CHAPTER XIIWILDEST SPAINNearest of all the Iberian peninsula to our own land, the ancient kingdom of Galicia is as well-nigh unknown to us as any section of Europe. As far back as mankind's memory carries it has been Spain's "last ditch." Up into this wild mountain corner of the peninsula retreated in its turn each subdued race as conqueror after conqueror swept over the land,--the aboriginal Iberians before the Celts, the Celtiberians before the coast-hugging Phoenicians and Carthaginians, these before the omniverous Romans, followed as the centuries rolled on by Vandal, Suevi, Goth and Moor. Further they could not flee, for behind them the world falls away by sheer cragged cliffs into the fathomless sea. Here the fugitives melted together into a racial amalgam, an uncourageous amalgam on the whole, for in each case those who reached the fastnesses were that remnant of the race that preferred life to honor, those who "fought and ran away," or who took to their heels even earlier in the proceedings.Yet it was a long two centuries after Hannibal had followed his father Hasdrubal into the Stygian realms of the defeated, after Rome had covered the rest of the peninsula with that network of roads that remains to this day, that the power of the outside world pushed its way into this tumbled wilderness. But for the necessity of loot to pay the gambling debts of his merry youth the conqueror indeed might never have appeared. Yet appear he did,--a young Roman just beginning to display a crownal baldness, known to his legions as Caesar and answering to his friends of the Roman boulevards and casinos to the name of Julius. He conquered; and when he, too, had written his memoirs and passed his perforated way, that lucky heir of all Roman striving caused to be built in these his mountains a city that should--like all that sprouted or grew under his reign--bear his name,--"Lucus Augusti--Gus's place."To-day it is Lugo, a modest city ensconced in the lap of a plain near a thousand feet above the railway station that bears its name. Politically Spanish, it is so in little else. The last traces of the Arab, so indelible in the rest of the peninsula, have disappeared. The racial amalgam, now the gallego, is close akin to the Portuguese, like all long dominated peoples docile, unassertive, born to be a servant to mankind. He is the chief butt, the low comedian of the Spanish stage, slow, loutish, heavy of mind and body, without a suggestion of the fire of that bubbling child of enthusiasm, the Andaluz; none of the native dignity and consciousness of personal worth of the Castilian, not even the dreaminess of the Manchegan. He is fitted to be what he is,--the domestic, the server of his fellow-countrymen.From the posada at the city gate I climbed to Lugo's chief promenade and Alameda, the top of her surrounding wall. This is some forty feet high, of flat, irregular slabs of slate-stone on Roman foundations, with a circuit of nearly a mile and a half. The town within and below is of the same material, the dull gray or drab so predominating as to give the place the somberness of a stone village of Wales. The inhabitants, moreover, have little of the Spaniard's love of color, being as sober in garb as in demeanor. It is noteworthy that those communities that are least embellished by nature are most prone to garb themselves in all the colors of the spectrum. The Venetian above his muddy water has been noted in all times as a colorist; the peasants of the Apennines barely a hundred miles away have very little brightness of dress.So the Lugense; for if the town itself is somber gray, the moss and vines that overrun the low, leaden houses, the gardens scattered among them, the flowers that trail from the windows of the dwellings built medieval-fashion into the walls make the scene gay even within. While outwardly it is unsurpassed. From the wall-top promenade the eye commands an endless vista of richest green landscape, a labyrinth of munificent hill forms and mountain ridges dense-wooded with veritable Alpine forests rolling away on every side to the uttermost horizon.In the town itself is almost nothing of what the tourist calls "sights"; which is, perhaps, a chief reason why his shadow almost never falls within it. There is only the dull, bluish-stone cathedral, and an atmosphere wholly individual; nothing exciting, nothing extraordinary, though one amusing detail of life is sure to attract attention. Like many towns of Spain, Lugo obtains her water through the mouths of stone lions in her central plaza. But here the fountain spouts are for some Gallegan reason high above the flagging, far out of reach. Whence the plaza and the streets of the city are at all hours overrun with housewives and domestics carrying not merely pitchers but a tin tube some ten feet long through which to conduct the water into their receptacles. In nothing does the town differ from familiar Spain more than in temperature. Her climate is like that of Bar Harbor. A change in a few hours as from Florida in August to Mount Desert brought quickly home to me the fact that my garb was fitted only for perpetual summer. Almost with the setting sun I fell visibly to shivering, and by dark I was forced to take refuge in bed.I had come into Galicia proposing to strike across country to Oviedo, capital of the Asturias, in the hope of getting wholly and thoroughly "off the beaten track." Therein I seemed fully to have succeeded. Inquiries in Lugo elicited the information that Oviedo was reputed to lie somewhere to the eastward. Nothing more; except some nebulous notion of a highway beginning at the base of the city wall leading for a day or two in that direction. For which uncertainty I was in no sense sorry, delighted with the prospect of exploring by a route of my own that wooded wilderness of mountains that spreads endlessly away from Lugo's promenade, certain of finding a land and a people unsullied by tourists.Dinner over on the day after my arrival, I descended from the city of Augustus by the unpaved road that was to set me a little way on my journey. It was soon burrowing through dense, scented forests, broken by scores of little deep green meadows along the way; so many and so inviting that it required a strong tug of the will to keep from lying down for a nap in each of them, in memory of the many grassless, siestaless, fly-bitten days in the rest of the peninsula. Truly the good things of this world are unevenly distributed. In fact, only by a dead lift of the imagination could one comprehend that this also was Spain. Switzerland, perhaps, but never a part and portion of the same country with the sear, deforested uplands of Castille, the sandy stretches of Andalusia, with osseous and all but treeless La Mancha. The division line between Europe and Africa was meant surely to be the Pyrenees and this Cantabrian range rather than the Mediterranean.When darkness settled down I halted at a jumbled stone hamlet, where payment was refused except for the few cents' worth of peasant fare I ate. For my bed, was spread in an open stable a bundle of newly threshed wheat-straw that was longer than myself. A half-day's tramp had not left me sleepy. The night lay cool and silent about me, and I sank into that reverie of contentment that comes most surely upon the wanderer when he has left the traveled world behind and turns his face care-free toward the unknown, that mysterious land across which beckons the aërial little sprite men nameWanderlust. For the joy of travel is not in arriving but in setting forth, in moving onward; how fast matters little, where, even less, but ever on and on, forgetting, for the supremest satisfaction, that there is a goal to attain. Let a man wander away into unknown lands smiling with summer, his journey's end little more than conjecture, his day of arrival a matter of indifference, and if he feel not then the joy of the open road he may know for a certainty that he is a hug-the-hearth, and no gipsy and a vagabond.In the morning continued a roadway hobble-skirted by forests, a country as pleasing as Caruso's voice, as soothing to the traveler from stony Spain as McDowell's music. To enumerate the details of life and landscape here is merely to tell by contrast what the rest of Spain is not. The inhabitants were in the highest degree laconic, as taciturn as the central and southern Spaniard is garrulous, self-conscious to the point of bashfulness, a characteristic as uncommon in the rest of the country as among the Jews or Arabs; a heavy-handed, unobserving peasantry that passed the stranger unaccosted, almost unnoticed. Such conversation as exchanged must be introduced by the traveler. The cheering "Vaya!" was heard no more, the stock greeting being a mumbled "Buenos."In appearance, be the inspection not too close, this mountain people well deserves the outworn epithet "picturesque." The women young and old wore on their heads large kerchiefs of brilliant red, and most of them a waist of the same color, offering striking contrast to the rich green background, as the latter was sure to be. As footwear, except those unpossessed of any, both sexes had wooden shoes painted black and fancifully carved, which, scraping along the highway, carried the thoughts quickly back to Japan. At nearer sight, however, something of the picturesqueness was lost in the unfailing evidences of a general avoidance of the bath and washtub.Of least interest were the dwellings of this peasantry,--villages neither frequent nor large, more properly mere heaps of gray huts built without order or plan of the slate-stone of which the province itself is chiefly formed, as was seen wherever the outer soil had been stripped away and the skeleton of the mountain laid bare. For all the character of the country abundance of rain and a pains-taking agriculture gave good crops. Galicia indeed supports, though in poverty, the densest population of the peninsula. Wheat, Indian corn, and hay abounded. The former was stacked, and threshed with flails--two customs unknown in Spain, as the latter products are entirely. The maize was sown. A species of cabbage on a stalk some two feet long was among the most common of the vegetables.All these products grew, not on the level, but in little isolated, precipitous fields in which it seemed impossible that the laborers, male and female with sickles or mattocks, could stand upright. Flocks of sheep and goats were many, and as the final change from the Spain that I had hitherto known there was nowhere silence. The forests on either hand were vocal with the songs of birds. Mountain streams came plunging, headlong down the ravines, or brawled along through stony channels beside the winding way. The water was of the purest and clearest, which may, perhaps, have led the inhabitants to give most of their mundifying attention to the vessels in which it was carried,--great oaken buckets each with three wide hoops scoured spotless and shining as a Hindu'slota.But most unfailing breakers of the silence and most characteristic of all the features of the province was its vehicles. The Phrygian peasants who dragged their produce into Troy before the siege had certainly as up-to-date a conveyance. The traveler's first encounter with one of these Homeric contrivances is sure to be startling. There is only one word that exactly expresses their sound from afar,--the Frenchbourdonner--the noise of the bumblebee. Indeed, when first I heard it I fell to threshing about my ears, sure that one of those insects was upon me. Slowly the sound grew to the meowling of a thousand cats, and around a turn of the forest-hedged road came a peasant's cart drawn by little brown oxen--they are as often cows--much like our Jerseys in appearance, a great sheepskin thrown over their heads, to the horns of which the yoke was fastened. The unwieldy edifice, wabbling drunkenly as it came, consisted of little more than two solid disks of wood like cistern covers turning on a wooden axle, the whole having about it neither an ounce of iron nor a smell of axle-grease. Its pace certainly did not exceed a mile an hour, the oxen see-sawing from side to side of the road, twisting their burdened heads to stare at me with curious, sad eyes. As it passed, my ears literally ached with its scream. I doubled my pace to flee the torture. But there was no entire escape; hardly once thereafter was I out of sound of a cart or two, now screaming by, now "bourdonning" away across some valley, buzzing at times even after the night had settled down.Early on this second day, which was Sunday, there appeared a far more precipitous and rocky country through which the road began to wind its way upward amid a chaos of rugged tumbled valleys, gaining by early afternoon an elevation above the line of vegetation. For two hours I kept lookout for a bit of level space for a siesta, without finding a patch of flat ground as large as my knapsack. I stepped over the edge of the highway and lay down on a bank so sheer that I was obliged to brace my stick against the small of my back to keep from pitching down the thousand-foot slope into a brook; and even as it was I awoke to find I had shifted some ten feet down the hill.The ascent thereafter grew still sharper, the surrounding world being at last wholly enveloped in a dense cloud. From out of this I heard, at what I fancied must be toward sunset, sounds of revelry, by which, marching onward, I was soon encompassed, though still unseeing and unseen. Suddenly there came waltzing toward me out of the fog a couple in each other's arms, disappearing again as another pair whirled forth out of the unknown. Wandering on through a merry but invisible multitude I ran all but into the arms of two guardias civiles leaning on their muskets. They greeted me with vast surprise, welcoming me to their mountain-top town of Fonsagrada and, far from demanding my papers, offered to find me a partner that I might join the village in its Sunday celebration on the green. I declined such hilarity, but for an hour stood chatting with them while the dancers whirled unseen about us.Fonsagrada has no regular accommodations for strangers. The peregrinating band of musicians, however, furnishing the day's melody, was to be cared for in a sort of grocery, to which I repaired with them when the dance was over. Having partaken of a substantial supper in which the far-famedbacalao--cod preserved in great chunks in barrels like salt pork; a main staple in this region--made its initial appearance, I laid my case before the proprietor. He was a Yankee-like man in the middle thirties, of modern business methods even though he knew next to nothing of the world outside his cloud-bound village. Notwithstanding, therefore, that there was no "costumbre" to sanction it, he bade me spend the night under his roof--which I did all too literally, for when I had left off swapping yarns with the melodious nomads my host led the way to the garret, half-filled with straw, where in the midst of a too realistic dream I rose up suddenly and all but shattered my head on the roof in question.In the morning the clouds were still wandering like lost souls through the streets of Fonsagrada. A mist that barely escaped being a rain was falling when I set off in an attempt to follow the voluminous directions of the dubious village. According to these, when I had passed the "Mesón de Galo," a lonely stone tavern a few miles out, I left the road, which was bending toward Gijón on the north coast, and fell into a descending mountain path. A tang of the salt sea was in the air. All the day through I climbed, slipped, and scrambled over jagged mountain slopes and through deep, rocky barrancas. There develops with much wandering an instinct to follow the right fork of a mountain trail, slight hints that could not be explained, but without the half-unconscious noting of which I must have gone a score of times astray. Twice or thrice I stumbled into a hamlet in some wrinkle of the range, a village of five or six hovels huddling in the shadow of an enormous, overtowering church, all built of flat field stones and swarming with huge white dogs.At Grandas, a bit larger village overhung by massed up mountains, I was at length so fortunate as to get after much search an intangible imitation of a meal. From there I panted a long time upward and came out at last above a seemingly bottomless gorge, a gorge so deep that I had scrambled nearly a half-hour along its brink before I noted that far down in its depths was a town, encircled by vertical vineyards, like embroidery on the lower skirts of its overhanging mountains. My path lay plainly visible on the opposite slope, only a long jump away, but a jump for Pegasus or the princess of the Rosstrappe, and I, mere mortal, was forced to wind a long hour and a half to and fro on the rubbled face of the mountain before I entered the town below, called Saline.Before me lay the most laborious task of all my Spanish journey. A mountain as nearly perpendicular as man could hope to ascend, without a break or a knoll in all its slope, rose, a sheer wall, certainly four thousand feet above. The gorge seemed some boundary set by the gods between two worlds. Up the face of the cliff a path had been laid out with mathematical precision, every one of its score of legs a toilsome climb over loose stones, with the sun, untempered by a breath of wind, pouring down its fury upon my back. It was hot as Spain in the depth of the canyon; it was chilling cold when I reached the summit heavily crested in clouds and threw myself down breathless on my back. Darkness was coming on, and I fell soon to shivering in the biting mountain air and must rise and hurry forward. It was not strange that in the fog and darkness instinct failed and that when finally I reached a village of eight or nine hovels and inquired its name the inhabitants replied "Figuerina," not in the least like the "La Mesa" I had expected.Of a brawny, weather-beaten girl milking a cow by the light of a torch in what passed for the principal street, I asked:"Is there a posada in town?""No sé, señor," she answered."Don't know! When your town has only nine houses?"But she only stared dully at me through the gloom, and I carried my inquiry elsewhere. With no better result, however, for each one I asked returned the same laconic, "I don't know." I had sat down on a boulder in the center of the hamlet to puzzle over this strange ignorance when a strapping mountaineer approached through the darkness and led me with few words to the house of the head man. The latter was in bed with a broken leg, having had the misfortune to fall off his farm a few days before. I was taken before him as he lay propped up with pillows and, after a few brief questions, he commanded his family to make me at home.Only at a distance are these mountain hamlets of northern Spain inviting. For the good people live, indoors and out, in peace and equality with their pigs and chickens, not because they are by nature unclean, but because they know no other life than this, nor any reason why their domestic animals should not be treated as equals. The wife of the village chief led me into the living-room and kitchen. I knew it was that, for she said so. The place was absolutely dark. Since leaving Lugo I had not seen a pane of glass, and lamps of any sort appear to be unknown in these hamlets of the Sierra de Rañadoiro. There was, to be sure, a bit of fire in one corner, but it gave not the slightest illumination, only a thick smoke that wandered about looking for an exit, and unsuccessfully, for there was nothing whatever in the way of chimney, and the door had been closed as we entered. Smoker though I am, I began to weep and did not once leave off while I remained in the room.The mustiness of a dungeon assailed the nostrils; the silence was broken by a continual droning. The floor was stone. In the room were six or eight men and women, as I discovered little by little from their voices. Supper was announced, and a match I struck showed an indistinct group of which I was a part humped over a steaming kettle in the center of the floor. Into this all began to dip their bread. I hung back, which the wife discovering by some instinct, she made an exclamation I did not understand and soon after there was thrust into my hands a private bowl of the concoction.It turned out to be a "caldo gallego"--an all but tasteless thick soup of which the chief ingredient, besides water, is the long-stemmed cabbage indigenous to the region. A spoon was then handed me. It was of wood, homemade, and flat as a canoe-paddle. What most aroused my wonder was the bread. A glimpse I had caught of it in the flicker of my match seemed to show a loaf of about the size of a large grindstone--though I charged this to optical illusion--from which wedges were cut, one of them being laid in my lap. It was coarse as mortar, yet as savory, and proved later to be as sustaining a bread as I have yet run across on the earth. This and the caldo being no match for a mountain-climbing appetite, I asked the privilege of buying a bowl of milk. From my unseen companions arose many ejaculations of wonder that I could afford such a luxury, but a bowl of it was soon put in my hands. A better milk I never broke bread in.Still I was at a loss to account for the incessant droning in the room, like the croak of a distant ox-cart. Since my entrance, too, I had been struck a thousand times lightly in the face, as with bread crumbs or the paper-wads indigenous to the old country schoolhouse. When it occurred to me to put the two mysteries together both were solved. The flies were so thick in the room that they made this sound in flying blindly back and forth.But once upstairs the dwelling assumed a new rating. Here was, it is true, no luxury; but the rough-fashioned chamber, partly store-room and partly spare bedroom, was capacious and clean, of the rough, unused sort of cleanliness of a farmer's "best room," opened only on extraordinary occasions. The one sheet of the massive bed was as stiff as any windjammer's mainsail, the blanket as rough as the robe of a Cistercian monk. Among a score of multiform articles stored in the room was a stack of bread such as I had eaten below, some forty loaves each fully as large as a half-bushel measure. It is baked from four to six months ahead, twice or thrice a year, and has a crust hard and impervious as a glazed pot, which keeps it fresh and savory for an almost unlimited period.As I bade farewell to my host next morning I held out to him two pesetas. He resented the offer as an Arab or a Castilian might have, but being of those accustomed to express themselves less in words than in actions, did so laconically. When I offered it again he rose half up on his elbows and bellowed "No!" His gruffness was in no sense from anger, but merely his mode of speaking emphatically, and a way of hiding that bashfulness so common to mountaineers, who are usually, as here, a shy and kindly people with much more genuine benevolence than grace of manner. I protested that I should at least be permitted to pay for my extravagance, the milk, arguing that even a wanderer on his feet was better able to spare a peseta than a village chief on his back. But he roared "No!" again, and furthermore commanded his wife to cut me a wedge of the longevious bread, "to carry me over the day."Once escaped from the tangle of inhabited stone-piles, I strode away down rock-jumbled ravines, one close succeeding another and carrying me all but headlong downward. In the depths of the third I risked a plunge into a mountain brook, though the water was icy and the air still almost wintry cold. The day was warming, however, by the time I descended upon the hamlet of Berducedo, where I got fried eggs and a new highway.To chronicle the vagaries of the latter during the rest of the day would be a thankless task. For miles it wound around and upward, ever upward on the face of bare stony mountains like a spiral stairway to heaven. Then suddenly from each giddy height it dived headlong down into deep-wooded, fertile valleys; then up again round and round another mountain shoulder far beyond the last stunted shrub. Later in the day it took to rounding these peaks almost on the level, coming a score of times so close to itself that I could all but toss my bundle across, only to buckle back upon itself for miles around some narrow but apparently bottomless gulley.Somewhere during the previous afternoon I had crossed the unmarked boundary between Galicia and the still more rugged kingdom of Asturias, to-day the province of Oviedo. A new style of architecture gradually became prevalent. The buildings were of two stories, the lower, of stone, housing the animals, while the dwelling proper was of wood and perched a foot or more above the lower story on four cone-shaped cornerstones, like some great awkward bird ready to take flight.But for this peculiarity the village in which night overhauled me differed but little from that of the evening before, except in being many hundred feet nearer sea level. It was called San Fecundo. As before, my inquiry for an inn was each time answered by a terse "I don't know." I found the head man in good health, however,--a stalwart fellow little past thirty who was shoveling manure in his front yard. Yet so local is the dialect of every village in this region that I tried for some time in vain to make known my wants to him."Can't you speak Spanish, señor?" I cried out."No, señor," he replied like the report of a gun, and apparently angered at the allegation. We managed nevertheless by patience and repetition to establish communication between us, and I found out at last why my inquiry for a posada had evoked so surprising an answer. Public hostelries being unknown among them, the mountaineers understand the question "Is there an inn in town?" to mean "Do you suppose any resident will furnish me accommodations?"The head man did in this case, in spite of my unfortunate blunder in calling him a gallego. So great is the sectionalism in these Cantabrian ranges that a man from one village deeply resents even being taken for a resident of another a mile distant; while the Asturians, a blending of the aboriginal Iberian and the Goth, in whose caves of Covadonga was kept alight the last flicker of Spanish liberty and Christianity, consider themselves free and independent hidalgos infinitely superior to the submissive gallego. There were in truth some noticeable differences of character and customs, that were to increase as I advanced.We spent the evening in another ventless, smoky, fly-buzzing kitchen, though this time the fireplace gave a bit of blaze and from time to time the rugged faces of the eight or ten men, who had gathered at the invitation of the village leader, flashed visible. I entertained them with such stories of America as are most customary and popular on such occasions. This was no light task. Not only were there many words entirely indigenous to the village, but such Castilian as my hearers used would scarcely be recognized in Castille. The expression "For allà" (over there) they reduced to "Pa cá"; "horse" was never "caballo," but either "cabalo" or "cabayo." Worst of all, the infinitive of the verb served indifferently for all persons and tenses. "Yo ir" might mean "I go," "I was going," "I shall go," "I should go" and even "I would have gone" and "I should be going."Most taking of all the stories I could produce were those concerning the high buildings of New York. I had developed this popular subject at some length when a mountaineer interposed a question that I made out at length to be a query whether those who live in these great houses spend all their time in them or take an hour or two every morning to climb the stairs."Hay ascensores, señores," I explained, "elevators; some expresses, some mixtos, as on your railroads."A long, unaccountable silence followed. I filled and lighted my pipe, and still only the heavy breathing of the untutored sons of the hills about me sounded. Finally one of them cleared his throat and inquired in humble voice:"Would you be so kind, señor, as to tell us what is an elevator?"It was by no means easy. Long explanation gave them only the conception of a train that ran up and down the walls of the building. How this overcame the force of gravity I did not succeed in making clear to them; moreover there was only one of the group that had ever seen a train.In the morning the head man accepted with some protest tworeales--half a peseta. The highway again raced away downward, describing its parabolas and boomerang movements as before, and gradually bringing me to a realization of how high I had climbed into the sky. On every hand rocky gorges and sheer cliffs; now and again a group of charcoal-burners on the summit of a slope stood out against the dull sky-line like Millet's figures--for the sun was rarely visible. As I descended still lower, more pretentious, red-roofed villages appeared, and by mid-afternoon I entered the large town of Tineo. As I was leaving one of its shops a courtly youth introduced himself as a student in the University of Valladolid, and as he knew a bit of English it was with no small difficulty that I resisted his entreaties to talk that tongue with him in the mile or two he walked with me. That night for the first time since leaving Lugo I paid for my lodging in a public posada.Salas, a long town in a longer green valley, was so far down and sheltered that figs sold--by number here rather than weight--nine for a cent. Beyond, the highway strolled for miles through orchards of apples and pears, while figs dropped thick in the road and were trodden under foot. For the first time I understood the force of the expression, "not worth a fig."In the wineshop where I halted for an afternoon lunch I got the shock of that summer's journey. Casually I picked up the first newspaper I had seen in a week; and stared a full moment at it unbelieving. The entire front page was taken up by a photograph showing Posadas lying in bed, his familiar face gaunt with pain, and about him his father, a priest, and a fellow-torero."Carajo!" I gasped. "What's this; Posadas wounded?""Más," replied the innkeeper shortly. "Killed last Sunday. Too bad; he made good sport for the aficionados."An accompanying article gave particulars. The Sevillian had been engaged to alternate with a well-known diestro in the humble little plaza of San Lucar de Barrameda on the lower reaches of the Guadalquivir. The end of the day would have seen him a graduate matador. The bulls were "miúras" five years old. As he faced the first, Posadas executed some pass that delighted the spectators. For once, evidently, he forgot his one "secret of success"; he turned to acknowledge the applause. In a flash the animal charged and gored him in the neck. He tried to go on, poised his sword, and fainted; and was carried to the little lazaret beneath the amphitheater, while the festival continued. Toward morning he died.All this had passed while I was climbing into the cloud-cloaked village of Fonsagrada, two weeks to an hour since I had last seen the skilful Sevillian in the ring. The article ended with the vulgarity common to the yellow journal tribe:"We have paid the dying Posadas one thousand pesetas for the privilege of taking this picture, which is almost all the unfortunate torero left his sorrowing family."I trudged on deep in such reflections as such occurrences awaken, noting little of the scene. At sunset I found myself tramping through a warmer, less abrupt country, half conscious of having passed Grado, with its palaces, nurse-girls, and conventional costumes. As dusk fell I paused to ask for an inn. "A bit further on," replied the householder. I continued, still pensive. Several times I halted, always to receive the same reply, "A bit further, señor." Being in no sense tired, I gave the matter little attention until suddenly the seventh or eighth repetition of the unveracity aroused a touch of anger and a realization that the night was already well advanced. A lame man hobbling along the dark road gave me once more the threadbare answer, but walked some two miles at my side and left me at the door of a wayside wineshop that I should certainly not have missed even without him.The chief sources of the boisterousness within were three young vagabonds who were displaying their accomplishments to the gathering. One was playing tunes on a comb covered with a strip of paper, another produced a peculiarly weird music in a high falsetto, while the third was a really remarkable imitator of the various dialects of Spain. With the three I ascended near midnight to the loft of the building, where a supply of hay offered comfortable quarters. For an hour he of the falsetto sat smoking cigarettes and singing an endless ditty of his native city, the refrain of which rang out at frequent intervals:"Más bonita que hay,A Zaragoza me voyDentro de Ar-r-r-rago-o-ón."It was with genuine regret that I noted next morning the reapproach of civilization. Rough as is the life of these mountaineers of the north their entire freedom from convention, the contact with real men who know not even what pose and pretense are, the drinking into my lungs of the exhilarating mountain air had made the trip that was just ending by far the most joyful portion of all my Spanish experiences. Not since the morning I climbed into Astorga had I heard the whine of a beggar; not once in all the northwest had I caught the faintest scent of a tourist. The trip had likewise been the most inexpensive, for in the week's tramp I had spent less than twelve pesetas.A few hours more down the mountainside brought me into Oviedo, where I took up my abode in the Calle de la Luna. The boyhood home of Gil Blas is a sober, almost gloomy town, where the sun is reputed to shine but one day in four. Its inhabitants have much in common with the slow-witted Lugense, though they are on the whole more wide-awake and self-satisfied. Of window displays the most frequent was that of a volume in richly illustrated paper cover entitled, "Los Envenenadores (poisoners) de Chicago." It was, possibly, an exposé of the packing houses, but I did not find time to read it. August was nearing its close, and there was still a considerable portion of Spain to be seen. Luckily my kilometer-book was scarcely half-used up; but of the joyful days of freedom on the open road there could not be many more.CHAPTER XIIITHE LAND OF THE BASQUEMy knapsack garnished, I turned my back on Oviedo early on Sunday morning. The train wound slowly away toward the lofty serrated range that shuts off the world on the south. As we approached the mountains, the line began to tie itself in knots, climbing ever upward. In one section two stations seven miles apart had twenty-six miles of railroad between them. At the second of the two a flushed and puffing Spaniard burst into our compartment with the information that, having reached the former after the train had departed, he had overtaken us on foot.Still we climbed until, at the turning of the day, high up where clouds should have been we surmounted the ridgepole of the range and, racing, roaring downward, were almost in a moment back in the barren, rocky, sun-baked Spain of old, dust swirling everywhere, the heat wrapping us round as with a woolen blanket, drying up the very tobacco in my pouch; a change almost as decided as from the forests of Norway to the plains of India.Arrived in León at three, I set off at once tourist-fashion for the cathedral, with its soaring Gothic towers and delicate, airy flying-buttresses the first truly inspiring bit of Christian architecture I had seen in Spain; the first indeed whose exterior was anything. Much of the edifice, however, was glaringly new, the scaffolds of the renovators being still in place.But here again "if the house of God is rich that of man is poor," pauperous in fact. When once the traveler has forced himself to believe that León was not many centuries since the rich capital of a vast empire he must surely fall sad and pensive reflecting how mutable and fleeting indeed are the things of earth. The León of to-day is a large village, a dried-up, dirty, dilapidated, depopulated, cobble-streeted village of snarling, meretricious-minded inhabitants jumbled together inside a wall that with the cathedral is the only remaining proof of former importance. Here once more was the beggar with his distressing whine, his brow of bronze, and his all too evident injuries; not numerously but constituting a large percentage of the population. In all Spain the devise of insurance companies on the fronts of buildings is more than frequent; in León there was barely a hovel without one or more. Which could not but awaken profound wonder, for not only are there no wooden houses within her walls to make danger of fire imminent, but a greater blessing could hardly be imagined for León than a general and all-embracing conflagration.It was, perhaps, because of the unbroken misery with which they were surrounded that the Leónese were individually crabbed and cynical. Not a courteous word do I remember having received in all the town, and in vitriolic remarks the keepers and guests of the tumble-down parador where I was forced to put up outdid all others.I was off in the morning at the first opportunity, again by train, which, passing in the early afternoon through a blinding sand-storm near the village of Cisneros, landed me soon after at Palencia. This was a counterpart of León; a trifle less sulky and universally miserable, but as sprawling, sun-parched, and slovenly. Its surrounding plains were utterly verdureless, their flanking hills ossified, its gardens, promenades, and Alameda past all hope of relief by sprinkling even had its river not long since gone desert-dry as the rest. I left the place quickly, riding into the night and descending at length to march to the inspiriting music of a military band along a broad, thick-peopled Alameda, at the end of which a giant statue of Columbus bulked massive against the moonlit sky, into Valladolid.I had come again upon a real city, almost the first since leaving Madrid; whence accommodations, while in no sense lacking, were high in price. In the course of an hour of prowling, however, I was apprised of the existence of a modest casa eta huéspedes in a canyon-like side street. I rang the great doorbell below several times in vain; which was as I had expected, for foolish indeed would have been the Spaniard who remained within doors on such a night, while the band played and the city strolled in the Alameda. I dropped my bundle at my feet and leaned against the lintel of the massive doorway.Within an hour there arrived another seeker after quarters, a slender Spaniard in the early summer of life, who carried two heavy portmanteaus and a leather swordcase. Almost at the opening of our conversation he surprised me by inquiring, "You are a foreigner, verdad, señor?" I commended his penetration and, as we chatted, sought for some sign of his profession or place in society. All at once the long, slender swordcase caught my eye."Ah! Es usted torero, señor," I observed with assurance.The youth awakened the echoes of the narrow street with his laughter."Bullfighter! No, indeed! I am happy to say no. I am a student in the national cavalry school here, just returned from my month's furlough. But your error is natural," he went on, "and my fault. I have really no right to appear in civilian garb. It would mean a month of bread and water at least if one of our officers caught a glimpse of me. But carajo! The family above may not be back by midnight. We can leave our baggage with the portier next door."We strolled slowly back to the brilliantly lighted Plaza de la Constitutión. Suddenly the youth interrupted an anecdote of the tan-bark to exclaim in a calm but earnest voice:"Caramba! There come my commandante and the first lieutenant."Two men of forty-five or fifty, in resplendent uniforms and tall red caps, their swords clinking along the pavement, were sauntering down upon us. I stepped quickly to the opposite side of my companion, being taller--and likewise curious."Hombre!" he protested sharply, stepping back again. "No tenga V. cuidado. It is not our way to hide from our officers."With head erect and military stride he marched straight on before him. Luckily the officers were so engrossed in conversation that neither glanced up as they passed.We drifted into a café and ordered "helado," that Spanish imitation of ice-cream the calling of which in the streets had so frequently caused me to whirl about in astonishment, so much does it sound like our "hello." Over it we fell to discussing things American, in which we were gradually joined by several well-dressed men at the adjoining marble tables. In the course of the evening I chanced to remark that one of the surprises of my summer's trip had been to find so little resentment against the United States."Señor," said the youth, while each and all of our companions gave signs of agreement, "nothing more fortunate has befallen our country in a century than the loss of Cuba and the Philippines. Not only has it taken a load off the Spanish people; it has brought more relief than you can guess to us of the army. The colonies were the dumping-ground of our profession. Once let an officer show ability and he was forthwith shipped off to the islands to die. Now they are taken away, Spain has already begun to regain her lost place among the nations. No, señor; we of the army at least think nothing but kindness to your people for the relief."Returned to the casa de huéspedes, the student and I were given adjoining rooms and saw much of Valladolid together before I took train the second morning after to Burgos. There, were regulation "sights" in abundance; on every hand memories of the Cid Campeador, even the spot where stood his dwelling--all as authentic as the popular landmarks of Jerusalem. Two miles or more out along the shallow mill-race that Burgos calls a river I visited the nunnery of Las Huelgas, which claims for its distinction never in its centuries of existence to have admitted to the veil less than a daughter of the nobility. The stroll is pleasant, but the place, noble though it be, unexciting--at least outwardly. Of the cathedral, the finest in Spain, much might be said--that has been often said before.It was in Burgos that I saw for the first time what I might have seen earlier and frequently had my tastes run that way,--a Spanish cemetery. More exactly it was a corpse-file, a perpendicular hillside in which hundreds of bodies had been pigeon-holed for future reference, with the name and a charitably indulgent characterization of the deceased on the end of his coffin. The Spaniard, with his superstitions, prefers this style of tomb for much the same reason, it seems, that the Arab seals his graves with cement,--that the emissaries from the less popular regions may not bear away the departed before the agents of the better and hence slower realm put in an appearance.The greatest experience of my day in Burgos was the view from the summit of the hot, dry Cerro de San Miguel. Not merely does it offer a mighty and comprehensive vista of half the stony-bare face of Castilla Vieja, but a bird's-eye view as it were of all Spain and her history. Of the city spread out at one's feet fully three-fourths the space is taken up by cathedral, churches, convents, monasteries, casas de misericordia, the vast bulk of the castle, the barracks, the bullring,--all the countless buildings of non-producers; while between them in the nooks and corners wherever a crack offers are packed and huddled the hovels of the mere inhabitants. There, in plain sight, is Spain's malady. She is a land of non-producers. Ecclesiastics, soldiers, useless octroi guards, beggars rotten with the notion fostered by the omnivorous priesthood that mendicancy is an honorable profession, make up almost the bulk of her population of productive age. Not without reason does nomadic Borrow lift up his clench-fisted wail against "Batuschca."There is one road to redemption for Spain,--that she shoot her priests and set her soldiers to work. As isolated individuals the merry, dissolute fellows of the cloth might be permitted to live on as they have, and suffer the natural end of such living. But as a class they are beyond reform; their point of view is so utterly warped and incorrigible, they have grown so pestiferous with laziness and "graft" that there is no other remedy, "no hay otro remedio" as the Spaniard himself would say could his throttled mind cast off the rubbish of superstition and cant for one clear thought. Let him who protests that they are teachers of the youth go once and see what they teach,--the vapid, senseless lies about "saints" so far from truth as to be an abomination, so far above the possible aspirations and attainments of real humanity as to force the rising generations from very hopelessness of imitation to lose heart and sink to iniquity as the priesthood has done before them. Or are there some who still credit them with feeding the poor? A high praise, indeed, exactly equal to that due the footpad who refunds his victim carfare that he may be the more quickly rid of him.Therein lies the chief weakness of Spain. It is not because she is ruled by a slender youth chosen by the accident of birth rather than by a more portly man chosen more or less by his fellow-citizens; not because her religion happens to be that of Rome rather than the austerities of Calvin or the fatalism of Mohammed; not because her national sport is a bit more dramatically brutal than that of other lands; not because her soil is dry and stony and her rains and rivers slight; not because her people are decadent, her human stock run down--I have plowed in the sea in the foregoing pages if I have not made it clear that her real manhood, the workman, the peasant, the arriero, the muscle and sinew of the nation, are as hardy, toilsome and all-enduring as the world harbors. But in the long centuries of warfare her attention was drawn away from internal affairs, she fell among thieves within, and the force of example, the helplessness of the individual drove her people in the line of least resistance,--to become thieves too, nationally, officially, until mad grab-what-you-can-and-the-devil-grab-the-ungrabbing has her by the throat gasping for life. If she is not to sink down for the vultures of the nations to pick clean of her meager scraps of flesh there must arise within her boundaries a man, a movement, a sweeping change that shall cast off the burden of precedent and turn her officials to doing honestly with all their might what now they do with all their might dishonestly. She must regain confidence in the necessity and prevalence of honesty. She must learn that patent yet rarely comprehended truth that work and work only is the real source of life; she must cease to be the sworn enemy of the innovator, thinking her ways best and those of the rest of the world abnormal, unable to see a yard beyond her national boundaries, scorning all ideas and arguments from the outside like the most hide-bound of Orientals.The next afternoon found me in Vitoria, in the land of the Basque; yet another kind of Spain. Vitoria is a city of to-day, clean, bustling, almost American in her streets and architecture and the wide-awake air of theVascongado. Theboína--round cap without visor and the end of a string for tassel--had all at once become universal, worn, like the fez in Damascus, by every age and grade of man from bootblack to mayor. So pleasing was this prosaic city that even though her prices were high I loitered in her shade until the next afternoon before seeking out the highway to Bilbáo.There lay sixty-seven kilometers to the seaport, a half of which I hoped to cover before halting for the night. For on the following day Bilbáo was to celebrate in honor of the king. The way led me through a country fertile for all its stoniness, made so by the energy and diligence of the Basque, whose strong features, bold curved nose, piercing eyes and sturdy form was to be seen on every hand. With the southern Spaniard this new race had almost nothing in common, and though as serious of deportment as the gallego there was neither his bashfulness nor stupidity. The Castilian spoken in the region was excellent, the farming implements of modern manufacture and the methods of the husbandman thousands of years ahead of Andalusia.As the day was fading I began to clamber my way upward into the mountains that rose high in the darkening sky ahead. The night grew to one of the blackest, the heavens being overcast; but he who marches on into the darkness without contact with artificial light may still see almost plainly. It was two hours, perhaps, after nightfall, and the road was winding ever higher around the shoulder of a mammoth peak, its edge a sheer precipice above unfathomable depths, when suddenly I saw a man, a denser blackness against the sea of obscurity, standing stock-still on the utmost edge of the highway."Buenos tardes," I greeted in a low voice, almost afraid that a hearty tone would send him toppling backward to his death.He neither answered nor moved. I stepped closer."You have rather a dangerous position, verdad, señor?"Still he stared motionless at me through the darkness. Could he be some sleep-walker? I moved quietly forward and, thrusting out a hand, touched him on the sleeve. It was hard as if frozen! For an instant I recoiled, then with a sudden instinctive movement passed a hand quickly and lightly over his face. Was I dreaming? That, too, was hard and cold. I sprang back and, rummaging hastily through my pockets, found one broken match. The wind was rushing up from the bottomless gulf below. I struck a light, holding it in the hollow of my hand, and in the instant before it was blown out I caught a few words of an inscription on a pedestal:"ERECTED TO THE MEM--THROWN OVER THIS PRECIPICE--BANDITS--NIGHT OF--"and before I had made out date or name I was again in darkness.Over the summit, on a lower, less wind-swept level, I came upon a long mining town scattered on either side of the highway. I dropped in at a wineshop and bespoke supper and lodging. A dish of the now omnipresent bacalao was set before me, but for a time the keeper showed strong disinclination to house a wandering stranger falling upon him at this advanced hour.The young woman who served me at table and answered the demands for wine of the half-dozen youthful miners about me seemed strangely out of place in such surroundings. Nothing was plainer than that she was not of the barmaid type. One would have said rather the convent-reared daughter of some well-to-do merchant or large farmer. This surmise turned out to be close to the truth. When the carousing miners had drifted into the night and I, by dint of talking and acting my best Castilian, had found my way into the good graces of the family, I heard the girl's story--for rightly approached the Spaniard is easily led to talk of his private affairs. Her father had been the principal shop-keeper of the mining town, and had died a few weeks before. His debts were heavy and when all claims had been settled there remained to his orphaned daughter five hundred pesetas."But," I cried, "five hundred pesetas! It is a fortune, señorita, in Spain. You could have started a shop, or lived well until the novio appeared.""Jesus Maria!" cried the girl, looking at me with wondering eyes. "Do you forget purgatory? For the repose of my father's soul five hundred masses must be said; no less, the cura himself told me; and each mass costs a peseta. Then I have come to work here."There was that in the air next morning that reminded me, as I wound down into a wooded, well-peopled valley, that summer was drawing toward its close. The day grew quickly warm, however. In the knowledge that the king was sojourning in the city upon which I was marching, I was fully prepared to endure long catechizing and examination by guardias civiles. My wonder was not slight, therefore, when I was suffered to pass through one, two, three villages without being once challenged.But the expected meeting came at last and quite made up for the lack of others. The third village lay already behind me when I heard an authoritative shout and, turning around, saw a bareheaded man of thirty, dressed half in peasant, half in village garb, beckoning to me with a commanding gesture to return. Fancying him some wily shop-keeper, I swung on my heel and set off again. He shouted loudly, and racing after me, caught me by an arm. I shook him off with an indignation that sent him spinning half across the highway. Instead of retreating he sprang at me again and we should certainly have been soon entangled in a crude performance of the manly art had he not cried out in a voice quaking with anger:"Have a care, señor, in resisting the law. I am a miñón.""Miñón!" I cried, recalling suddenly that in the Basque provinces the national guardias are reënforced by local officers thus named. "Then why the devil don't you wear your uniform? How shall I know you are not a footpad?""I shall prove that soon enough," he replied, still visibly shaking with the rage of a Spaniard whose "pundonor" has been sullied.I returned with him to the casa de ayuntamiento, in the doorway of which he halted, and, examining me for concealed weapons, demanded that I untie my knapsack. Never before had this been more than superficially inspected, but the thoroughness with which the angry miñón overhauled it, examining even my letters and fingering my clothes-brush over and over as if convinced that it could be opened by some secret spring, fully made up for any possible carelessness of his fellow-officers elsewhere. When he had lost hope of finding evidence of treason he handed back my possessions reluctantly and bade me with a scowl the conventional "Go with God;" to which I answered, "Queda V. con el mismisimo diablo"--but the thrust was too subtle for his bullet-headed intellect.Toward noon the green slopes and cool forests turned to a cindered soil and the sooty aspect of a factory town. I mounted a last hill and descended quickly through a smoke-laden atmosphere into Bilbáo. Here was the first entirely modern city I had seen in Spain; one might easily have fancied one's self in Newcastle or Seattle. The Spanish casa de huéspedes seemed not even known by name, and in its place were only boisterous taverns, smacking of sea-faring custom and overrun with the touts that feed on the simple mariner.As I sat toward evening in one of these establishments, there entered a man something over thirty-five, dressed in boína and workingman's garb that showed but slight wear. I noted him only half consciously, being at that moment expressing to the landlord my surprise that the king, instead of being in Bilbáo as he was reported by the newspapers, was ten or twelve miles away on his yacht at the mouth of the river. The keeper, a stocky Basque of much better parts than the average of his guild, glanced up from his spigots and replied in a smooth and pleasant voice:"Porque, señor, no quiere morir tan joven--Because he does not care to die so young.""Y con mujer tan bella y fresca--And with a wife so beautiful and fresh," added a thick-set fellow at a neighboring table without looking up from his cards.Love for Alfonso is not one of the characteristics of the masses in this section of the country.Meanwhile the newcomer, whose eye had been wandering leisurely over the assembly, threaded his way half across the room to sit down at my table. I wondered a bit at the preference, but certain he was no tout, gave him the customary greeting. By the time I had accepted a glass and treated in turn we were exchanging personal information. He announced himself a cobbler, and even before I had broached the subject suggested that he could find me a lodging with an old woman above his shop. This workroom, when we reached it, proved to be nothing but a kit of tools and a few strips of leather scattered about the small hallway at the foot of the stairs. I found above the hospitality he had promised, however, and paying two night's lodging in an unusually pleasant room, descended.The shoemaker appeared more obliging than industrious, for he at once laid aside the shoe he was hammering and announced that he was going to give himself the pleasure of spending the evening with me and of finding me the best place to take in the fireworks that were to be set off in honor of the king. I explained that it was rather my plan to attend the city theater, where I might both see that remarkable personage in the flesh and hear one of Molière's best comedies in Spanish."There is more than time for both," replied the cobbler, and forthwith fell to extolling the coming spectacle so highly that he came near to arousing within me, too, an interest in the fireworks.At the end of an hour's stroll we found ourselves on the summit of a knoll in the outskirts, in a compact sea of Bilbaoans watching a tame imitation of a Fourth of July celebration on the slope of one of the surrounding hills. The display was, as I have said, in honor of the king; though it turned out that his indifferent majesty was at that moment dining and wining a company of fellow-sportsmen on board theGiraldatwelve miles away.The cobbler set a more than leisurely pace back to the city, but we regained at length the bank of the river and, crossing the wooded Paseo Arenal, approached the theater. Before it, was packed a vast and compact multitude through which I struggled my way to the entrance, only to be informed in the customary box-office tones that there was not another ticket to be had. The shoemaker was no theater-goer, and as my own disappointment was not overwhelming, we set out to fight our way back to the Paséo.Long before we had succeeded in that venturesome undertaking, however, there burst forth a sudden, unheralded roar of uncounted voices, the immense throng surged riverward with an abruptness that all but swept us off our feet, the thunder of thousands of hoofs swelled nearer, and down upon us rode an entire regiment of guardias civiles in uniforms so new they seemed but that moment to have left the tailor, and astride finer horses than I had dreamed existed in Spain. Straight into the crowd they dashed, headlong, at full canter, like cowboys into a drove of steers, sweeping all before them, scattering luckless individuals in all directions, and completely surrounding the theater in solid phalanx. Before I had recovered breath there arose another mighty shout, and, some three hundred more horsemen, with a richly caparisoned carriage in their midst, dashed through the throng from a landing-stage on the river bank behind us to the door of the theater. I caught a fleeting glimpse of a slight figure in a rakish overcoat, a burst of music sounded from the theater, and died as suddenly away as the doors closed behind the royal arrival. Again the cavalry charged, driving men, women and children pellmell back a hundred yards from the building and, forming a yet wider circle around it, settled down to sit their horses like statues until the play should be ended.When my wonder had somewhat subsided there came upon me an all but uncontrollable desire to shout with laughter. The ludicrousness, the ridiculousness of it all! A vast concourse of humanity driven helter-skelter like as many cattle, scores of persons jostled and bruised, thirteen hundred of the most able-bodied men in Spain to sit motionless on horseback around a theater late into the night, all for the mere protection of one slight youth whose equal was easily to be found in every town or village of the land! Truly this institution of kingship is as humorous a hoax as has been played upon mankind since man was.A hoax on all concerned. For the incumbent himself, the slender youth inside, who must spend his brief span of years amid such mummery, commands of himself a bit of mild admiration. I fell to wondering what he would give for the right to wander freely and unnoticed all a summer's day along the open highway. Let him who can imagine himself born a king, discovering as early as such notions can penetrate to his infant intellect that his fellow-mortals have placed him high on a pedestal, have given him even without the asking power, riches, and almost reverence as a superior being, when at heart he knows full well he is of quite the same clay as they; and he may well ask himself whether he would have grown up even as manly as the youth who goes by the name of Alfonso XIII. Recalling that former kings of Spain could not be touched by other than a royal finger, we may surely grant common sense to this sovereign who dances uncondescendingly with daughters of the middle class, who chats freely with bullfighters, peasants, or apple-women. Pleasing, too, is his devil-may-carelessness. On this same night, for instance, after reboarding his yacht, he took it suddenly into his mad young head to return at once through this, his most hostile province, to his queen. At one in the morning he was rowed ashore with one companion, stepped into his automobile, himself playing chauffeur, and tore away through Bilbáo and a hundred miles along the craggy coast to San Sebastian. It is not hard to guess what might have happened had he punctured a tire among those stony mountains and been chanced upon by a homing band of peasants brave with wine.Musing all which I turned to address the cobbler and found him gone. The crowd was slowly melting away. I sat down in the Paseo and waited an hour, but my erstwhile companion did not reappear. When I descended from my lodging next morning there remained not a trace of his "shop" at the foot of the stairs. Had the village miñón done me the honor of telegraphing my description to the seaport, or was my road-worn garb the livery of suspicion? This only I know; when, that Sunday evening after my return from a glimpse of the open sea, I asked my hostess whether her fellow renter were really a shoemaker, she screwed up her parchment-like features into a smile and answered:"Sí, señor, one of the shoemakers of his majesty."
CHAPTER XII
WILDEST SPAIN
Nearest of all the Iberian peninsula to our own land, the ancient kingdom of Galicia is as well-nigh unknown to us as any section of Europe. As far back as mankind's memory carries it has been Spain's "last ditch." Up into this wild mountain corner of the peninsula retreated in its turn each subdued race as conqueror after conqueror swept over the land,--the aboriginal Iberians before the Celts, the Celtiberians before the coast-hugging Phoenicians and Carthaginians, these before the omniverous Romans, followed as the centuries rolled on by Vandal, Suevi, Goth and Moor. Further they could not flee, for behind them the world falls away by sheer cragged cliffs into the fathomless sea. Here the fugitives melted together into a racial amalgam, an uncourageous amalgam on the whole, for in each case those who reached the fastnesses were that remnant of the race that preferred life to honor, those who "fought and ran away," or who took to their heels even earlier in the proceedings.
Yet it was a long two centuries after Hannibal had followed his father Hasdrubal into the Stygian realms of the defeated, after Rome had covered the rest of the peninsula with that network of roads that remains to this day, that the power of the outside world pushed its way into this tumbled wilderness. But for the necessity of loot to pay the gambling debts of his merry youth the conqueror indeed might never have appeared. Yet appear he did,--a young Roman just beginning to display a crownal baldness, known to his legions as Caesar and answering to his friends of the Roman boulevards and casinos to the name of Julius. He conquered; and when he, too, had written his memoirs and passed his perforated way, that lucky heir of all Roman striving caused to be built in these his mountains a city that should--like all that sprouted or grew under his reign--bear his name,--"Lucus Augusti--Gus's place."
To-day it is Lugo, a modest city ensconced in the lap of a plain near a thousand feet above the railway station that bears its name. Politically Spanish, it is so in little else. The last traces of the Arab, so indelible in the rest of the peninsula, have disappeared. The racial amalgam, now the gallego, is close akin to the Portuguese, like all long dominated peoples docile, unassertive, born to be a servant to mankind. He is the chief butt, the low comedian of the Spanish stage, slow, loutish, heavy of mind and body, without a suggestion of the fire of that bubbling child of enthusiasm, the Andaluz; none of the native dignity and consciousness of personal worth of the Castilian, not even the dreaminess of the Manchegan. He is fitted to be what he is,--the domestic, the server of his fellow-countrymen.
From the posada at the city gate I climbed to Lugo's chief promenade and Alameda, the top of her surrounding wall. This is some forty feet high, of flat, irregular slabs of slate-stone on Roman foundations, with a circuit of nearly a mile and a half. The town within and below is of the same material, the dull gray or drab so predominating as to give the place the somberness of a stone village of Wales. The inhabitants, moreover, have little of the Spaniard's love of color, being as sober in garb as in demeanor. It is noteworthy that those communities that are least embellished by nature are most prone to garb themselves in all the colors of the spectrum. The Venetian above his muddy water has been noted in all times as a colorist; the peasants of the Apennines barely a hundred miles away have very little brightness of dress.
So the Lugense; for if the town itself is somber gray, the moss and vines that overrun the low, leaden houses, the gardens scattered among them, the flowers that trail from the windows of the dwellings built medieval-fashion into the walls make the scene gay even within. While outwardly it is unsurpassed. From the wall-top promenade the eye commands an endless vista of richest green landscape, a labyrinth of munificent hill forms and mountain ridges dense-wooded with veritable Alpine forests rolling away on every side to the uttermost horizon.
In the town itself is almost nothing of what the tourist calls "sights"; which is, perhaps, a chief reason why his shadow almost never falls within it. There is only the dull, bluish-stone cathedral, and an atmosphere wholly individual; nothing exciting, nothing extraordinary, though one amusing detail of life is sure to attract attention. Like many towns of Spain, Lugo obtains her water through the mouths of stone lions in her central plaza. But here the fountain spouts are for some Gallegan reason high above the flagging, far out of reach. Whence the plaza and the streets of the city are at all hours overrun with housewives and domestics carrying not merely pitchers but a tin tube some ten feet long through which to conduct the water into their receptacles. In nothing does the town differ from familiar Spain more than in temperature. Her climate is like that of Bar Harbor. A change in a few hours as from Florida in August to Mount Desert brought quickly home to me the fact that my garb was fitted only for perpetual summer. Almost with the setting sun I fell visibly to shivering, and by dark I was forced to take refuge in bed.
I had come into Galicia proposing to strike across country to Oviedo, capital of the Asturias, in the hope of getting wholly and thoroughly "off the beaten track." Therein I seemed fully to have succeeded. Inquiries in Lugo elicited the information that Oviedo was reputed to lie somewhere to the eastward. Nothing more; except some nebulous notion of a highway beginning at the base of the city wall leading for a day or two in that direction. For which uncertainty I was in no sense sorry, delighted with the prospect of exploring by a route of my own that wooded wilderness of mountains that spreads endlessly away from Lugo's promenade, certain of finding a land and a people unsullied by tourists.
Dinner over on the day after my arrival, I descended from the city of Augustus by the unpaved road that was to set me a little way on my journey. It was soon burrowing through dense, scented forests, broken by scores of little deep green meadows along the way; so many and so inviting that it required a strong tug of the will to keep from lying down for a nap in each of them, in memory of the many grassless, siestaless, fly-bitten days in the rest of the peninsula. Truly the good things of this world are unevenly distributed. In fact, only by a dead lift of the imagination could one comprehend that this also was Spain. Switzerland, perhaps, but never a part and portion of the same country with the sear, deforested uplands of Castille, the sandy stretches of Andalusia, with osseous and all but treeless La Mancha. The division line between Europe and Africa was meant surely to be the Pyrenees and this Cantabrian range rather than the Mediterranean.
When darkness settled down I halted at a jumbled stone hamlet, where payment was refused except for the few cents' worth of peasant fare I ate. For my bed, was spread in an open stable a bundle of newly threshed wheat-straw that was longer than myself. A half-day's tramp had not left me sleepy. The night lay cool and silent about me, and I sank into that reverie of contentment that comes most surely upon the wanderer when he has left the traveled world behind and turns his face care-free toward the unknown, that mysterious land across which beckons the aërial little sprite men nameWanderlust. For the joy of travel is not in arriving but in setting forth, in moving onward; how fast matters little, where, even less, but ever on and on, forgetting, for the supremest satisfaction, that there is a goal to attain. Let a man wander away into unknown lands smiling with summer, his journey's end little more than conjecture, his day of arrival a matter of indifference, and if he feel not then the joy of the open road he may know for a certainty that he is a hug-the-hearth, and no gipsy and a vagabond.
In the morning continued a roadway hobble-skirted by forests, a country as pleasing as Caruso's voice, as soothing to the traveler from stony Spain as McDowell's music. To enumerate the details of life and landscape here is merely to tell by contrast what the rest of Spain is not. The inhabitants were in the highest degree laconic, as taciturn as the central and southern Spaniard is garrulous, self-conscious to the point of bashfulness, a characteristic as uncommon in the rest of the country as among the Jews or Arabs; a heavy-handed, unobserving peasantry that passed the stranger unaccosted, almost unnoticed. Such conversation as exchanged must be introduced by the traveler. The cheering "Vaya!" was heard no more, the stock greeting being a mumbled "Buenos."
In appearance, be the inspection not too close, this mountain people well deserves the outworn epithet "picturesque." The women young and old wore on their heads large kerchiefs of brilliant red, and most of them a waist of the same color, offering striking contrast to the rich green background, as the latter was sure to be. As footwear, except those unpossessed of any, both sexes had wooden shoes painted black and fancifully carved, which, scraping along the highway, carried the thoughts quickly back to Japan. At nearer sight, however, something of the picturesqueness was lost in the unfailing evidences of a general avoidance of the bath and washtub.
Of least interest were the dwellings of this peasantry,--villages neither frequent nor large, more properly mere heaps of gray huts built without order or plan of the slate-stone of which the province itself is chiefly formed, as was seen wherever the outer soil had been stripped away and the skeleton of the mountain laid bare. For all the character of the country abundance of rain and a pains-taking agriculture gave good crops. Galicia indeed supports, though in poverty, the densest population of the peninsula. Wheat, Indian corn, and hay abounded. The former was stacked, and threshed with flails--two customs unknown in Spain, as the latter products are entirely. The maize was sown. A species of cabbage on a stalk some two feet long was among the most common of the vegetables.
All these products grew, not on the level, but in little isolated, precipitous fields in which it seemed impossible that the laborers, male and female with sickles or mattocks, could stand upright. Flocks of sheep and goats were many, and as the final change from the Spain that I had hitherto known there was nowhere silence. The forests on either hand were vocal with the songs of birds. Mountain streams came plunging, headlong down the ravines, or brawled along through stony channels beside the winding way. The water was of the purest and clearest, which may, perhaps, have led the inhabitants to give most of their mundifying attention to the vessels in which it was carried,--great oaken buckets each with three wide hoops scoured spotless and shining as a Hindu'slota.
But most unfailing breakers of the silence and most characteristic of all the features of the province was its vehicles. The Phrygian peasants who dragged their produce into Troy before the siege had certainly as up-to-date a conveyance. The traveler's first encounter with one of these Homeric contrivances is sure to be startling. There is only one word that exactly expresses their sound from afar,--the Frenchbourdonner--the noise of the bumblebee. Indeed, when first I heard it I fell to threshing about my ears, sure that one of those insects was upon me. Slowly the sound grew to the meowling of a thousand cats, and around a turn of the forest-hedged road came a peasant's cart drawn by little brown oxen--they are as often cows--much like our Jerseys in appearance, a great sheepskin thrown over their heads, to the horns of which the yoke was fastened. The unwieldy edifice, wabbling drunkenly as it came, consisted of little more than two solid disks of wood like cistern covers turning on a wooden axle, the whole having about it neither an ounce of iron nor a smell of axle-grease. Its pace certainly did not exceed a mile an hour, the oxen see-sawing from side to side of the road, twisting their burdened heads to stare at me with curious, sad eyes. As it passed, my ears literally ached with its scream. I doubled my pace to flee the torture. But there was no entire escape; hardly once thereafter was I out of sound of a cart or two, now screaming by, now "bourdonning" away across some valley, buzzing at times even after the night had settled down.
Early on this second day, which was Sunday, there appeared a far more precipitous and rocky country through which the road began to wind its way upward amid a chaos of rugged tumbled valleys, gaining by early afternoon an elevation above the line of vegetation. For two hours I kept lookout for a bit of level space for a siesta, without finding a patch of flat ground as large as my knapsack. I stepped over the edge of the highway and lay down on a bank so sheer that I was obliged to brace my stick against the small of my back to keep from pitching down the thousand-foot slope into a brook; and even as it was I awoke to find I had shifted some ten feet down the hill.
The ascent thereafter grew still sharper, the surrounding world being at last wholly enveloped in a dense cloud. From out of this I heard, at what I fancied must be toward sunset, sounds of revelry, by which, marching onward, I was soon encompassed, though still unseeing and unseen. Suddenly there came waltzing toward me out of the fog a couple in each other's arms, disappearing again as another pair whirled forth out of the unknown. Wandering on through a merry but invisible multitude I ran all but into the arms of two guardias civiles leaning on their muskets. They greeted me with vast surprise, welcoming me to their mountain-top town of Fonsagrada and, far from demanding my papers, offered to find me a partner that I might join the village in its Sunday celebration on the green. I declined such hilarity, but for an hour stood chatting with them while the dancers whirled unseen about us.
Fonsagrada has no regular accommodations for strangers. The peregrinating band of musicians, however, furnishing the day's melody, was to be cared for in a sort of grocery, to which I repaired with them when the dance was over. Having partaken of a substantial supper in which the far-famedbacalao--cod preserved in great chunks in barrels like salt pork; a main staple in this region--made its initial appearance, I laid my case before the proprietor. He was a Yankee-like man in the middle thirties, of modern business methods even though he knew next to nothing of the world outside his cloud-bound village. Notwithstanding, therefore, that there was no "costumbre" to sanction it, he bade me spend the night under his roof--which I did all too literally, for when I had left off swapping yarns with the melodious nomads my host led the way to the garret, half-filled with straw, where in the midst of a too realistic dream I rose up suddenly and all but shattered my head on the roof in question.
In the morning the clouds were still wandering like lost souls through the streets of Fonsagrada. A mist that barely escaped being a rain was falling when I set off in an attempt to follow the voluminous directions of the dubious village. According to these, when I had passed the "Mesón de Galo," a lonely stone tavern a few miles out, I left the road, which was bending toward Gijón on the north coast, and fell into a descending mountain path. A tang of the salt sea was in the air. All the day through I climbed, slipped, and scrambled over jagged mountain slopes and through deep, rocky barrancas. There develops with much wandering an instinct to follow the right fork of a mountain trail, slight hints that could not be explained, but without the half-unconscious noting of which I must have gone a score of times astray. Twice or thrice I stumbled into a hamlet in some wrinkle of the range, a village of five or six hovels huddling in the shadow of an enormous, overtowering church, all built of flat field stones and swarming with huge white dogs.
At Grandas, a bit larger village overhung by massed up mountains, I was at length so fortunate as to get after much search an intangible imitation of a meal. From there I panted a long time upward and came out at last above a seemingly bottomless gorge, a gorge so deep that I had scrambled nearly a half-hour along its brink before I noted that far down in its depths was a town, encircled by vertical vineyards, like embroidery on the lower skirts of its overhanging mountains. My path lay plainly visible on the opposite slope, only a long jump away, but a jump for Pegasus or the princess of the Rosstrappe, and I, mere mortal, was forced to wind a long hour and a half to and fro on the rubbled face of the mountain before I entered the town below, called Saline.
Before me lay the most laborious task of all my Spanish journey. A mountain as nearly perpendicular as man could hope to ascend, without a break or a knoll in all its slope, rose, a sheer wall, certainly four thousand feet above. The gorge seemed some boundary set by the gods between two worlds. Up the face of the cliff a path had been laid out with mathematical precision, every one of its score of legs a toilsome climb over loose stones, with the sun, untempered by a breath of wind, pouring down its fury upon my back. It was hot as Spain in the depth of the canyon; it was chilling cold when I reached the summit heavily crested in clouds and threw myself down breathless on my back. Darkness was coming on, and I fell soon to shivering in the biting mountain air and must rise and hurry forward. It was not strange that in the fog and darkness instinct failed and that when finally I reached a village of eight or nine hovels and inquired its name the inhabitants replied "Figuerina," not in the least like the "La Mesa" I had expected.
Of a brawny, weather-beaten girl milking a cow by the light of a torch in what passed for the principal street, I asked:
"Is there a posada in town?"
"No sé, señor," she answered.
"Don't know! When your town has only nine houses?"
But she only stared dully at me through the gloom, and I carried my inquiry elsewhere. With no better result, however, for each one I asked returned the same laconic, "I don't know." I had sat down on a boulder in the center of the hamlet to puzzle over this strange ignorance when a strapping mountaineer approached through the darkness and led me with few words to the house of the head man. The latter was in bed with a broken leg, having had the misfortune to fall off his farm a few days before. I was taken before him as he lay propped up with pillows and, after a few brief questions, he commanded his family to make me at home.
Only at a distance are these mountain hamlets of northern Spain inviting. For the good people live, indoors and out, in peace and equality with their pigs and chickens, not because they are by nature unclean, but because they know no other life than this, nor any reason why their domestic animals should not be treated as equals. The wife of the village chief led me into the living-room and kitchen. I knew it was that, for she said so. The place was absolutely dark. Since leaving Lugo I had not seen a pane of glass, and lamps of any sort appear to be unknown in these hamlets of the Sierra de Rañadoiro. There was, to be sure, a bit of fire in one corner, but it gave not the slightest illumination, only a thick smoke that wandered about looking for an exit, and unsuccessfully, for there was nothing whatever in the way of chimney, and the door had been closed as we entered. Smoker though I am, I began to weep and did not once leave off while I remained in the room.
The mustiness of a dungeon assailed the nostrils; the silence was broken by a continual droning. The floor was stone. In the room were six or eight men and women, as I discovered little by little from their voices. Supper was announced, and a match I struck showed an indistinct group of which I was a part humped over a steaming kettle in the center of the floor. Into this all began to dip their bread. I hung back, which the wife discovering by some instinct, she made an exclamation I did not understand and soon after there was thrust into my hands a private bowl of the concoction.
It turned out to be a "caldo gallego"--an all but tasteless thick soup of which the chief ingredient, besides water, is the long-stemmed cabbage indigenous to the region. A spoon was then handed me. It was of wood, homemade, and flat as a canoe-paddle. What most aroused my wonder was the bread. A glimpse I had caught of it in the flicker of my match seemed to show a loaf of about the size of a large grindstone--though I charged this to optical illusion--from which wedges were cut, one of them being laid in my lap. It was coarse as mortar, yet as savory, and proved later to be as sustaining a bread as I have yet run across on the earth. This and the caldo being no match for a mountain-climbing appetite, I asked the privilege of buying a bowl of milk. From my unseen companions arose many ejaculations of wonder that I could afford such a luxury, but a bowl of it was soon put in my hands. A better milk I never broke bread in.
Still I was at a loss to account for the incessant droning in the room, like the croak of a distant ox-cart. Since my entrance, too, I had been struck a thousand times lightly in the face, as with bread crumbs or the paper-wads indigenous to the old country schoolhouse. When it occurred to me to put the two mysteries together both were solved. The flies were so thick in the room that they made this sound in flying blindly back and forth.
But once upstairs the dwelling assumed a new rating. Here was, it is true, no luxury; but the rough-fashioned chamber, partly store-room and partly spare bedroom, was capacious and clean, of the rough, unused sort of cleanliness of a farmer's "best room," opened only on extraordinary occasions. The one sheet of the massive bed was as stiff as any windjammer's mainsail, the blanket as rough as the robe of a Cistercian monk. Among a score of multiform articles stored in the room was a stack of bread such as I had eaten below, some forty loaves each fully as large as a half-bushel measure. It is baked from four to six months ahead, twice or thrice a year, and has a crust hard and impervious as a glazed pot, which keeps it fresh and savory for an almost unlimited period.
As I bade farewell to my host next morning I held out to him two pesetas. He resented the offer as an Arab or a Castilian might have, but being of those accustomed to express themselves less in words than in actions, did so laconically. When I offered it again he rose half up on his elbows and bellowed "No!" His gruffness was in no sense from anger, but merely his mode of speaking emphatically, and a way of hiding that bashfulness so common to mountaineers, who are usually, as here, a shy and kindly people with much more genuine benevolence than grace of manner. I protested that I should at least be permitted to pay for my extravagance, the milk, arguing that even a wanderer on his feet was better able to spare a peseta than a village chief on his back. But he roared "No!" again, and furthermore commanded his wife to cut me a wedge of the longevious bread, "to carry me over the day."
Once escaped from the tangle of inhabited stone-piles, I strode away down rock-jumbled ravines, one close succeeding another and carrying me all but headlong downward. In the depths of the third I risked a plunge into a mountain brook, though the water was icy and the air still almost wintry cold. The day was warming, however, by the time I descended upon the hamlet of Berducedo, where I got fried eggs and a new highway.
To chronicle the vagaries of the latter during the rest of the day would be a thankless task. For miles it wound around and upward, ever upward on the face of bare stony mountains like a spiral stairway to heaven. Then suddenly from each giddy height it dived headlong down into deep-wooded, fertile valleys; then up again round and round another mountain shoulder far beyond the last stunted shrub. Later in the day it took to rounding these peaks almost on the level, coming a score of times so close to itself that I could all but toss my bundle across, only to buckle back upon itself for miles around some narrow but apparently bottomless gulley.
Somewhere during the previous afternoon I had crossed the unmarked boundary between Galicia and the still more rugged kingdom of Asturias, to-day the province of Oviedo. A new style of architecture gradually became prevalent. The buildings were of two stories, the lower, of stone, housing the animals, while the dwelling proper was of wood and perched a foot or more above the lower story on four cone-shaped cornerstones, like some great awkward bird ready to take flight.
But for this peculiarity the village in which night overhauled me differed but little from that of the evening before, except in being many hundred feet nearer sea level. It was called San Fecundo. As before, my inquiry for an inn was each time answered by a terse "I don't know." I found the head man in good health, however,--a stalwart fellow little past thirty who was shoveling manure in his front yard. Yet so local is the dialect of every village in this region that I tried for some time in vain to make known my wants to him.
"Can't you speak Spanish, señor?" I cried out.
"No, señor," he replied like the report of a gun, and apparently angered at the allegation. We managed nevertheless by patience and repetition to establish communication between us, and I found out at last why my inquiry for a posada had evoked so surprising an answer. Public hostelries being unknown among them, the mountaineers understand the question "Is there an inn in town?" to mean "Do you suppose any resident will furnish me accommodations?"
The head man did in this case, in spite of my unfortunate blunder in calling him a gallego. So great is the sectionalism in these Cantabrian ranges that a man from one village deeply resents even being taken for a resident of another a mile distant; while the Asturians, a blending of the aboriginal Iberian and the Goth, in whose caves of Covadonga was kept alight the last flicker of Spanish liberty and Christianity, consider themselves free and independent hidalgos infinitely superior to the submissive gallego. There were in truth some noticeable differences of character and customs, that were to increase as I advanced.
We spent the evening in another ventless, smoky, fly-buzzing kitchen, though this time the fireplace gave a bit of blaze and from time to time the rugged faces of the eight or ten men, who had gathered at the invitation of the village leader, flashed visible. I entertained them with such stories of America as are most customary and popular on such occasions. This was no light task. Not only were there many words entirely indigenous to the village, but such Castilian as my hearers used would scarcely be recognized in Castille. The expression "For allà" (over there) they reduced to "Pa cá"; "horse" was never "caballo," but either "cabalo" or "cabayo." Worst of all, the infinitive of the verb served indifferently for all persons and tenses. "Yo ir" might mean "I go," "I was going," "I shall go," "I should go" and even "I would have gone" and "I should be going."
Most taking of all the stories I could produce were those concerning the high buildings of New York. I had developed this popular subject at some length when a mountaineer interposed a question that I made out at length to be a query whether those who live in these great houses spend all their time in them or take an hour or two every morning to climb the stairs.
"Hay ascensores, señores," I explained, "elevators; some expresses, some mixtos, as on your railroads."
A long, unaccountable silence followed. I filled and lighted my pipe, and still only the heavy breathing of the untutored sons of the hills about me sounded. Finally one of them cleared his throat and inquired in humble voice:
"Would you be so kind, señor, as to tell us what is an elevator?"
It was by no means easy. Long explanation gave them only the conception of a train that ran up and down the walls of the building. How this overcame the force of gravity I did not succeed in making clear to them; moreover there was only one of the group that had ever seen a train.
In the morning the head man accepted with some protest tworeales--half a peseta. The highway again raced away downward, describing its parabolas and boomerang movements as before, and gradually bringing me to a realization of how high I had climbed into the sky. On every hand rocky gorges and sheer cliffs; now and again a group of charcoal-burners on the summit of a slope stood out against the dull sky-line like Millet's figures--for the sun was rarely visible. As I descended still lower, more pretentious, red-roofed villages appeared, and by mid-afternoon I entered the large town of Tineo. As I was leaving one of its shops a courtly youth introduced himself as a student in the University of Valladolid, and as he knew a bit of English it was with no small difficulty that I resisted his entreaties to talk that tongue with him in the mile or two he walked with me. That night for the first time since leaving Lugo I paid for my lodging in a public posada.
Salas, a long town in a longer green valley, was so far down and sheltered that figs sold--by number here rather than weight--nine for a cent. Beyond, the highway strolled for miles through orchards of apples and pears, while figs dropped thick in the road and were trodden under foot. For the first time I understood the force of the expression, "not worth a fig."
In the wineshop where I halted for an afternoon lunch I got the shock of that summer's journey. Casually I picked up the first newspaper I had seen in a week; and stared a full moment at it unbelieving. The entire front page was taken up by a photograph showing Posadas lying in bed, his familiar face gaunt with pain, and about him his father, a priest, and a fellow-torero.
"Carajo!" I gasped. "What's this; Posadas wounded?"
"Más," replied the innkeeper shortly. "Killed last Sunday. Too bad; he made good sport for the aficionados."
An accompanying article gave particulars. The Sevillian had been engaged to alternate with a well-known diestro in the humble little plaza of San Lucar de Barrameda on the lower reaches of the Guadalquivir. The end of the day would have seen him a graduate matador. The bulls were "miúras" five years old. As he faced the first, Posadas executed some pass that delighted the spectators. For once, evidently, he forgot his one "secret of success"; he turned to acknowledge the applause. In a flash the animal charged and gored him in the neck. He tried to go on, poised his sword, and fainted; and was carried to the little lazaret beneath the amphitheater, while the festival continued. Toward morning he died.
All this had passed while I was climbing into the cloud-cloaked village of Fonsagrada, two weeks to an hour since I had last seen the skilful Sevillian in the ring. The article ended with the vulgarity common to the yellow journal tribe:
"We have paid the dying Posadas one thousand pesetas for the privilege of taking this picture, which is almost all the unfortunate torero left his sorrowing family."
I trudged on deep in such reflections as such occurrences awaken, noting little of the scene. At sunset I found myself tramping through a warmer, less abrupt country, half conscious of having passed Grado, with its palaces, nurse-girls, and conventional costumes. As dusk fell I paused to ask for an inn. "A bit further on," replied the householder. I continued, still pensive. Several times I halted, always to receive the same reply, "A bit further, señor." Being in no sense tired, I gave the matter little attention until suddenly the seventh or eighth repetition of the unveracity aroused a touch of anger and a realization that the night was already well advanced. A lame man hobbling along the dark road gave me once more the threadbare answer, but walked some two miles at my side and left me at the door of a wayside wineshop that I should certainly not have missed even without him.
The chief sources of the boisterousness within were three young vagabonds who were displaying their accomplishments to the gathering. One was playing tunes on a comb covered with a strip of paper, another produced a peculiarly weird music in a high falsetto, while the third was a really remarkable imitator of the various dialects of Spain. With the three I ascended near midnight to the loft of the building, where a supply of hay offered comfortable quarters. For an hour he of the falsetto sat smoking cigarettes and singing an endless ditty of his native city, the refrain of which rang out at frequent intervals:
"Más bonita que hay,A Zaragoza me voyDentro de Ar-r-r-rago-o-ón."
"Más bonita que hay,A Zaragoza me voyDentro de Ar-r-r-rago-o-ón."
"Más bonita que hay,
A Zaragoza me voy
Dentro de Ar-r-r-rago-o-ón."
It was with genuine regret that I noted next morning the reapproach of civilization. Rough as is the life of these mountaineers of the north their entire freedom from convention, the contact with real men who know not even what pose and pretense are, the drinking into my lungs of the exhilarating mountain air had made the trip that was just ending by far the most joyful portion of all my Spanish experiences. Not since the morning I climbed into Astorga had I heard the whine of a beggar; not once in all the northwest had I caught the faintest scent of a tourist. The trip had likewise been the most inexpensive, for in the week's tramp I had spent less than twelve pesetas.
A few hours more down the mountainside brought me into Oviedo, where I took up my abode in the Calle de la Luna. The boyhood home of Gil Blas is a sober, almost gloomy town, where the sun is reputed to shine but one day in four. Its inhabitants have much in common with the slow-witted Lugense, though they are on the whole more wide-awake and self-satisfied. Of window displays the most frequent was that of a volume in richly illustrated paper cover entitled, "Los Envenenadores (poisoners) de Chicago." It was, possibly, an exposé of the packing houses, but I did not find time to read it. August was nearing its close, and there was still a considerable portion of Spain to be seen. Luckily my kilometer-book was scarcely half-used up; but of the joyful days of freedom on the open road there could not be many more.
CHAPTER XIII
THE LAND OF THE BASQUE
My knapsack garnished, I turned my back on Oviedo early on Sunday morning. The train wound slowly away toward the lofty serrated range that shuts off the world on the south. As we approached the mountains, the line began to tie itself in knots, climbing ever upward. In one section two stations seven miles apart had twenty-six miles of railroad between them. At the second of the two a flushed and puffing Spaniard burst into our compartment with the information that, having reached the former after the train had departed, he had overtaken us on foot.
Still we climbed until, at the turning of the day, high up where clouds should have been we surmounted the ridgepole of the range and, racing, roaring downward, were almost in a moment back in the barren, rocky, sun-baked Spain of old, dust swirling everywhere, the heat wrapping us round as with a woolen blanket, drying up the very tobacco in my pouch; a change almost as decided as from the forests of Norway to the plains of India.
Arrived in León at three, I set off at once tourist-fashion for the cathedral, with its soaring Gothic towers and delicate, airy flying-buttresses the first truly inspiring bit of Christian architecture I had seen in Spain; the first indeed whose exterior was anything. Much of the edifice, however, was glaringly new, the scaffolds of the renovators being still in place.
But here again "if the house of God is rich that of man is poor," pauperous in fact. When once the traveler has forced himself to believe that León was not many centuries since the rich capital of a vast empire he must surely fall sad and pensive reflecting how mutable and fleeting indeed are the things of earth. The León of to-day is a large village, a dried-up, dirty, dilapidated, depopulated, cobble-streeted village of snarling, meretricious-minded inhabitants jumbled together inside a wall that with the cathedral is the only remaining proof of former importance. Here once more was the beggar with his distressing whine, his brow of bronze, and his all too evident injuries; not numerously but constituting a large percentage of the population. In all Spain the devise of insurance companies on the fronts of buildings is more than frequent; in León there was barely a hovel without one or more. Which could not but awaken profound wonder, for not only are there no wooden houses within her walls to make danger of fire imminent, but a greater blessing could hardly be imagined for León than a general and all-embracing conflagration.
It was, perhaps, because of the unbroken misery with which they were surrounded that the Leónese were individually crabbed and cynical. Not a courteous word do I remember having received in all the town, and in vitriolic remarks the keepers and guests of the tumble-down parador where I was forced to put up outdid all others.
I was off in the morning at the first opportunity, again by train, which, passing in the early afternoon through a blinding sand-storm near the village of Cisneros, landed me soon after at Palencia. This was a counterpart of León; a trifle less sulky and universally miserable, but as sprawling, sun-parched, and slovenly. Its surrounding plains were utterly verdureless, their flanking hills ossified, its gardens, promenades, and Alameda past all hope of relief by sprinkling even had its river not long since gone desert-dry as the rest. I left the place quickly, riding into the night and descending at length to march to the inspiriting music of a military band along a broad, thick-peopled Alameda, at the end of which a giant statue of Columbus bulked massive against the moonlit sky, into Valladolid.
I had come again upon a real city, almost the first since leaving Madrid; whence accommodations, while in no sense lacking, were high in price. In the course of an hour of prowling, however, I was apprised of the existence of a modest casa eta huéspedes in a canyon-like side street. I rang the great doorbell below several times in vain; which was as I had expected, for foolish indeed would have been the Spaniard who remained within doors on such a night, while the band played and the city strolled in the Alameda. I dropped my bundle at my feet and leaned against the lintel of the massive doorway.
Within an hour there arrived another seeker after quarters, a slender Spaniard in the early summer of life, who carried two heavy portmanteaus and a leather swordcase. Almost at the opening of our conversation he surprised me by inquiring, "You are a foreigner, verdad, señor?" I commended his penetration and, as we chatted, sought for some sign of his profession or place in society. All at once the long, slender swordcase caught my eye.
"Ah! Es usted torero, señor," I observed with assurance.
The youth awakened the echoes of the narrow street with his laughter.
"Bullfighter! No, indeed! I am happy to say no. I am a student in the national cavalry school here, just returned from my month's furlough. But your error is natural," he went on, "and my fault. I have really no right to appear in civilian garb. It would mean a month of bread and water at least if one of our officers caught a glimpse of me. But carajo! The family above may not be back by midnight. We can leave our baggage with the portier next door."
We strolled slowly back to the brilliantly lighted Plaza de la Constitutión. Suddenly the youth interrupted an anecdote of the tan-bark to exclaim in a calm but earnest voice:
"Caramba! There come my commandante and the first lieutenant."
Two men of forty-five or fifty, in resplendent uniforms and tall red caps, their swords clinking along the pavement, were sauntering down upon us. I stepped quickly to the opposite side of my companion, being taller--and likewise curious.
"Hombre!" he protested sharply, stepping back again. "No tenga V. cuidado. It is not our way to hide from our officers."
With head erect and military stride he marched straight on before him. Luckily the officers were so engrossed in conversation that neither glanced up as they passed.
We drifted into a café and ordered "helado," that Spanish imitation of ice-cream the calling of which in the streets had so frequently caused me to whirl about in astonishment, so much does it sound like our "hello." Over it we fell to discussing things American, in which we were gradually joined by several well-dressed men at the adjoining marble tables. In the course of the evening I chanced to remark that one of the surprises of my summer's trip had been to find so little resentment against the United States.
"Señor," said the youth, while each and all of our companions gave signs of agreement, "nothing more fortunate has befallen our country in a century than the loss of Cuba and the Philippines. Not only has it taken a load off the Spanish people; it has brought more relief than you can guess to us of the army. The colonies were the dumping-ground of our profession. Once let an officer show ability and he was forthwith shipped off to the islands to die. Now they are taken away, Spain has already begun to regain her lost place among the nations. No, señor; we of the army at least think nothing but kindness to your people for the relief."
Returned to the casa de huéspedes, the student and I were given adjoining rooms and saw much of Valladolid together before I took train the second morning after to Burgos. There, were regulation "sights" in abundance; on every hand memories of the Cid Campeador, even the spot where stood his dwelling--all as authentic as the popular landmarks of Jerusalem. Two miles or more out along the shallow mill-race that Burgos calls a river I visited the nunnery of Las Huelgas, which claims for its distinction never in its centuries of existence to have admitted to the veil less than a daughter of the nobility. The stroll is pleasant, but the place, noble though it be, unexciting--at least outwardly. Of the cathedral, the finest in Spain, much might be said--that has been often said before.
It was in Burgos that I saw for the first time what I might have seen earlier and frequently had my tastes run that way,--a Spanish cemetery. More exactly it was a corpse-file, a perpendicular hillside in which hundreds of bodies had been pigeon-holed for future reference, with the name and a charitably indulgent characterization of the deceased on the end of his coffin. The Spaniard, with his superstitions, prefers this style of tomb for much the same reason, it seems, that the Arab seals his graves with cement,--that the emissaries from the less popular regions may not bear away the departed before the agents of the better and hence slower realm put in an appearance.
The greatest experience of my day in Burgos was the view from the summit of the hot, dry Cerro de San Miguel. Not merely does it offer a mighty and comprehensive vista of half the stony-bare face of Castilla Vieja, but a bird's-eye view as it were of all Spain and her history. Of the city spread out at one's feet fully three-fourths the space is taken up by cathedral, churches, convents, monasteries, casas de misericordia, the vast bulk of the castle, the barracks, the bullring,--all the countless buildings of non-producers; while between them in the nooks and corners wherever a crack offers are packed and huddled the hovels of the mere inhabitants. There, in plain sight, is Spain's malady. She is a land of non-producers. Ecclesiastics, soldiers, useless octroi guards, beggars rotten with the notion fostered by the omnivorous priesthood that mendicancy is an honorable profession, make up almost the bulk of her population of productive age. Not without reason does nomadic Borrow lift up his clench-fisted wail against "Batuschca."
There is one road to redemption for Spain,--that she shoot her priests and set her soldiers to work. As isolated individuals the merry, dissolute fellows of the cloth might be permitted to live on as they have, and suffer the natural end of such living. But as a class they are beyond reform; their point of view is so utterly warped and incorrigible, they have grown so pestiferous with laziness and "graft" that there is no other remedy, "no hay otro remedio" as the Spaniard himself would say could his throttled mind cast off the rubbish of superstition and cant for one clear thought. Let him who protests that they are teachers of the youth go once and see what they teach,--the vapid, senseless lies about "saints" so far from truth as to be an abomination, so far above the possible aspirations and attainments of real humanity as to force the rising generations from very hopelessness of imitation to lose heart and sink to iniquity as the priesthood has done before them. Or are there some who still credit them with feeding the poor? A high praise, indeed, exactly equal to that due the footpad who refunds his victim carfare that he may be the more quickly rid of him.
Therein lies the chief weakness of Spain. It is not because she is ruled by a slender youth chosen by the accident of birth rather than by a more portly man chosen more or less by his fellow-citizens; not because her religion happens to be that of Rome rather than the austerities of Calvin or the fatalism of Mohammed; not because her national sport is a bit more dramatically brutal than that of other lands; not because her soil is dry and stony and her rains and rivers slight; not because her people are decadent, her human stock run down--I have plowed in the sea in the foregoing pages if I have not made it clear that her real manhood, the workman, the peasant, the arriero, the muscle and sinew of the nation, are as hardy, toilsome and all-enduring as the world harbors. But in the long centuries of warfare her attention was drawn away from internal affairs, she fell among thieves within, and the force of example, the helplessness of the individual drove her people in the line of least resistance,--to become thieves too, nationally, officially, until mad grab-what-you-can-and-the-devil-grab-the-ungrabbing has her by the throat gasping for life. If she is not to sink down for the vultures of the nations to pick clean of her meager scraps of flesh there must arise within her boundaries a man, a movement, a sweeping change that shall cast off the burden of precedent and turn her officials to doing honestly with all their might what now they do with all their might dishonestly. She must regain confidence in the necessity and prevalence of honesty. She must learn that patent yet rarely comprehended truth that work and work only is the real source of life; she must cease to be the sworn enemy of the innovator, thinking her ways best and those of the rest of the world abnormal, unable to see a yard beyond her national boundaries, scorning all ideas and arguments from the outside like the most hide-bound of Orientals.
The next afternoon found me in Vitoria, in the land of the Basque; yet another kind of Spain. Vitoria is a city of to-day, clean, bustling, almost American in her streets and architecture and the wide-awake air of theVascongado. Theboína--round cap without visor and the end of a string for tassel--had all at once become universal, worn, like the fez in Damascus, by every age and grade of man from bootblack to mayor. So pleasing was this prosaic city that even though her prices were high I loitered in her shade until the next afternoon before seeking out the highway to Bilbáo.
There lay sixty-seven kilometers to the seaport, a half of which I hoped to cover before halting for the night. For on the following day Bilbáo was to celebrate in honor of the king. The way led me through a country fertile for all its stoniness, made so by the energy and diligence of the Basque, whose strong features, bold curved nose, piercing eyes and sturdy form was to be seen on every hand. With the southern Spaniard this new race had almost nothing in common, and though as serious of deportment as the gallego there was neither his bashfulness nor stupidity. The Castilian spoken in the region was excellent, the farming implements of modern manufacture and the methods of the husbandman thousands of years ahead of Andalusia.
As the day was fading I began to clamber my way upward into the mountains that rose high in the darkening sky ahead. The night grew to one of the blackest, the heavens being overcast; but he who marches on into the darkness without contact with artificial light may still see almost plainly. It was two hours, perhaps, after nightfall, and the road was winding ever higher around the shoulder of a mammoth peak, its edge a sheer precipice above unfathomable depths, when suddenly I saw a man, a denser blackness against the sea of obscurity, standing stock-still on the utmost edge of the highway.
"Buenos tardes," I greeted in a low voice, almost afraid that a hearty tone would send him toppling backward to his death.
He neither answered nor moved. I stepped closer.
"You have rather a dangerous position, verdad, señor?"
Still he stared motionless at me through the darkness. Could he be some sleep-walker? I moved quietly forward and, thrusting out a hand, touched him on the sleeve. It was hard as if frozen! For an instant I recoiled, then with a sudden instinctive movement passed a hand quickly and lightly over his face. Was I dreaming? That, too, was hard and cold. I sprang back and, rummaging hastily through my pockets, found one broken match. The wind was rushing up from the bottomless gulf below. I struck a light, holding it in the hollow of my hand, and in the instant before it was blown out I caught a few words of an inscription on a pedestal:
"ERECTED TO THE MEM--THROWN OVER THIS PRECIPICE--BANDITS--NIGHT OF--"
and before I had made out date or name I was again in darkness.
Over the summit, on a lower, less wind-swept level, I came upon a long mining town scattered on either side of the highway. I dropped in at a wineshop and bespoke supper and lodging. A dish of the now omnipresent bacalao was set before me, but for a time the keeper showed strong disinclination to house a wandering stranger falling upon him at this advanced hour.
The young woman who served me at table and answered the demands for wine of the half-dozen youthful miners about me seemed strangely out of place in such surroundings. Nothing was plainer than that she was not of the barmaid type. One would have said rather the convent-reared daughter of some well-to-do merchant or large farmer. This surmise turned out to be close to the truth. When the carousing miners had drifted into the night and I, by dint of talking and acting my best Castilian, had found my way into the good graces of the family, I heard the girl's story--for rightly approached the Spaniard is easily led to talk of his private affairs. Her father had been the principal shop-keeper of the mining town, and had died a few weeks before. His debts were heavy and when all claims had been settled there remained to his orphaned daughter five hundred pesetas.
"But," I cried, "five hundred pesetas! It is a fortune, señorita, in Spain. You could have started a shop, or lived well until the novio appeared."
"Jesus Maria!" cried the girl, looking at me with wondering eyes. "Do you forget purgatory? For the repose of my father's soul five hundred masses must be said; no less, the cura himself told me; and each mass costs a peseta. Then I have come to work here."
There was that in the air next morning that reminded me, as I wound down into a wooded, well-peopled valley, that summer was drawing toward its close. The day grew quickly warm, however. In the knowledge that the king was sojourning in the city upon which I was marching, I was fully prepared to endure long catechizing and examination by guardias civiles. My wonder was not slight, therefore, when I was suffered to pass through one, two, three villages without being once challenged.
But the expected meeting came at last and quite made up for the lack of others. The third village lay already behind me when I heard an authoritative shout and, turning around, saw a bareheaded man of thirty, dressed half in peasant, half in village garb, beckoning to me with a commanding gesture to return. Fancying him some wily shop-keeper, I swung on my heel and set off again. He shouted loudly, and racing after me, caught me by an arm. I shook him off with an indignation that sent him spinning half across the highway. Instead of retreating he sprang at me again and we should certainly have been soon entangled in a crude performance of the manly art had he not cried out in a voice quaking with anger:
"Have a care, señor, in resisting the law. I am a miñón."
"Miñón!" I cried, recalling suddenly that in the Basque provinces the national guardias are reënforced by local officers thus named. "Then why the devil don't you wear your uniform? How shall I know you are not a footpad?"
"I shall prove that soon enough," he replied, still visibly shaking with the rage of a Spaniard whose "pundonor" has been sullied.
I returned with him to the casa de ayuntamiento, in the doorway of which he halted, and, examining me for concealed weapons, demanded that I untie my knapsack. Never before had this been more than superficially inspected, but the thoroughness with which the angry miñón overhauled it, examining even my letters and fingering my clothes-brush over and over as if convinced that it could be opened by some secret spring, fully made up for any possible carelessness of his fellow-officers elsewhere. When he had lost hope of finding evidence of treason he handed back my possessions reluctantly and bade me with a scowl the conventional "Go with God;" to which I answered, "Queda V. con el mismisimo diablo"--but the thrust was too subtle for his bullet-headed intellect.
Toward noon the green slopes and cool forests turned to a cindered soil and the sooty aspect of a factory town. I mounted a last hill and descended quickly through a smoke-laden atmosphere into Bilbáo. Here was the first entirely modern city I had seen in Spain; one might easily have fancied one's self in Newcastle or Seattle. The Spanish casa de huéspedes seemed not even known by name, and in its place were only boisterous taverns, smacking of sea-faring custom and overrun with the touts that feed on the simple mariner.
As I sat toward evening in one of these establishments, there entered a man something over thirty-five, dressed in boína and workingman's garb that showed but slight wear. I noted him only half consciously, being at that moment expressing to the landlord my surprise that the king, instead of being in Bilbáo as he was reported by the newspapers, was ten or twelve miles away on his yacht at the mouth of the river. The keeper, a stocky Basque of much better parts than the average of his guild, glanced up from his spigots and replied in a smooth and pleasant voice:
"Porque, señor, no quiere morir tan joven--Because he does not care to die so young."
"Y con mujer tan bella y fresca--And with a wife so beautiful and fresh," added a thick-set fellow at a neighboring table without looking up from his cards.
Love for Alfonso is not one of the characteristics of the masses in this section of the country.
Meanwhile the newcomer, whose eye had been wandering leisurely over the assembly, threaded his way half across the room to sit down at my table. I wondered a bit at the preference, but certain he was no tout, gave him the customary greeting. By the time I had accepted a glass and treated in turn we were exchanging personal information. He announced himself a cobbler, and even before I had broached the subject suggested that he could find me a lodging with an old woman above his shop. This workroom, when we reached it, proved to be nothing but a kit of tools and a few strips of leather scattered about the small hallway at the foot of the stairs. I found above the hospitality he had promised, however, and paying two night's lodging in an unusually pleasant room, descended.
The shoemaker appeared more obliging than industrious, for he at once laid aside the shoe he was hammering and announced that he was going to give himself the pleasure of spending the evening with me and of finding me the best place to take in the fireworks that were to be set off in honor of the king. I explained that it was rather my plan to attend the city theater, where I might both see that remarkable personage in the flesh and hear one of Molière's best comedies in Spanish.
"There is more than time for both," replied the cobbler, and forthwith fell to extolling the coming spectacle so highly that he came near to arousing within me, too, an interest in the fireworks.
At the end of an hour's stroll we found ourselves on the summit of a knoll in the outskirts, in a compact sea of Bilbaoans watching a tame imitation of a Fourth of July celebration on the slope of one of the surrounding hills. The display was, as I have said, in honor of the king; though it turned out that his indifferent majesty was at that moment dining and wining a company of fellow-sportsmen on board theGiraldatwelve miles away.
The cobbler set a more than leisurely pace back to the city, but we regained at length the bank of the river and, crossing the wooded Paseo Arenal, approached the theater. Before it, was packed a vast and compact multitude through which I struggled my way to the entrance, only to be informed in the customary box-office tones that there was not another ticket to be had. The shoemaker was no theater-goer, and as my own disappointment was not overwhelming, we set out to fight our way back to the Paséo.
Long before we had succeeded in that venturesome undertaking, however, there burst forth a sudden, unheralded roar of uncounted voices, the immense throng surged riverward with an abruptness that all but swept us off our feet, the thunder of thousands of hoofs swelled nearer, and down upon us rode an entire regiment of guardias civiles in uniforms so new they seemed but that moment to have left the tailor, and astride finer horses than I had dreamed existed in Spain. Straight into the crowd they dashed, headlong, at full canter, like cowboys into a drove of steers, sweeping all before them, scattering luckless individuals in all directions, and completely surrounding the theater in solid phalanx. Before I had recovered breath there arose another mighty shout, and, some three hundred more horsemen, with a richly caparisoned carriage in their midst, dashed through the throng from a landing-stage on the river bank behind us to the door of the theater. I caught a fleeting glimpse of a slight figure in a rakish overcoat, a burst of music sounded from the theater, and died as suddenly away as the doors closed behind the royal arrival. Again the cavalry charged, driving men, women and children pellmell back a hundred yards from the building and, forming a yet wider circle around it, settled down to sit their horses like statues until the play should be ended.
When my wonder had somewhat subsided there came upon me an all but uncontrollable desire to shout with laughter. The ludicrousness, the ridiculousness of it all! A vast concourse of humanity driven helter-skelter like as many cattle, scores of persons jostled and bruised, thirteen hundred of the most able-bodied men in Spain to sit motionless on horseback around a theater late into the night, all for the mere protection of one slight youth whose equal was easily to be found in every town or village of the land! Truly this institution of kingship is as humorous a hoax as has been played upon mankind since man was.
A hoax on all concerned. For the incumbent himself, the slender youth inside, who must spend his brief span of years amid such mummery, commands of himself a bit of mild admiration. I fell to wondering what he would give for the right to wander freely and unnoticed all a summer's day along the open highway. Let him who can imagine himself born a king, discovering as early as such notions can penetrate to his infant intellect that his fellow-mortals have placed him high on a pedestal, have given him even without the asking power, riches, and almost reverence as a superior being, when at heart he knows full well he is of quite the same clay as they; and he may well ask himself whether he would have grown up even as manly as the youth who goes by the name of Alfonso XIII. Recalling that former kings of Spain could not be touched by other than a royal finger, we may surely grant common sense to this sovereign who dances uncondescendingly with daughters of the middle class, who chats freely with bullfighters, peasants, or apple-women. Pleasing, too, is his devil-may-carelessness. On this same night, for instance, after reboarding his yacht, he took it suddenly into his mad young head to return at once through this, his most hostile province, to his queen. At one in the morning he was rowed ashore with one companion, stepped into his automobile, himself playing chauffeur, and tore away through Bilbáo and a hundred miles along the craggy coast to San Sebastian. It is not hard to guess what might have happened had he punctured a tire among those stony mountains and been chanced upon by a homing band of peasants brave with wine.
Musing all which I turned to address the cobbler and found him gone. The crowd was slowly melting away. I sat down in the Paseo and waited an hour, but my erstwhile companion did not reappear. When I descended from my lodging next morning there remained not a trace of his "shop" at the foot of the stairs. Had the village miñón done me the honor of telegraphing my description to the seaport, or was my road-worn garb the livery of suspicion? This only I know; when, that Sunday evening after my return from a glimpse of the open sea, I asked my hostess whether her fellow renter were really a shoemaker, she screwed up her parchment-like features into a smile and answered:
"Sí, señor, one of the shoemakers of his majesty."