CAN this really be Europe—crowded Europe? For four long days we have traversed Estremenian wilds, and during that time have scarce met a score of folk, nor seen serious evidence of effective human occupation. At first our northward way led through rolling undulations, the western foothills of the long Sierra Moréna, clad with the everlasting gum-cistus, with euonymus, a few stunted trees, and the usual aromatic brushwood of the south. Only at long intervals—say a league or two apart—would some tiny cot, of woodcutter perhaps, or goat-herd, gleam white amidst the rolling green monotone. Here and there wild-thyme (cantuéso) empurpled the slopes as it were August heather, but the chief beauty-spot was the rose-like flower of the cistus, now (May) in fullest bloom—waxy white, with orange centre and a splash like black velvet on each petal. Next, for a whole day we ride through open forest of evergreen oak and wild-olive, the floor carpeted with tasselled grasses, tufty broom, and fennel. We encamp where we list and cut firewood, none saying us nay or inquiring by what authority we do these things.
One evening while we investigated an azure magpie’s nest in an ilex hard by the tents, four donkey-borne peasants appeared. Though they rode close by, yet they showed no sign, passing silent and incurious. The few natives we met hereabouts all seemed listless, apathetic, uncommunicative, in striking contrast with their sprightly southern neighbours beyond the hills in Andalucia. We read that Estremadura is a “paludic” province and unhealthy; possibly the malarial microbe has sapped energy.
To forest, next day succeeded more rolling hills with ten-foot bush and scattered trees. From a crag-crowned ridge, the culminating point of these, there fell within view three human habitations—three, in a vista of thirty miles—two tall castles perched in strong places, the third apparently a considerable farm. The landscape is often lovely enough, park-like, with infinite sites for country halls; yet all, all seems abandoned by man and beast. The few wild creatures observed included common and azure magpies, hoopoes, and bee-eaters, rollers, doves, kestrels, with a sprinkling of partridge and an occasional hare.
A landowner in this province (Badajoz) endeavoured to preserve the game on his estate. At first all went well. As their enemies decreased, partridge rapidly multiplied. But thereupon occurred an influx of extraneous vermin (foxes and wild-cats) from adjacent wilds, and Nature restored her former exiguous balance of life.
The scene changes. For the next twenty miles there is not a tree or a bush, hardly a living thing on those dreary levels save larks and bustards. The hungry earth shows brown and naked through its scanty herbage, stript by devouring locusts.
Travelling by rail the abandonment seems yet more striking, since thus we cover more ground. True, along the line cluster some slight attempts at cultivation elsewhere absent; but these amount to nothing—a few patches of starveling oats, six to eighteen inches high, with scarce a score of blades to the yard! Two men are reaping with sickles. Each has his donkey tethered hard by, and at nightfall will ride to his distant village, a league away maybe, hidden in some unnoticed hollow. Scarce a village have we seen.
The monotony wearies. The abject barrenness of Estremadura, its lifelessness, is actually worse, more pronounced and depressing, than we had anticipated. Now the far horizon on the north bristles with battlements, towers, and spires—that is Trujillo, an old-world fortress of the Caesars, crowning a granite koppie in yon everlasting plain. The ten leagues that yet intervene recall, in colour and contour, a mid-Northumbrian moor, wild and bleak—here the home of bustards, stone-curlew, sand-grouse, ... and of locusts.
From the topmost turrets of Trujillo let us take one more survey of this Estremenian wilderness ere yet we pronounce a final judgment.
