When you leave Burgos at 3.29 of a passably sunny afternoon you are not
at once aware of the moral difference between the terms of your approach
and those of your departure. You are not changing your earth or your
sky very much, but it is not long before you are sensible of a change of
mind which insists more and more. There is the same long ground-swell
of wheat-fields, but yesterday you were followed in vision by the
loveliness of the frugal and fertile Biscayan farms, and to-day this
vision has left you, and you are running farther and farther into the
economic and topographic waste of Castile. Yesterday there were more
or less agreeable shepherdesses in pleasant plaids scattered over the
landscape; to-day there are only shepherds of three days’ unshornness;
the plaids are ragged, and there is not sufficient compensation in
the cavalcades of both men and women riding donkeys in and out of the
horizons on the long roads that lose and find themselves there. Flocks
of brown and black goats, looking large as cows among the sparse
stubble, do little to relieve the scene from desolation; I am not sure
but goats, when brown and black, add to the horror of a desolate scene.
There are no longer any white farmsteads, or friendly villages gathering
about high-shouldered churches, but very far away to the eastward or
westward the dun expanse of the wheat-lands is roughed with something
which seems a cluster of muddy protuberances, so like the soil at first
it is not distinguishable from it, but which as your train passes
nearer proves to be a town at the base of tablelands, without a tree
or a leaf or any spear of green to endear it to the eye as the abode of
living men. You pull yourself together in the effort to visualize the
immeasurable fields washing those dreary towns with golden tides of
harvest; but it is difficult. What you cannot help seeing is the actual
nakedness of the land which with its spindling stubble makes you think
of that awful moment of the human head, when utter baldness will be a
relief to the spectator.
I
At times and in places, peasants were scratching the dismal surfaces
with the sort of plows which Abel must have used, when subsoiling was
not yet even a dream; and between the plowmen and their ox-teams it
seemed a question as to which should loiter longest in the unfinished
furrow. Now and then, the rush of the train gave a motionless goatherd,
with his gaunt flock, an effect of comparative celerity to the rearward.
The women riding their donkeys over