In the forests about befell all those adventures with the mad Cardenio
and the wronged Dorothea, both self-banished to the wilderness through
the perfidy of the same false friend and faithless lover. The episodes
which end so well, and which form, I think, the heart of the wonderful
romance, have, from the car windows, the fittest possible setting;
but suddenly the scene changes, and you are among aspects of nature as
savagely wild as any in that new western land where the countrymen of
Cervantes found a New Spain, just as the countrymen of Shakespeare found
a New England. Suddenly, or if not suddenly, then startlingly, we were
in a pass of the Sierra called (for some reason which I will leave
picturesquely unexplained) the Precipice of Dogs, where bare sharp peaks
and spears of rock started into the air, and the faces of the cliffs
glared down upon us like the faces of Indian warriors painted yellow and
orange and crimson, and every other warlike color. With my poor scruples
of moderation I cannot give a just notion of the wild aspects; I must
leave it to the reader, with the assurance that he cannot exaggerate
it, while I employ myself in noting that already on this awful summit we
began to feel ourselves in the south, in Andalusia. Along the mountain
stream that slipped silverly away in the valley below, there were
oleanders in bloom, such as we had left in Bermuda the April before.
Already, north of the Sierra the country had been gentling. The upturned
soil had warmed from gray to red; elsewhere the fields were green with
sprouting wheat; and there were wide spaces of those purple flowers,
like crocuses, which women were gathering in large baskets. Probably
they were not crocuses; but there could be no doubt of the vineyards
increasing in their acreage; and the farmhouses which had been without
windows in their outer walls, now sometimes opened as many as two to
the passing train. Flocks of black sheep and goats, through the optical
illusion frequent in the Spanish air, looked large as cattle in the
offing. Only in one place had we seen the tumbled boulders of Old
Castile, and there had been really no greater objection to La Mancha
than that it was flat, stale, and unprofitable and wholly unimaginable
as the scene of even Don Quixote’s first adventures.
But now that we had mounted to the station among the summits of the
Sierra Morena, my fancy began to feel at home, and rested in a scene
which did all the work for it. There was ample time for the fancy to
rest in that more than co-operative landscape. Just beyond the first
station the engine of a freight-train had opportunely left the track in
front of us, and we waited there four hours till it could be got back.
It would be inhuman to make the reader suffer through this delay with
us after it ceased to be pleasure and began to be pain. Of course,
everybody of foreign extraction got out of the train and many even,
went forward to look at the engine and see what they could do about it;
others went partly forward and asked the bolder spirits on their way
back what was the matter. Now and then our locomotive whistled as if
to scare the wandering engine back to the rails. At moments the
station-master gloomily returned to the station from somewhere and
diligently despaired in front of it. Then we backed as if to let our
locomotive run up the siding and try to butt the freight-train off the
track to keep its engine company.
About this time the restaurant-car bethought itself of some sort of
late-afternoon repast, and we went forward and ate it with an interest
which we prolonged as much as possible. We returned to our car which was
now pervaded by an extremely bad smell. The smell drove us out, and we
watched a public-spirited peasant beating the acorns from a live-oak
near the station with a long pole. He brought a great many down, and
first filled his sash-pocket with them; then he distributed them among
the children of the third-class passengers who left the train and
flocked about him. But nobody seemed to do anything with the acorns,
though they were more than an inch long, narrow, and very sharp-pointed.
As soon as he had discharged his self-assumed duty the peasant lay down
on the sloping bank under the tree, and with his face in the grass, went
to sleep for all our stay, and for what I know the whole night after.
It did not now seem likely that we should ever reach Gordova, though
people made repeated expeditions to the front of the train, and came
back reporting that in an hour we should start. We interested ourselves
as intensely as possible in a family from the next compartment,
London-tailored, and speaking either Spanish or English as they fancied,
who we somehow understood lived at Barcelona; but nothing came of our
interest. Then as the day waned we threw ourselves into the interest
taken by a fellow-passenger in a young Spanish girl of thirteen or
fourteen who had been in the care of a youngish middle-aged man when our
train stopped, and been then abandoned by him for hours, while he seemed
to be satisfying a vain curiosity at the head of the train. She owned
that the deserter was her father, and while we were still poignantly
concerned for her he came back and relieved the anxiety which the girl
herself had apparently not shared even under pressure of the whole
compartment’s sympathy.