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