I fancied that a kind of Gothic gloom was expressed in the black
wine-skins of Old Castile, as contrasted with the fairer color of those
which began to prevail even so little south of Burgos as Valladolid. I
am not sure that the Old Castilian wine-skins derived their blackness
from the complexion of the pigs, or that there are more pale pigs in the
south than in the north of Spain; I am sure only of a difference in
the color of the skins, which may have come from a difference in the
treatment of them. At a venture I should not say that there were more
black pigs in Old Castile than in Andalusia, as we observed them from
the train, rooting among the unpromising stubble of the wheat-lands.
Rather I should say that the prevailing pig of all the Spains was brown,
corresponding to the reddish blondness frequent among both the Visigoths
and the Moors. The black pig was probably the original, prehistoric
Iberian pig, or of an Italian strain imported by the Romans; but I do
not offer this as more than a guess. The Visigothic or Arabic pig showed
himself an animal of great energy and alertness wherever we saw him,
and able to live upon the lean of the land where it was leanest. At his
youngest he abounded in the furrows and hollows, matching his russet
with the russet of the soil and darting to and fro with the quickness
of a hare. He was always of an ingratiating humorousness and endeared
himself by an apparent readiness to enter into any joke that was going,
especially that of startling the pedestrian by his own sudden apparition
from behind a tuft of grass or withered stalk. I will not be sure, but I
think we began to see his kind as soon as we got out of Yalladolid, when
we began running through a country wooded with heavy, low-crowned pines
that looked like the stone-pines of Italy, but were probably not the
same. After twenty miles of this landscape the brown pig with pigs of
other complexions, as much guarded as possible, multiplied among the
patches of vineyard. He had there the company of tall black goats and
rather unhappy-looking black sheep, all of whom he excelled in the
art of foraging among the vines and the stubble of the surrounding
wheat-lands. After the vineyards these opened and stretched themselves
wearily, from low dull sky to low dull sky, nowise cheered in aspect by
the squalid peasants, scratching their tawny expanses with those crooked
prehistoric sticks which they use for plows in Spain. It was a dreary
landscape, but it was good to be out of Valladolid on any terms, and
especially good to be away from the station which we had left emulating
the odors of the house of Cervantes.
I
There had been the usual alarm about the lack of places in the
Sud-Express which we were to take at Valladolid, but we chanced getting
them, and our boldness was rewarded by getting a whole compartment to
ourselves, and a large, fat friendly conductor with an eye out for tips
in every direction. The lunch in our dining-car was for the first time
in Spain not worth the American price asked for it; everywhere else
on the Spanish trains I must testify that the meals were excellent and
abundant; and the refection may now have felt in some obscure sort the
horror of the world in which the Sud-Express seemed to have lost itself.
The scene was as alien to any other known aspect of our comfortable
planet as if it were the landscape of some star condemned for the
sins of its extinct children to wander through space in unimaginable
desolation. It seldom happens in Spain that the scenery is the same on
both sides of the railroad track, but here it was malignly alike on one
hand and on the other, though we seemed to be running along the slope of
an upland, so that the left hand was higher and the right lower. It was
more as if we were crossing the face of some prodigious rapid, whose
surges were the measureless granite boulders tossing everywhere in
masses from the size of a man’s fist to the size of a house. In a wild
chaos they wallowed against one another, the greater bearing on their
tops or between them on their shoulders smaller regular or irregular
masses of the same gray stone. Everywhere among their awful shallows
grew gray live-oaks, and in among the rocks and trees spread tufts of
gray shrub. Suddenly, over the frenzy of this mad world, a storm of cold
rain broke whirling, and cold gray mists drove, blinding the windows and
chilling us where we sat within. From time to time the storm lifted and
showed again this vision of nature hoary as if with immemorial eld; if
at times we seemed to have run away from it again it closed in upon us
and held us captive in its desolation.
With longer and longer intervals of relief it closed upon us for the
last time in the neighborhood of the gloomiest pile that ever a man
built for his life, his death and his prayer between; but before we came
to the palace-tomb of the Escorial, we had clear in the distance the
vision of the walls and roofs and towers of the medieval city of Avila.
It is said to be the perfectest relic of the Middle Ages after or before
Rothenburg, and we who had seen Rothenburg solemnly promised ourselves
to come back some day from Madrid and spend it in Avila. But we never
came, and Avila remains a vision of walls and roofs and towers tawny
gray glimpsed in a rift of the storm that again swept toward the Spanish
capital.