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.