Fancy bread and sun-worship—Prehistoric sandals—A bower of oleanders—An Andalucian St. John—Fashion and footpaths—Themauvais pas—The midday rest—A mountain storm—Thunder, lightning, and flood—Kind-hearted donkey-drivers—A welcome shelter.
Fancy bread and sun-worship—Prehistoric sandals—A bower of oleanders—An Andalucian St. John—Fashion and footpaths—Themauvais pas—The midday rest—A mountain storm—Thunder, lightning, and flood—Kind-hearted donkey-drivers—A welcome shelter.
All too soon my allotted time came to an end, and I found myself at seven o’clock of a glorious September morning bidding farewell to my kind friends, as I started for a ride of 30 kilometres over the mountains to the railway station at Morón de la Frontera. My host as a parting gift presented me with some curious bread of his own making, in what is called acaracóldesign—a primitive sun-symbol of Egyptian origin, had he only known it. I asked him where he got the design, and he said, “From his father: it was nothing, but as I likedcosas antiguas(old things) it had occurred to him to make it.” I have since found that this form of “little bread” is peculiar to Algodonales, and my parting gift is preserved in a glass case with other interesting survivals of sun-worship in the Tartessus of the Greeks, the Baetica of the Romans, and the Andalucia of to-day.
This was one of the longest and most beautiful rides I have ever taken, as also the most adventurous.I had indeed cut my visit short by a few days because there were indications that the weather was likely to break up, and this mountain path—often no more than a goat-track—is impassable after rain, when parts of it may be washed away into the river Guadálporcón hundreds of feet below.
We climbed up and up for a couple of hours, until vines and olive groves were left behind, and forests of evergreen oaks, covered with acorns, took their place. This oak, which grows almost up to the line where snow sometimes lies till June, is only second in value to the olive on mountain estates, for it costs very little in labour, and its acorns are the best food that can be given to the droves of brown long-haired pigs which haunt these lofty solitudes.
On we went, sometimes up the hill, sometimes down under the shade of the oaks, sometimes along a water-course through thickets of brambles and pink oleanders, which in this climate grow almost into trees when their roots can reach a stream. Over one such thicket a wild vine, growing from a rock above, had spread its tangled branches, and the goatherds had cut and trained it to form a shelter impervious to the sun. A flock of goats was browsing around, guarded by a man and a boy wearing wide straw hats, blue cotton jackets, and short trousers with striped socks and sandals made of twistedespartograss, just like those in use three thousand years or more ago among their Tartessian progenitors. They lay half asleep under their bower of vine leaves and oleander blossom, but rose at ourapproach and insisted on my sitting down to rest in the shade, while they chatted outside in the sun with José. It was so cool and pretty that I would gladly have stopped there for the noonday siesta, but it was still too early for that, and we had many miles yet to travel.
A cry of distress from a nannygoat broke the sunny calm round us, and the boy ran up the hill like a hare to see what had happened to his charges. The last I saw as I rode away was the little goat-herd standing on a rock far above us, waving a hand in adieu, with an injured kid slung round his neck. One constantly meets with incidents of this kind, and of course one is inevitably reminded of the boy St. John with his lamb. In a recent country fair I saw two men taking turns to carry a full-sized goat in their arms, she having somehow hurt a leg on the journey into the town. It was less picturesque than a kid on the shoulders, but the spirit was the same; for the goat could still walk, so that not necessity but kindness dictated the action.
We met few people in those beautiful but desolate hills. José told me that in the course of a few weeks, when the acorns ripened, a number of families would come from the villages round and live inchozasduring the harvest. Thechozasof the Sierra are very different from those of the plains. They are built of stones laid dry one on the other, and roofed withespartograss from the streams, and they almost always have some sort of a chimney, for the cold here on autumn nights and on wet days is considerable. But these stone-built huts can bemade very snug and warm, by mortaring the walls within and roofing with something more durable than reed, and I can imagine no more delightful summer holiday than one spent in a well-madechozaamong these glorious mountains—provided that thechozalay within reach of a Tartessian castle or necropolis wherein to excavate in the intervals of enjoying the view.
The few people we did meet always appeared at inconvenient moments. A fat young lady riding a very small donkey with very widejamugas, and carrying a beautiful flounced silk parasol, suddenly came into the picture half-way down a precipitous hill, so steep and so strewn with boulders that I, feeling discretion to be the better part of valour, had got off my donkey to walk. Indeed I very often did get off to walk downhill on that journey, for in many places I felt that the only way to avoid diving over the donkey’s head would be to hold on to his tail, and it seemed on the whole safer as well as more dignified to trust to my own feet. The young lady with the parasol was coming up as I went down, but I am sure she would have held on to the donkey’s tail any number of times rather than get off once had our situations been reversed, for I never saw a more confirmed expression of bland laziness than hers. She was too sleepy even to respond to the “Go with God” with which we greeted her, and that is a breach of good manners that nothing but the torpor of extreme fatness could condone. I am not very clear how we managed to pass her and her convoy of servants and baggagedonkeys: I only remember that I had to climb on to the top of the nearest boulder and stand there for a long time to be out of the way while the train went by.
She was the daughter of a neighbouring landowner, who lived in a fine house built on the ruins of a castle round the spur of a hill to our left, as José informed me. He could not remember the name either of the family or the castle, and I was not particularly anxious to know either. What interested me was the notion of a rich landowner building himself a fine house on the slope of a hill to which no road could be made. It was for the olives and the cork trees, said José: thatcaballeroowned thousands and thousands of them, and came out to the Sierra from Arcos with all his family to “take the mountain air” when the crops were coming in.
Our next rencontre was a more exciting one. We had to cross the side of a steep hill sloping sharply down to the river far below, by a path just wide enough for the donkey and the mule to put one foot before the other, and no more. This in itself would have been nothing, had the slope been clothed with vegetation like the rest of the mountain. But it was the “bad step” of the pass, José said, the place which after a storm even of summer rain is not only dangerous but impossible, for the hillside here is of a shaly sort of slate, and a very little water is enough to send the whole path slithering down to the river. It was perfectly safe now, said José, for there had been no rain for three months, and everythingwas dust-dry. But my honour would well understand, seeing the bad step with her own eyes, why he could not have attempted to take her the journey to Morón, much as he delighted in pleasing her, had the dreaded thunderstorm come up last night, as he had been a little afraid it might.
“My honour” did indeed understand, and looked back rather anxiously at the hills behind, where a lovely but ominous background of purple-blue clouds threw the gorgeous sunshine around us into strong relief. Did José think the storm would come up during the day? Had we not better press on towards some house where we could shelter if we were caught in the rain?
My honour must free herself from anxiety. In no case could we hasten here, where a false step would be fatal, and there was no house within many miles. And the storm was still distant, on the other side of San Cristóbal: may be, if God pleased, it would not overtake us; and at the worst we should be well over the pass before it came.
As a rule I tie the halter round my donkey’s neck and let it pick its own way, but here José led it, leaving the pack mule to follow as best it could. It was clear that he felt a little anxious, and he explained that some heavily loaded animal must have had a slip at one spot, where the path disappeared altogether, and we had to make a detour above. For some minutes we had heard a voice singing, and just at this point a lad riding a donkey appeared. That boy proceeded with the utmost nonchalance to make a new path across the looseshale, rather than take the trouble to go off the direct line as we had done. He shouted to his donkey, kicked it hard with his heels, encased in the usualespartosandals with soles an inch thick, and took the dangerous bit at a trot! It was not done for effect, as one might have imagined, for he paid no attention at all to us, and we heard him gaily singing as he rode on, apparently unaware that he had risked a sudden and terrible death by his foolhardy performance.
After this our way led downwards, and at one o’clock, as the clouds seemed to have dispersed, we ventured to stop for a rest under two fine walnut trees which had sown themselves above the bank of the river, now beginning to assume respectable proportions, but still a good way below us. José unharnessed his animals, fixed up a sort of tent with the blanket from under myjamugasand the cloth from his mule, to give us shade, and after we had lunched he lay down with his head on my hold-all and I with mine on my riding-cushion, and we both slept soundly for over an hour. More than that we could not allow, he had said, if I was to catch the five o’clock train at Morón, for we were already behindhand owing to my frequent pauses to enjoy the scenery, and we still had a very long way to go.
While we slept the clouds came up, and I awoke to find a thundery suffocating heat in the air, the sun obscured, and not a breath of wind anywhere. José looked grave, and devoutly thanked God that we were over the pass. Had we been caught by this weather on the other side we should have hadno alternative but to return to Algodonales, and the Señora would not have crossed this pass before next summer.
As he talked he was hurriedly saddling the animals and packing the lunch basket, etc., into the panniers, while I unstrapped my hold-all and got out umbrella and mackintosh, which undoubtedly I should very soon need.
“There is no alternative,” said José, “I must take your honour to shelter in the Venta del Albercón. It is only half a league out of the way, but if we do not find shelter we shall be drowned. What a fool I was to allow your honour to leave Algodonales, but I did it for the best, and Salvador agreed that the storm would not come up before to-morrow.”
Long before we got to theventawe were wet to the skin. The rain fell in one unbroken sheet, through which streaks of lightning dazzled us at appallingly frequent intervals, accompanied by peals of thunder which sounded perfectly terrific in their reverberations among the hills.
As soon as possible José led the way down to the banks of the stream, and dragged the animals across at the risk of breaking their legs among the rough stones that filled the bed. Already the biggest stones were almost covered, and José said that if we delayed to cross till we got to the ford the river would be up to our necks. Thence we made our way, I hardly know how, through the oleanders and brambles to what was really only a goat-track some twenty feet or so up the bank, and by this time the situation was so critical that Joséceased to apologise, for all his energies were devoted to urging on the terrified beasts. Fortunately they knew and loved him, and his caressing voice soothed even the mule, which was young and got half wild with terror when the lightning flashed in its eyes.
We passed the ford where the Algodonales track crossed a by-road from Olvera to Villamartín, leaving it on our left. It was already a raging torrent eight to ten feet deep and rising higher every minute, and all the little tributary water-courses which had been stony wastes when we started were now turbid streams, rushing down to swell the flood. I have never seen anything to equal the rapidity with which the waters gathered, and I really began to wonder whether José and I would ever be seen again by our respective families, for it seemed as if at any moment we might be overwhelmed by an avalanche of stones and shale tumbled down from the peaks above us by those nightmare torrents which had suddenly sprung into being where an hour ago all was dust-dry. It also crossed my mind that my family, who were away in England, had not the remotest idea where I was, my trip having been a sudden inspiration of which I had not informed them; and I pictured my friend Rosario distractedly seeking my corpse in company with the widow and children of José (I learnt afterwards that he was a bachelor) and wildly telegraphing to break the news, hampered by having no notion of my family’s address.
Fortunately these gloomy forebodings were not fulfilled. A peal of thunder that seemed to shakethe whole world, and a flash of lightning so close over our heads that we were almost blinded, heralded our arrival at theventa, and in a moment I found myself lifted off the donkey and half carried into the cottage by the kindly people within, while José slipped the panniers—which would not pass through the door—off his mule, and led the two poor, frightened, half-drowned beasts through a clean white-washed kitchen into a roomy stable beyond, where he patted and soothed them until they were quite quiet and happy, before he gave a thought to his own comfort. The storm had come up so suddenly that although he had dragged out an extra wrap for me, he had been unable or unwilling to stop and put on his own blanket, which was in the panniers under my luggage, and all my persuasions had failed to induce him to take mine, which had been thrown over the luggage, when we started, to protect my camera from the sun.
There is an impression abroad that Spaniards are not kind to their animals, but this is a great mistake.
“How should we not do the best we can for our donkeys, when we depend on them for our livelihood?” one of myarrierosremarked on my praising his tender care of an injured mule.
True one often sees even quite young and active mules and donkeys in the villages of the Sierra with their knees badly broken; but when one realises that most of their work has to be done on tracks such as I have endeavoured to describe—for, thanks to the neglect of the governing classes,there are thousands of villages in Spain which can only be reached by such paths—one has to admit that it is a wonder that the condition of the beasts of burden is no worse. And indeed I know for a fact that many poor men working on the land never let their donkeys go hungry while they have a bite of bread for themselves, so that my heart often aches to see the animals thin and out of condition, knowing it means there is want in the home.
Having all my luggage with me (a further advantage of travelling on donkey-back) I was able to get out of my wet clothes at once, and while I changed in a roomy loft over the kitchen, where the family slept and kept their corn, beans, winter melons, and other stores, the pretty daughter of theventeratold me that although autumn and winter storms were frequent enough on these hills, they had never known one come up so suddenly or with such rapidity so early in the season. We learnt afterwards that it was indeed rather a cyclone than an ordinary thunderstorm, and that it did terrible damage on the other side of the range of mountains, flooding an entire village on a river bank, and drowning an unfortunate gipsy family encamped under a bridge in the bed of the stream, which no one expected any water to reach until at least a month later.