[image]A Moorish gate of RondaMy 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 aguardia civilwho 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.[image]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 agazpacho, 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.CHAPTER IIITHE LAST FOOTHOLD OF THE MOORRonda 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 encirclingvega, 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 theTajo, 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 littlerejaedbalcony 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 tumbledpueblo. 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:[image]Aqui se bende binoOnce 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.Theventainto which I straggled at last was the replica of an Arabickhan, 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. Theposaderogrumbled 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, anarrieroarrived 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 theirbachiin conspicuous places. But even this seems rather a misery of parade than a reality, a theatrical lying-in-wait for the gullibleBusnéfrom 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.CHAPTER IVTHE BANKS OF THE GUADALQUIVIRGranada 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 occasionalpuchero. 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 littlecantina, with zinc bar and shining spigots, but domestically the home of an amiable couple. Thecantinero, 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 bakedjarraswere 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."
[image]A Moorish gate of Ronda
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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 aguardia civilwho 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.
[image]A gitana of Granada. In the district of the Alhambra.
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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 agazpacho, 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.
CHAPTER III
THE LAST FOOTHOLD OF THE MOOR
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 encirclingvega, 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 theTajo, 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 littlerejaedbalcony 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 tumbledpueblo. 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:
[image]Aqui se bende bino
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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.
Theventainto which I straggled at last was the replica of an Arabickhan, 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. Theposaderogrumbled 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, anarrieroarrived 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 theirbachiin conspicuous places. But even this seems rather a misery of parade than a reality, a theatrical lying-in-wait for the gullibleBusnéfrom 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.
CHAPTER IV
THE BANKS OF THE GUADALQUIVIR
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 occasionalpuchero. 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 littlecantina, with zinc bar and shining spigots, but domestically the home of an amiable couple. Thecantinero, 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 bakedjarraswere 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."