Four Months Afoot in Spain Part 14

It is law that no bull that has once entered the ring shall live.

Curious to know what was to be the fate of this animal, I sprang over the barrier and hurried across to the gate by which he had disappeared.

There I beheld a scene that forever dispelled any notion that the task of the matador is an easy one, however simple it may look from the tribunes. The bull was thres.h.i.+ng to and fro within a small corral, bellowing with rage and las.h.i.+ng the air with his tail. It required six men and a half-hour of time to la.s.so and drag him to the fence. With a hundred straining at the rope his head was drawn down under the gate, a man struck him several blows with a sledge, and another, watching his opportunity, swung his great navaja and laid wide open the animal's throat.

It was late when, having mingled for some time with the country folk dancing on the sandy plain before the plaza, I returned to the city for my bundle and repaired to the station. A twelve-hour ride was before me. For I had decided to explore a territory where even the scent of tourists is unknown,--the northwest province of Galicia.

The train that I boarded at eleven was crowded with countrymen returning from the day's festival, a merry but in no sense intoxicated company, in which I saw my first wooden-shod Galicians. The car was, for once, of the American pattern--though of Spanish width--with thirty seats each large enough for three persons. The brakeman, too, who stood lantern on arm in the open door, bore an unusual resemblance to an American "shack."

A dozen men were standing in the aisle, but to my surprise one seat near the center of the car seemed to be unoccupied. When I reached it, however, I found a priest stretched out on his back, his hands clasped over his paunch, snoring impressively. I carried a protest to the brakeman and with a snort he swooped down upon the sleeper. At sight of him, however, he recoiled.

"Carajo!" he cried. "Es un padre! I could n't disturb his reverence."

I stooped and touched the monopolist on the shoulder, being in no mood to remain standing all night. Moreover, I had long been curious to know the Spaniard's att.i.tude toward a man who should treat a priest as an ordinary human being. "His reverence" grunted. I touched him again.

His snore lost a beat or two and began once more. I shook him more forcibly. He opened his blood-shot eyes, snorted "Huh!" so much like a certain monopolist of the animal kingdom that even the pa.s.sengers about me laughed at the resemblance--and fell again to snoring. I sat down gently on his fat legs and, when he kicked me off, confiscated a place.

He sat up with the look of a man whose known world has suddenly crumbled about his ears and glared at me with bulging eyes a full two minutes, while over the faces of the onlookers flitted a series of winks and smiles.

He was just huddling himself up again in the two-thirds of the seat that remained to him when the door opened and Trueno, the matador, his little _coleta_ peeping out from beneath his hat, his sword-case under one arm, entered and, spying the extra place, sat down in it with scant ceremony.

We fell to talking. The torero was a jovial, explosive, devil-may-care fellow who looked and dressed his character well. The priest slunk off somewhere in the thickest hours and his place was taken by a peasant who had been standing near me since leaving Salamanca. When he found opportunity to break into the conversation he addressed me with an amused smile:

"You are not then a Catholic, senor?"

"No."

"Ah! A socialist!" he cried with a.s.surance.

For to the ma.s.ses of southern Europe socialist and non-Catholic are synonymous.

"I doubt, senor," I observed, "whether you yourself are a Catholic."

"Como, senor!" he cried, raising his hands in a comical gesture of quasi-horror. "I, a cristino viejo, no Catholic!"

"Do you go to church and do what your cura commands?"

"What nonsense!" he cried, using a still more forcible term. "Who does?

My wife goes now and then to confession. I go to church, senor, to be baptized, married, and buried."

"Why go then?"

"Caramba!" he gasped. "How else shall a man be buried, married, and baptized?"

Toward morning I fell into a doze, from which I was awakened by the extraordinary sensation of feeling cold. Dawn was touching the far horizon. The train was straining upward through a sharply rising country. As the sun rose we came in sight of Astorga, standing drearily on her bleak hilltop, and in memory of Gil Blas and for the unlimbering of my legs I alighted and climbed into the town. It proved as uninteresting as any in Spain, and before the morning was old I was again riding northwestward. Soon there came an utter change of scene; tunnels grew unaccountable, the railroad winding its way doggedly upward through a wild, heavily wooded mountain region that had little in common with familiar Spanish landscapes. In mid-afternoon I dismounted at the station of Lugo, the capital of Galicia.

CHAPTER XII

WILDEST SPAIN

Nearest of all the Iberian peninsula to our own land, the ancient kingdom of Galicia is as well-nigh unknown to us as any section of Europe. As far back as mankind's memory carries it has been Spain's "last ditch." Up into this wild mountain corner of the peninsula retreated in its turn each subdued race as conqueror after conqueror swept over the land,--the aboriginal Iberians before the Celts, the Celtiberians before the coast-hugging Phoenicians and Carthaginians, these before the omniverous Romans, followed as the centuries rolled on by Vandal, Suevi, Goth and Moor. Further they could not flee, for behind them the world falls away by sheer cragged cliffs into the fathomless sea. Here the fugitives melted together into a racial amalgam, an uncourageous amalgam on the whole, for in each case those who reached the fastnesses were that remnant of the race that preferred life to honor, those who "fought and ran away," or who took to their heels even earlier in the proceedings.

Yet it was a long two centuries after Hannibal had followed his father Hasdrubal into the Stygian realms of the defeated, after Rome had covered the rest of the peninsula with that network of roads that remains to this day, that the power of the outside world pushed its way into this tumbled wilderness. But for the necessity of loot to pay the gambling debts of his merry youth the conqueror indeed might never have appeared. Yet appear he did,--a young Roman just beginning to display a crownal baldness, known to his legions as Caesar and answering to his friends of the Roman boulevards and casinos to the name of Julius. He conquered; and when he, too, had written his memoirs and pa.s.sed his perforated way, that lucky heir of all Roman striving caused to be built in these his mountains a city that should--like all that sprouted or grew under his reign--bear his name,--"Lucus Augusti--Gus's place."

To-day it is Lugo, a modest city ensconced in the lap of a plain near a thousand feet above the railway station that bears its name.

Politically Spanish, it is so in little else. The last traces of the Arab, so indelible in the rest of the peninsula, have disappeared. The racial amalgam, now the gallego, is close akin to the Portuguese, like all long dominated peoples docile, una.s.sertive, born to be a servant to mankind. He is the chief b.u.t.t, the low comedian of the Spanish stage, slow, loutish, heavy of mind and body, without a suggestion of the fire of that bubbling child of enthusiasm, the Andaluz; none of the native dignity and consciousness of personal worth of the Castilian, not even the dreaminess of the Manchegan. He is fitted to be what he is,--the domestic, the server of his fellow-countrymen.

From the posada at the city gate I climbed to Lugo's chief promenade and Alameda, the top of her surrounding wall. This is some forty feet high, of flat, irregular slabs of slate-stone on Roman foundations, with a circuit of nearly a mile and a half. The town within and below is of the same material, the dull gray or drab so predominating as to give the place the somberness of a stone village of Wales. The inhabitants, moreover, have little of the Spaniard's love of color, being as sober in garb as in demeanor. It is noteworthy that those communities that are least embellished by nature are most p.r.o.ne to garb themselves in all the colors of the spectrum. The Venetian above his muddy water has been noted in all times as a colorist; the peasants of the Apennines barely a hundred miles away have very little brightness of dress.

So the Lugense; for if the town itself is somber gray, the moss and vines that overrun the low, leaden houses, the gardens scattered among them, the flowers that trail from the windows of the dwellings built medieval-fas.h.i.+on into the walls make the scene gay even within. While outwardly it is unsurpa.s.sed. From the wall-top promenade the eye commands an endless vista of richest green landscape, a labyrinth of munificent hill forms and mountain ridges dense-wooded with veritable Alpine forests rolling away on every side to the uttermost horizon.

In the town itself is almost nothing of what the tourist calls "sights"; which is, perhaps, a chief reason why his shadow almost never falls within it. There is only the dull, bluish-stone cathedral, and an atmosphere wholly individual; nothing exciting, nothing extraordinary, though one amusing detail of life is sure to attract attention. Like many towns of Spain, Lugo obtains her water through the mouths of stone lions in her central plaza. But here the fountain spouts are for some Gallegan reason high above the flagging, far out of reach. Whence the plaza and the streets of the city are at all hours overrun with housewives and domestics carrying not merely pitchers but a tin tube some ten feet long through which to conduct the water into their receptacles. In nothing does the town differ from familiar Spain more than in temperature. Her climate is like that of Bar Harbor. A change in a few hours as from Florida in August to Mount Desert brought quickly home to me the fact that my garb was fitted only for perpetual summer.

Almost with the setting sun I fell visibly to s.h.i.+vering, and by dark I was forced to take refuge in bed.

I had come into Galicia proposing to strike across country to Oviedo, capital of the Asturias, in the hope of getting wholly and thoroughly "off the beaten track." Therein I seemed fully to have succeeded.

Inquiries in Lugo elicited the information that Oviedo was reputed to lie somewhere to the eastward. Nothing more; except some nebulous notion of a highway beginning at the base of the city wall leading for a day or two in that direction. For which uncertainty I was in no sense sorry, delighted with the prospect of exploring by a route of my own that wooded wilderness of mountains that spreads endlessly away from Lugo's promenade, certain of finding a land and a people unsullied by tourists.

Dinner over on the day after my arrival, I descended from the city of Augustus by the unpaved road that was to set me a little way on my journey. It was soon burrowing through dense, scented forests, broken by scores of little deep green meadows along the way; so many and so inviting that it required a strong tug of the will to keep from lying down for a nap in each of them, in memory of the many gra.s.sless, siestaless, fly-bitten days in the rest of the peninsula. Truly the good things of this world are unevenly distributed. In fact, only by a dead lift of the imagination could one comprehend that this also was Spain. Switzerland, perhaps, but never a part and portion of the same country with the sear, deforested uplands of Castille, the sandy stretches of Andalusia, with osseous and all but treeless La Mancha.

The division line between Europe and Africa was meant surely to be the Pyrenees and this Cantabrian range rather than the Mediterranean.

When darkness settled down I halted at a jumbled stone hamlet, where payment was refused except for the few cents' worth of peasant fare I ate. For my bed, was spread in an open stable a bundle of newly threshed wheat-straw that was longer than myself. A half-day's tramp had not left me sleepy. The night lay cool and silent about me, and I sank into that reverie of contentment that comes most surely upon the wanderer when he has left the traveled world behind and turns his face care-free toward the unknown, that mysterious land across which beckons the aerial little sprite men name _Wanderl.u.s.t_. For the joy of travel is not in arriving but in setting forth, in moving onward; how fast matters little, where, even less, but ever on and on, forgetting, for the supremest satisfaction, that there is a goal to attain. Let a man wander away into unknown lands smiling with summer, his journey's end little more than conjecture, his day of arrival a matter of indifference, and if he feel not then the joy of the open road he may know for a certainty that he is a hug-the-hearth, and no gipsy and a vagabond.

In the morning continued a roadway hobble-skirted by forests, a country as pleasing as Caruso's voice, as soothing to the traveler from stony Spain as McDowell's music. To enumerate the details of life and landscape here is merely to tell by contrast what the rest of Spain is not. The inhabitants were in the highest degree laconic, as taciturn as the central and southern Spaniard is garrulous, self-conscious to the point of bashfulness, a characteristic as uncommon in the rest of the country as among the Jews or Arabs; a heavy-handed, un.o.bserving peasantry that pa.s.sed the stranger unaccosted, almost unnoticed. Such conversation as exchanged must be introduced by the traveler. The cheering "Vaya!" was heard no more, the stock greeting being a mumbled "Buenos."

In appearance, be the inspection not too close, this mountain people well deserves the outworn epithet "picturesque." The women young and old wore on their heads large kerchiefs of brilliant red, and most of them a waist of the same color, offering striking contrast to the rich green background, as the latter was sure to be. As footwear, except those unpossessed of any, both s.e.xes had wooden shoes painted black and fancifully carved, which, sc.r.a.ping along the highway, carried the thoughts quickly back to j.a.pan. At nearer sight, however, something of the picturesqueness was lost in the unfailing evidences of a general avoidance of the bath and washtub.

Of least interest were the dwellings of this peasantry,--villages neither frequent nor large, more properly mere heaps of gray huts built without order or plan of the slate-stone of which the province itself is chiefly formed, as was seen wherever the outer soil had been stripped away and the skeleton of the mountain laid bare. For all the character of the country abundance of rain and a pains-taking agriculture gave good crops. Galicia indeed supports, though in poverty, the densest population of the peninsula. Wheat, Indian corn, and hay abounded. The former was stacked, and threshed with flails--two customs unknown in Spain, as the latter products are entirely. The maize was sown. A species of cabbage on a stalk some two feet long was among the most common of the vegetables.

All these products grew, not on the level, but in little isolated, precipitous fields in which it seemed impossible that the laborers, male and female with sickles or mattocks, could stand upright. Flocks of sheep and goats were many, and as the final change from the Spain that I had hitherto known there was nowhere silence. The forests on either hand were vocal with the songs of birds. Mountain streams came plunging, headlong down the ravines, or brawled along through stony channels beside the winding way. The water was of the purest and clearest, which may, perhaps, have led the inhabitants to give most of their mundifying attention to the vessels in which it was carried,--great oaken buckets each with three wide hoops scoured spotless and s.h.i.+ning as a Hindu's _lota_.

But most unfailing breakers of the silence and most characteristic of all the features of the province was its vehicles. The Phrygian peasants who dragged their produce into Troy before the siege had certainly as up-to-date a conveyance. The traveler's first encounter with one of these Homeric contrivances is sure to be startling. There is only one word that exactly expresses their sound from afar,--the French _bourdonner_--the noise of the b.u.mblebee. Indeed, when first I heard it I fell to thres.h.i.+ng about my ears, sure that one of those insects was upon me. Slowly the sound grew to the meowling of a thousand cats, and around a turn of the forest-hedged road came a peasant's cart drawn by little brown oxen--they are as often cows--much like our Jerseys in appearance, a great sheepskin thrown over their heads, to the horns of which the yoke was fastened. The unwieldy edifice, wabbling drunkenly as it came, consisted of little more than two solid disks of wood like cistern covers turning on a wooden axle, the whole having about it neither an ounce of iron nor a smell of axle-grease. Its pace certainly did not exceed a mile an hour, the oxen see-sawing from side to side of the road, twisting their burdened heads to stare at me with curious, sad eyes. As it pa.s.sed, my ears literally ached with its scream. I doubled my pace to flee the torture. But there was no entire escape; hardly once thereafter was I out of sound of a cart or two, now screaming by, now "bourdonning" away across some valley, buzzing at times even after the night had settled down.

Early on this second day, which was Sunday, there appeared a far more precipitous and rocky country through which the road began to wind its way upward amid a chaos of rugged tumbled valleys, gaining by early afternoon an elevation above the line of vegetation. For two hours I kept lookout for a bit of level s.p.a.ce for a siesta, without finding a patch of flat ground as large as my knapsack. I stepped over the edge of the highway and lay down on a bank so sheer that I was obliged to brace my stick against the small of my back to keep from pitching down the thousand-foot slope into a brook; and even as it was I awoke to find I had s.h.i.+fted some ten feet down the hill.

The ascent thereafter grew still sharper, the surrounding world being at last wholly enveloped in a dense cloud. From out of this I heard, at what I fancied must be toward sunset, sounds of revelry, by which, marching onward, I was soon encompa.s.sed, though still unseeing and unseen. Suddenly there came waltzing toward me out of the fog a couple in each other's arms, disappearing again as another pair whirled forth out of the unknown. Wandering on through a merry but invisible mult.i.tude I ran all but into the arms of two guardias civiles leaning on their muskets. They greeted me with vast surprise, welcoming me to their mountain-top town of Fonsagrada and, far from demanding my papers, offered to find me a partner that I might join the village in its Sunday celebration on the green. I declined such hilarity, but for an hour stood chatting with them while the dancers whirled unseen about us.

Fonsagrada has no regular accommodations for strangers. The peregrinating band of musicians, however, furnis.h.i.+ng the day's melody, was to be cared for in a sort of grocery, to which I repaired with them when the dance was over. Having partaken of a substantial supper in which the far-famed _bacalao_--cod preserved in great chunks in barrels like salt pork; a main staple in this region--made its initial appearance, I laid my case before the proprietor. He was a Yankee-like man in the middle thirties, of modern business methods even though he knew next to nothing of the world outside his cloud-bound village.

Notwithstanding, therefore, that there was no "costumbre" to sanction it, he bade me spend the night under his roof--which I did all too literally, for when I had left off swapping yarns with the melodious nomads my host led the way to the garret, half-filled with straw, where in the midst of a too realistic dream I rose up suddenly and all but shattered my head on the roof in question.

In the morning the clouds were still wandering like lost souls through the streets of Fonsagrada. A mist that barely escaped being a rain was falling when I set off in an attempt to follow the voluminous directions of the dubious village. According to these, when I had pa.s.sed the "Meson de Galo," a lonely stone tavern a few miles out, I left the road, which was bending toward Gijon on the north coast, and fell into a descending mountain path. A tang of the salt sea was in the air. All the day through I climbed, slipped, and scrambled over jagged mountain slopes and through deep, rocky barrancas. There develops with much wandering an instinct to follow the right fork of a mountain trail, slight hints that could not be explained, but without the half-unconscious noting of which I must have gone a score of times astray. Twice or thrice I stumbled into a hamlet in some wrinkle of the range, a village of five or six hovels huddling in the shadow of an enormous, overtowering church, all built of flat field stones and swarming with huge white dogs.

At Grandas, a bit larger village overhung by ma.s.sed up mountains, I was at length so fortunate as to get after much search an intangible imitation of a meal. From there I panted a long time upward and came out at last above a seemingly bottomless gorge, a gorge so deep that I had scrambled nearly a half-hour along its brink before I noted that far down in its depths was a town, encircled by vertical vineyards, like embroidery on the lower skirts of its overhanging mountains. My path lay plainly visible on the opposite slope, only a long jump away, but a jump for Pegasus or the princess of the Rosstrappe, and I, mere mortal, was forced to wind a long hour and a half to and fro on the rubbled face of the mountain before I entered the town below, called Saline.

Before me lay the most laborious task of all my Spanish journey. A mountain as nearly perpendicular as man could hope to ascend, without a break or a knoll in all its slope, rose, a sheer wall, certainly four thousand feet above. The gorge seemed some boundary set by the G.o.ds between two worlds. Up the face of the cliff a path had been laid out with mathematical precision, every one of its score of legs a toilsome climb over loose stones, with the sun, untempered by a breath of wind, pouring down its fury upon my back. It was hot as Spain in the depth of the canyon; it was chilling cold when I reached the summit heavily crested in clouds and threw myself down breathless on my back. Darkness was coming on, and I fell soon to s.h.i.+vering in the biting mountain air and must rise and hurry forward. It was not strange that in the fog and darkness instinct failed and that when finally I reached a village of eight or nine hovels and inquired its name the inhabitants replied "Figuerina," not in the least like the "La Mesa" I had expected.

Of a brawny, weather-beaten girl milking a cow by the light of a torch in what pa.s.sed for the princ.i.p.al street, I asked:

"Is there a posada in town?"