A DESCENT INTO ARAGON
There was an unwonted excitement in the air when I boarded the train
next morning for the longest unbroken ride of my Spanish journey.
Pernales, the anachronism, the twentieth-century bandit of the environs
of Cordoba, had fallen. Aboard the train newspapers were as numerous as
on the New York "Elevated" at a similar hour. I bought one and was soon
lost like the rest in the adventures of this last defier of the mighty
guardia civil.
The story was simple. Two evenings before, about the time I had been
yawning over the king's fireworks, Pernales had met a village arriero
among the foothills of his retreat, and asked him some question about
the road. The rustic gave him the desired information, but guessing
with whom he was speaking, had raced away, once he was out of sight, as
fast as he could drive his ass before him, to carry his suspicions to
the village alcalde. The rest was commonplace. A dozen guardias
stalked the unsuspecting bandolero among the hills, and coming upon him
toward sunrise, brought his unsanctioned career abruptly to a close.
[Illustration: The Roman walls of Leon]
"Our special correspondent" had dismally failed to cast over his account
the glamour of romance, but in compensation had taken a reporter's care
to give the precise point in the right temple where the ball had
entered, with the exact dimensions of the orifice, as well as the life
story of the hero who had bored it. Nay, with almost American haste and
resourcefulness the paper printed a full-length portrait of the
successful hunter--or one at least of a man who could not have been
vastly different in appearance, in a uniform that was certainly very
similar. Alas! The good old days of the bandit and the contrabandista
are forever gone in Spain; the humdrum era of the civil guard is come.
Pernales' is but another story of a man born a century too late.
[Illustration: The land of the boina. Alfonso XII at a picnic]
All day long as we toiled and twisted over the Cantabrian range and
descended southward, this only was the topic of conversation of all
grades and sexes of travelers. An hour's halt at Miranda and we creaked
on along the bank of Spain's greatest river, the Ebro, talking still of
bandoleros and the regret of their passing. Slowly the green tinge in
the landscape faded away and in its place came reddish cliffs and a
sun-seared and all but desert country spreading away from either bank of
the red-dyed river, sterile rolling plains relieved only by small oases
of fertility and isolated and in all probability bigoted villages
standing colorless on colorless hillsides. As central Spain may be
likened to rocky Judea, so this resembles in some degree Egypt, with the
Ebro as the Nile.
It was late in the evening when I arrived in Saragossa and, crossing the
broad river by the Puente de Piedra, found myself in one of the most
labyrinthian cities of Spain. But so practiced had I grown in such
quest that in less than an hour I had engaged accommodation at my own
price, which by this time had descended to two and a half pesetas.
The "sight" par excellence of Saragossa is of course her "Virgen del
Pilar." The story runs that Santiago, who is none other than Saint
James, while wandering about Spain, as he was wont to ramble in various
corners of the earth, was favored one evening by a call from the Mother
of Christ, who, during all their little chat, stood on the top of a
stone pillar. That the tale is true there seems little chance for doubt,
for they have the pillar yet; and it is over this that has been erected
the vast cathedral to which flock thousands of pilgrims during every
month of the year.
I repaired to it early, but was soon turned melancholy with the
recollection of Puck's profound saying anent the folly of mankind. The
interior of the edifice is as impressive as that of an empty warehouse.
Under the main dome is a large chapel screaming with riches, in the back
of which, on her pillar, stands the Virgin--turned to black,
half-decayed wood--dressed in more thousands of dollars' worth of gold
and silver, of resplendent robes and vociferous gaudiness than god
Juggernaut of India ever possessed at the height of his influence.
Before it worshipers are always kneeling. In the back wall of the
chapel is an opening through which one can touch the pillar--and find a
cup-shaped hole worn in it by such action during the centuries. I sat
down on a bench near the far-famed orifice, and for close upon an hour
watched the unbroken procession file past. Beggar women, rag-pickers,
ladies of wealth, cankerous old men, merchants, city sports,
lawyers--Saragossa is the one city of Spain where even men go to
church--every grade and variety of Aragonese pressed close upon the
heels one of another, each bowing down as he passed to kiss the hole
deeper into the pillar. At bottom the difference is slight indeed
between the religion of the Spaniard and that of the Hindu.
In the city swarms a hungry, ragged people, more often than not without
shoes, yet one and all with the proverbial haughty pride and somber mood
of Aragon in face and bearing, stiff-shouldered, bristling with a
touch-me-not-with-a-pole expression. Here, too, may still be found,
especially among the peasants from the further districts, the old
provincial costume,--knee breeches, a jacket reaching barely to the
waist, and a red cloth wound about the head.
Tiring of such things, there is a pleasant promenade along the banks of
the Ebro, whence one will drift naturally through the Portillo gate
where the "flying Gaul was foil'd by a woman's hand." It is startling
to find the settings of two such world-famed dramas so close together,
but from the gate one has only to saunter a few yards along the Madrid
highway to come upon the weather-battered Aljaferia of "Trovatore" fame.
To-day it is a barracks. Within its towers, through now unbarred
windows, may be seen soldiers polishing their spurs and muskets, humming
now and then a snatch of popular song; but one may wait in vain to hear
some tuneful prisoner strike up the expected "miserere."
There is one stroll in Saragossa that I would commend to the wanderer
who finds pleasure in gaining elevations whence he may look down, as it
were, on the world. It is out along the Canal Imperial, past the
swollen-paunched statue of its sponsor Pignatelli, and across the
Huerva; then winding lazily southwest and upward the stroller comes
suddenly out on the crown of a bald hillock. There, below him in its
flat valley, spreads all Saragossa, far enough away to lose the
crassness of detail, yet distinct, the two finished towers of the Pilar
rising above it like minarets, the whole girded by the green huerta, and
beyond and all around the desert in gashed and gnarled hills like the
Libyan range of another continent. Here I lounged until the setting sun,
peering over my shoulder, cast the radiant flush of evening on the city
below, which gradually fading away was at length effaced in the night,
its sounds mingling together in a sort of music that drifted up to me
long after the scene itself had wholly disappeared.
I descended for supper. It is the lot of man that he has no sooner
climbed to a height where he may look down calmly on the scramble of
life than he must again plunge down into it to _eat_--or to earn more
bread. To-morrow I must set my face toward the frontier, toward New
York and a return to labor.
On my way to the five-o'clock train next morning I passed through
Saragossa's vast covered market and halted to lay in a last supply of
figs. The cheery old woman who sold them grasped my fifteen centimos
tightly in her hand and solemnly made with it the sign of the cross. I
expressed surprise, and a misgiving lest I had unwittingly parted with
coppers possessing peculiar virtues.
"Como, senor!" she cried, in wonder at my ignorance. "It is the first
money of the day. If I do not say a paternoster with it I may sit here
until nightfall without selling another perrito-worth, you may be sure."
The train labored back along the Ebro to Castejon, where I changed cars
and journeyed northward, every click of the wheels seeming to cry out
that my Spanish summer was nearing its end. At high noon I descended in
a dusty plain before the sheer face of the rock on which stands Pamplona
of Navarre. When I had climbed into the city I inquired of the first
policeman for a modest casa de huespedes. He rubbed his head a moment
and set off with me along the street, chatting sociably as we went.
Soon we came upon another officer, to whom the first repeated my
question. He scratched his head a moment and fell in beside us,
babbling cheerily. Fully a half-mile beyond we accosted a third
officer. He rasped his close-shaven poll yet another moment and joined
us in the quest, adding a new stock of anecdotes. Here was courtesy
extraordinary, even for Spain. Had the police force of Pamplona
discovered in me some prince incognito, or was mine to be the role of
the rolling pancake? We rambled on, but without success, for not
another officer could we find in all our circuit of the city. It was
certainly close upon an hour after my original inquiry, and something
like a hundred yards from the same spot, that we entered a side street
and mounted, still in quartet, to a cheap but homelike boarding-house
high up in an aged building. The courtesy was quickly explained. The
landlady, having expressed her deep gratitude for being brought a new
guest, begged each of the officers to do her the favor of accepting a
glass of wine. They smacked their lips over it, exchanged with the
household the customary salutations and banter, and sauntered back to
their beats.
When I had eaten, I descended for a turn about the city with the uncle
of my grateful hostess, a mountain-hardened Basque of sixty, in the
universal boina, who had but recently retired from a lifetime of rocky
hillside farming. Of both his province of Navarre and of himself he
talked freely until suddenly my tongue stumbled upon some question of
military conscription. He fell at once silent, his jaws stiffened, and
into his face came the reflection of a bitter sadness. For the Basques
are by no means reconciled to the loss of their cherished _fueros_, or
special political privileges. In silence the sturdy old man led the way
half across the city to one of her gates and, climbing a knoll that gave
a good view of the surrounding fortifications, said in cheerless tones:
"Don Henrico, we have here the strongest city walls in Spain. But what
use are they now against the king's modern artillery? No hay remedio.
We must serve in his armies."
As we threaded our way slowly back to the boarding-house I halted at a
money changer's to buy a twenty-franc piece. The transaction left me
only a handful of coppers in Spanish currency, and I went early to bed
lest there be not enough remaining to carry me out of the country.
On a glorious clear September morning I turned my back on Spain and set
forth from Pamplona to tramp over the Pyrenees by the pass of
Roncesvalles, being just uncertain enough of the road to lend zest to
the undertaking. At the edge of the plain to the northward of the city
a highway began to wind its way upward along the bank of a young river,
not laboriously, but steadily rising. Habitations were rare. Late in
the morning a spot above whirling rapids in shaded solitude suggested a
plunge; but as I pulled off my coat a sound fell on my ear and, looking
across the stream, I saw a half-dozen women kneeling on the bank and
staring curiously across at me. When I retreated, they laughed heartily
and fell once more to pounding away at their laundry-work on the stones.
Some distance higher I found another pool in which, by rolling over and
over, I won the afterglow of a real swim. Sharper ascents succeeded,
though still none steep. I was soon surrounded by a Tyrolian scenery of
forest and deep-cut valleys, and among up-to-date people--the farming
implements being of modern type and the smallest villages having
electric lights run by power from the mountain streams. Every
fellow-mortal, young or old, as is usual in mountain regions, gave me
greeting, not with the familiar "Vaya!" nor the "Buenos!" of Galicia,
but with "Adios!" which seemed here to mean much more than the
grammatical "Good-by." In the place of guardias civiles were
carabineros in a provincial uniform, whose advances, if less warm and
companionable, were none the less kindly.
Toward evening the road flowed up into a broad, oblong meadow,
ankle-deep in greenest grass, musical with the sound of cow-bells,
across which it drifted as if content to rest for a time on its oars
before taking the final climb. The sun was setting when I reached
Burguete at forty-four kilometers, station of the trans-Pyrenean
diligence and the point that I had been assured I should do well to
reach in a two-day's walk. But I felt as unwearied as at the outset;
the towers of Roncesvalles stood plainly visible five kilometers ahead
across the green tableland. I rambled on in the cool of evening and by
dark was housed in a good inn of the mountain village.
When the supper hour arrived, the landlord stepped across to me to ask
whether I would eat as a guest or as a member of the family. I inquired
what the distinction might be.
"No difference," he answered, "except that as a member of the family you
pay a peseta upon leaving, and as a guest you pay two."
It was of course en famille that I supped, and right royally, at a board
merry with good-humored peasants and arrieros rather than in the silent,
gloomy company of a half-dozen convention-ridden travelers in an
adjoining room.
Roncesvalles would have been an unequaled spot in which to pass an
autumn week, roaming in the forest glens of the mountains, dreaming of
the heroic days of Roland. But the hour of reckoning and of New York
was near at hand. Of all sensations I most abhor the feeling that I
must be in a given place at a given time.
A short climb through wooded hillsides strewn with gigantic rocks and I
found myself all at once and unexpectedly on the very summit of the
Pyrenees. In no sense had the ascent been toilsome, vastly less so than
several scrambles of two or three hours' duration between Lugo and
Oviedo. From the French side, no doubt, it would have been far more of
a task. Gazing northward I recognized for the first time that I stood
high indeed above the common level of the earth. Miles below, blue as
the sea, lay France, the forested mountains at my feet rolling
themselves out into hills, the hills growing lower and lower and
spreading away into the far, far distance like another world. The
modern world--and I was all at once assailed with a desire to ask what
it had been doing in all the days I had been gone. Then the highway
seized me in its grasp and hurried me away down, racing, rushing, almost
stumbling, so fast I was forced to break away from it and clamber down
at my own pace through dense unpeopled forests, to fall upon it again
far below and stalk with it at lunch-time into the village of Val
Carlos. Yet another hour's descent and I crossed a small stream into
the little hamlet of Arneguy; the long-forgotten figure of a French
gendarme slouched forth from a hut to shout as I passed, "Anything
dutiable, monsieur?" and my Spanish journey was among the things that
have been.