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Four Months Afoot in Spain

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Title: Four Months Afoot in Spain

Creator: Harry Alverson Franck


        
Release date: July 27, 2012 [eBook #40357]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40357

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOUR MONTHS AFOOT IN SPAIN ***




Produced by Al Haines.




[Illustration: Cover]



[Illustration: Map showing the author's itinerary]




                            HARRY A. FRANCK



                           FOUR MONTHS AFOOT
                                IN SPAIN




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




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




                               A FOREWORD


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

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

THE AUTHOR.




                                CONTENTS

CHAPTER


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




                       FOUR MONTHS AFOOT IN SPAIN



                               CHAPTER I

                         A 'TWEENDECKS JOURNEY


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

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

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

"Christ'fer!" croaked the guard.

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

                            "SCHNELLDAMPFER.
                           PRINZESSIN ----."


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

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

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

Ah--er--you mean _steerage_?"

"Steerage, mein Herr; to Gibraltar."

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

"Thirty dollars and fifty cents," he rumbled.

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

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

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

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

"Qui non ch' e piu," he said; "Giu!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You will next time?" I hinted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The steward jerked his head backward toward me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Room to put me up?" I asked.

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

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

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

"Sign off here?" he drawled.

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

"A.B., eh?"

"Been before the mast on the _Warwickshire_, _Glen_--"

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

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

"Like it," I replied.

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

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




                               CHAPTER II

                         FOOTPATHS OF ANDALUSIA


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why for you travel third-class?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why?" I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Have you a library in the barracks?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No, I am traveling on foot."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You furnish lodgings?"

"Si, senor; and your burro?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was turning away when he continued:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: A Moorish gate of Ronda]

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

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

[Illustration: A gitana of Granada.  In the district of the Alhambra.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




                              CHAPTER III

                     THE LAST FOOTHOLD OF THE MOOR


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: Aqui se bende bino]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The train is gone," answered the agent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




                               CHAPTER IV

                     THE BANKS OF THE GUADALQUIVIR


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Esta loco, senor?  Is he insane that he jabbers such a jargon?"

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

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

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

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




                               CHAPTER V

                           THE TORERO AT HOME


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: A Sevillian street]

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

[Illustration: The Plaza, San Fernando.  "A'ua!  A'ua fresca!  Quien
quiere beber?"]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




                               CHAPTER VI

                           TRAMPING NORTHWARD


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hot days these on the road, senor."

"Verdad es," I answered.

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

"Yes; but how do you know that?"

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

"What tells you that?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Even so, senor."

"A sad misfortune."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Si, senor.  Do you not also sell the music of your songs?"

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

"To Madrid."

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

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

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




                              CHAPTER VII

                      SPANISH ROADS AND ROADSTERS


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Gasparo shook his head, sadly yet decisively.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




                              CHAPTER VIII

                        ON THE ROAD IN LA MANCHA


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In that only were we unanimous,

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