleagues; one enjoyed their
dexterity as one enjoys a seasoned public speaker,
yet the performance lacked just the thrill of
amateurishness.

Here, too, I saw Spain's greatest picador, the only
one indeed I ever saw accomplish what the picador
is supposed to do,--to hold off the bull with his
*garrocha*.  This he did repeatedly, placing his lance
so unerringly that he stopped the animal's most
furious charges and forced him to retire bellowing
with rage and with blood trickling down over his
shoulders.  In all the afternoon this king of the
pike-pole had but one horse killed under him.  It was in
connection with this one fall that Quinito, the
boldest of the matadores, won by his daring such applause
as seemed to shake the Pyrenees behind us.  Moreno
lay half buried under his dead horse, in more than
imminent danger of being gored to death by the bull
raging above him.  In vain the anxious caudrilla
flaunted their cloaks.  All at once Quinito stepped
empty handed into the ring and caught the animal
by the tail.  Away the brute dashed across the plaza,
twisting this way and that, but unable to bring his
horns nearer than an inch or two of his tormentor
who, biding his time, let go and vaulted lightly over
the barrier.

I quitted Bayonne with the dawn and for four days
following marched steadily on across the great
Landes of France.  Miles upon miles the broad
highway stretched unswerving before me through
an ultra-flat country between endless forests of pine.
On the trunk of every tree hung a sort of flowerpot
to catch the dripping pitch.  There was almost no
agriculture, nothing but pine-trees stretching away
in regular rows in every direction, a solitude broken
only by the sighing of the wind sweeping across the
flatlands, where one could shout to the full capacity
of one's lungs without awakening other response than
long rolling echoes.  Once in a while a pitch-gatherer
flitted among the trees; less often the highway
crossed a rusty and apparently trainless railroad at
the solitary stations of which were tumbled hundreds
of barrels of pitch.

My shoes wore out, those very oxfords "custom-made"
in America and honestly tapped in Toledo,
and I was forced to continue the tramp in
alpargatas, or what had here changed their name to
*sandales*.  As my twenty-franc piece melted away a
wondering began to grow upon me whether I was
really homeward bound after all; so myriad are the
mishaps that may befall a mere letter.

Still the unswerving road continued, the endless
forests stretched ahead.  Such few persons as I met
scowled at me in the approved French fashion, never
once imitating the cheery greeting of the Spaniard.
Now and again a man-slaughtering automobile tore
by like some messenger to or from, the infernal
regions, recalling by contrast one of the chief charms
of the land I had left behind.  Hardly one of those
destroyers of peace and tranquillity had I seen or
heard in all Spain.

Four months afoot had not improved my outward
appearance.  It was not strange that the post-office
officials of Bordeaux stared at me long and suspiciously
when I arrived at length one afternoon with
a single franc in my pocket.  The letter was there.
When I had, after the unwinding of endless red tape,
collected the amount of the order, my journey seemed
over indeed.

The "Agents Maritimes" to whom I applied
accepted me readily enough as an emigrant to America,
agreeing to pick me up in Bordeaux and set me down
unstarved in New York for the net sum of two
hundred and three francs.  But there came a hitch in the
proceedings.  The agent was firing at me with
Gaelic speed the questions prescribed by our
exacting government--"Name?" "Age?" "Profession?"--and
setting down the answers almost before
I gave them, when:

"Have you contracted to work in the United States?"

"Oui, monsieur."

He stopped like a canvas canoe that has struck
a snag.

"C'est impossible," he announced, closing his book
of blanks with a thump.  "We cannot of course sell
you a ticket."

I plunged at once into an explanation.  I
advanced the information that the contract labor law
was not framed to shut out American citizens.
I protested that I had already toiled a year
under the contract in question, and for my sins
must return to toil another.  I made no headway
whatever.

"It is the law of the United States," he snapped.
"Voilà!  C'est assez."

Luckily I had a day to spare.  By dint of
appealing to every maritime authority in the city I
convinced the agent at last of his error.  But it was
none too soon.  With my bundle and ticket in one
hand and a sort of meal-sack tag to tie in my lapel--if
I so chose--in the other, I tumbled into the night
train for Paris just as its wheels began to turn.
Emigrant tickets are not good in France by day.  There
was one other tagged passenger in the compartment,
a heavy-mannered young peasant likewise wearing a
boína.  Being thus drawn together we fell gradually;
into conversation.  He was at first exceeding chary,
with the two-fold canniness of the Basque and of the
untraveled rustic whose native village has warned
him for weeks to beware wily strangers.  When I
displayed my ticket, however, he lost at once his
suspicion and, drawing out his own, proposed that we
make the journey as partners.  He was bound for
Idaho.  We did not, however, exchange ideas with
partner-like ease, for though he had passed his
twenty-five years in the province of Guipuzcoa he
spoke little Spanish.

Near midnight a few passengers alighted and I fell
into a cramped and restless sort of dog-sleep from
which I awoke as we screamed into Versailles.  When
we descended at the Montparnasse station we were
joined by three more Basques from another
compartment.  They, too, wore boínas and, like my
companion, in lieu of coats, smocks reaching almost to
the knees.  They were from near Pamplona and had
tickets from Bordeaux to Fresno, California, having
taken this route to avoid the difficulties of leaving
Spain by sea.

The Paris agent of the "American Line" did not
meet us in silk hat and with open arms; but when
we had shivered about the station something over an
hour an unshaven Italian of forty, with lettered cap
and a remarkable assortment of unlearned tongues
picked us up and bore us away by omnibus to his
"Cucina Italiana" in the Passage Moulin.  Breakfast
over, I invited my fellow-emigrants to view
Paris under my leadership.  They accepted, after
long consultation, and we marched away along the
Rue de Lyon to the site of the Bastille, then on into
the roar of the city, the Spaniards so helplessly
overwhelmed by the surrounding sights and sounds that
I was called upon times without number to save them
being run down.  At length we crossed to the island
and, the morgue being closed, entered Notre Dame.
I had hitherto credited Catholic churches with being
the most democratic of institutions.  Hardly were we
inside, however, when a priest steamed down upon my
companions.

"Sortez de suite!" he commanded.  "Get out!
How dare you enter the sacred cathedral in blouses!"

The Basques stared at him open-mouthed, now and
then nervously wiping their hands on the offending
smocks.  I passed on and they followed, pausing
where I paused, to gape at whatever I looked upon.
The priest danced shouting about them.  They smiled
at him gratefully, as if they fancied he were
explaining to them the wonders of the edifice.  His
commands grew vociferous.

"Ces messieurs, sir," I remarked at last, "are
Spaniards and do not understand a word of French."

"You then, tell them to get out at once!" he cried
angrily.

"You must pardon me, monsieur," I protested, "if
I do not presume to appoint myself interpreter to
your cathedral."

We continued our way, strolling down one nave
to the altar, sauntering back along the other toward
the entrance, the priest still prancing about us.  In
the doorway the Basques turned to thank him by
signs for his kindness and backed away devoutedly
crossing themselves.

At the Louvre, however, the smock-wearers were
halted at the door by two stocky officials, and we
wandered on into the Tuileries Gardens.  There the
quartet balked.  These hardy mountaineers, accustomed
to trudge all day on steep hillsides behind their
burros, were worn out by a few miles of strolling on
city pavements.  For an hour they sat doggedly in
a bench before I could cajole them a few yards
further to the Place de la Concorde to board a Seine
steamer and return to the Cucina.  I left them there
and returned alone to while away the afternoon
among my old haunts in the Latin Quarter.

Soon after dark the razorless son of Italy took
us once more in tow and, climbing to the imperial of
an omnibus, we rolled away through the brilliant
boulevards to the gare St. Lazare.  Here was
assembled an army of emigrants male and female, of all
ages and various distances from their last soaping.
In due time we were admitted to the platform.  A
third-class coach marked "Cherbourg" stood near at
hand.  I stepped upon the running-board to open a
door.  A station official caught me by the coat-tail
with an oath and a violence that would have landed
me on the back of my head but for my grip on the
door handle.  Being untrained to such treatment, I
thrust out an alpargata-shod foot mule-fashion
behind me.  The official went to sit down dejectedly on
the further edge of the platform.  By and by he
came back to shake his fist in my face.  I spoke to
him in his own tongue and he at once subsided, crying:

"Tiens!  I thought you were one of those animals there."

We were finally stuffed into four cars, so close
we were obliged to lie all night with our legs in one
another's laps.  The weather was arctic, and we slept
not a wink.  Early in the morning we disentangled
moody and silent in Cherbourg.  Another unshaven
agent took charge of my companions' baggage with
the rest, promising it should be returned the moment
they were aboard ship.  I clung skeptically to my
bundle.  We were herded together in a tavern and
served coffee and bread, during the administration
of which the agent collected our tickets and any
proof that we had ever possessed them, and
disappeared.  The day was wintry cold.  All the
morning we marched shivering back and forth between
the statue of Napoleon and the edge of the beach,
the teeth of the south-born Basques chattering
audibly.  At noon we jammed our way into the tavern
again for soup, beef and poor cider, and were given
rendezvous at two at one of the wharves.

By that hour all were gathered.  It was after
four, however, when a tender tied up alongside.  A
man stepped forth with an armful of tickets and
began croaking strange imitations of the names
thereon.  I heard at last a noise that sounded not
altogether unlike my own name and, no one else
chancing to forestall me, marched on board to
reclaim my credentials.  A muscular arm thrust me
on through a passageway in which a Frenchman in
uniform caught me suddenly by the head and turned
up my eyelids with a sort of stiletto.  Before I could
double a fist in protest another arm pushed me on.
At six a signal ran up, we steamed out through the
breakwater, and were soon tumbling up the gangway
of the steamer *New York*.  At the top another
doctor lay in wait, but forewarned, I flung open my
passport, and flaunting it in his face, stepped
unmolested on deck.

Some four hundred third-class passengers had
boarded the steamer in England, and no small
percentage of the berths were already occupied.
Unlike the nests of the *Prinzessin*, however, they might
reasonably be called berths, for though they offered
no luxury, or indeed privacy, being two hundred in a
section, the quarters were ventilated, well-lighted,
and to a certain extent clean.  I stepped to the
nearest unoccupied bunk and was about to toss my bundle
into it when a young steward in shirt-sleeves and
apron sprang at me.

"No good, John," he shouted, in Cockney accents
and striving to add force to his remarks by a clumsy
pantomime.  "Berth take.  No more.  No good,
John.  All gone.  But--" jerking his head
sidewise--"Pst!  John!  I know one good berth.  One
dollar--" holding up a hand with forefinger and
thumb in the form of that over-popular object--"All
take, Joh--"

"Say, what t'ell's the game, anyhow, mate?" I
interrupted.

His legs all but wilted under him.

"Sye, ol' man," he cried, patting me on the
shoulder.  "S'elp me, I took you for one o' these
waps, as why shouldn't I, in that there sky-piece
an' make-up?  Of course you can 'ave the berth.
Or sye, over 'ere by the port'ole's a far 'an'somer
one.  There y' are.  Now, mite, if ever I can 'elp
you out--" and he was still chattering when I
climbed again on deck.

Unfortunately, in the rough and tumble of
embarking I had lost sight of the Spaniards.  When I
found them again every berth was really taken, for
there was a shortage--or rather considerably more
than the legal number of tickets had been sold; and
the quartet, having withstood the blackmail, were
among those unprovided.  That night they slept, if
at all, on the bare deck.  Next day I protested to
the third-class steward and he spread for them two
sacks of straw on a lower hatch.  There, too, the icy
sea air circulated freely.  Worst of all, in spite of
the solemn promises of the agent, their bags, in which
they had packed not only blankets and heavier
garments, but meat, bread, fruit, cheese, and botas of
wine sufficient to supply them royally during all the
journey, had been stowed away in the hold.  For
two days they showed, after the fashion of
emigrants, no interest in gastronomic matters.  When
appetite returned they could not eat American--or
rather English food.  "No hay ajos!--It has
no garlic!" they complained.  Once or twice I acted
as agent between them and an under cook who
sneaked out of the galley with a roast chicken under
his jacket, but they grew visibly leaner day by day.

On the whole steerage life on the New York was
endurable.  The third-class fare was on a par with
most English cooking,--well-meant but otherwise
uncommendable.  The tables and dishes were moderately
clean, the waiters, expecting a sixpence tip at
the end of the passage, were almost obliging.  In
the steerage dining-room, large and airy, was a piano
around which we gathered of an evening to chat, or
to croak old-fashioned songs.  Here it was that I
felt the full force of my long total abstinence from
English.  It was days before I could talk fluently;
many a time my tongue clattered about a full
half-minute in quest of some quite everyday word.

On the fourth day out the oldest of the Spaniards
appealed to me for the twentieth time to intercede
for them with the third-class steward.

"Hombre," I answered, "it is useless; I have
talked myself hoarse.  Go to him yourself and it
may have some effect."

"But he understands neither Castilian nor
Eúscarra!" cried the Basque.

"No matter," I replied.  "He is a man in such
and such a uniform.  When you run across him
touch him on the sleeve and lay your head sidewise
on your hand--the pantomime for sleep the world
over--and he will remember your case."

An hour or more afterward I was aroused from
reading a book in an alleyway aft by the third-class
steward.

"I say," he cried, "will you come and see what
the bloomin' saints is biting these Spanish chaps?
They ayn't no one else can chin their lingo."

I followed him forward.  Before the dispensary
stood a wondering and sympathetic group, in the
center of which was the Basque making wry faces
and groaning, and the ship's surgeon looking
almost frightened.

"What's up?" I asked.

"Blow me if I know!" cried the medicine-man.
"This chap comes and touches me on the arm and
holds his hand against his cheek.  I gave him a dose
for toothache, and the beggar 's been howling ever
since.  Funny sort of creatures."

The Spaniards got no berth during the voyage,
though I carried their appeal in person to the
captain.  They were still encamped on the lower
hatch on the morning when the land-fever drew us
on deck at dawn.  Soon appeared a light-ship, then
land, a view of the charred ruins of Coney Island,
then a gasp of wonder from the emigrants as the
sky-scrapers burst on their sight.  We steamed
slowly up the harbor, checked by mail, custom, and
doctor's boats, and tied up at a wharf early in the
afternoon.  Rain was pouring.  I appeared before
a commissioner in the second cabin to establish my
nationality, bade the Basques farewell as they were
leaving for Ellis Island, and scudded away through
the deluge.  In my pocket was exactly six cents.
I caught up an evening paper and with the last coin
in hand dived down into the Subway.

.. vspace:: 2

:: 

   The Summer's Expense Account:
   Transportation ...................  $90.
   Food and Lodging .................   55.
   Bullfights, sights, souvenirs ....   10.
   Miscellaneous ....................   17.
                                      -----
                                      $172

.. vspace:: 6

.. pgfooter::