An expedition on this scale involves an amount of care and forethought that only those who have experienced it would credit. For in Spain it is an unknown undertaking, and to engineer something new is always difficult. Quite an extensive camping-trip can be organised in Africa, where the system is understood, with less than a hundredth part of the care needed for a comparatively short trip in Spain where it is not. The necessary bulk of camp-outfit and equipment requires a considerable cavalcade, and this mule-transport (since no provender is obtainable in the country) involves carrying along all the food for the animals—the heaviest item of all. Naturally the cost of such expeditions works out to nearly double that of simple riding.
But, after all, it is worth it! Compare some of the miseries we have above but lightly touched upon—the dirt and squalor, the nameless horrors of choza or posada—with the sense of joyous exhilaration felt when encamped by the banks of some babbling trout-stream or in the glorious freedom of the open hill. Casting back in mental reverie over a lengthening vista of years, we certainly count as among the happiest days of life those spent thus under canvas—whether on the sierras and marismas of Spain, on high field or dark forest in Scandinavia, or on Afric’s blazing veld.
Should some remarks (here or elsewhere in this book) appear self-contradictory the reason will be found rather in our inadequate expression than in any confusion of idea. We love Spain primarily because she is wild and waste; but, loving her, are naturally desirous that she should advance to that position among nations that is her due. Such material development, nevertheless, need not—and will not—imply the total destruction of her wild beauties. Development on those lines would not consist with the peculiar genius of the Spanish race, and, while we trust the development will come, we fear no such collateral results. Take, for instance, the corn-lands. There the great bustard is alike the index and the price of vast, unwieldy farms unfenced and but half tilled, remote from rail, road, or market. That condition we neither expect nor hope to see exchanged for smug fields with a network of railways. For “three acres and a cow” is not the line of Spanish regeneration; it is rather a claptrap catch-word of politicians—a murrain on the lot of them!
True, the plan seems to answer in Denmark, and if the Danes are satisfied, well and good—that is no business of ours. But no such mathematical and Procrustean restriction of vital energies and ambitions will subserve our British race, nor the Spanish. In Spanish sierra may the howl of the wolf at dawn never be replaced by blast from factory siren, nor the curling blue smoke of the charcoal-burner in primeval forest be abolished in favour of black clouds belching from bristling chimneys that pierce a murky sky. Either in such circumstance would be misplaced.
Similarly, when the engineer shall have been turned loose in the Spanish marismas, he can, beyond all doubt, destroy them for ever. His straight lines and intersecting canals, hideous in utilitarian rectitude, would right soon demolish that glory of lonely desolation—those leagues of marshland, samphire, and glittering lucio. And all for nothing! Since the desecration will not “pay” financially—the reason we give in detail elsewhere—and you sacrifice for a shadow some of the grandest bits of wild nature that yet survive—the finest length and breadth of utter abandonment that still enrich a humdrum Europe. Should “progress” only advance on these lines no scrap of that continent will be left to wanderer in the wilds—no spot where clanging skeins of wild-geese serry the skies, and the swish of ten thousand wigeon be heard overhead; or that marvellous iridescence—as of triple flame—the passing of a flight of flamingoes, be enjoyed.[6]
That national progress and development may come, for Spain’s sake, we earnestly pray. But does there exist inherent reason why progress, in itself, should always come to ruin natural and racial beauties? Progress seems nowadays to be misunderstood as a synonym for uniformity—and uniformity to a single type. Disciples of the cult of insensate haste, of self-assertion and advertisement, have pretty well conquered the civilised world; but in Spain they find no foothold, and we glory to think they never will. Spain will never be “dragooned” into a servile uniformity. There remain many, among whom we count our humble selves, who bow no knee to the modern Baal, and who (while conceding to the “hustling” crowd not one iota of their pretensions to fuller efficiency in any shape or form) are proud to find fascination in simplicity, a solace in honest purpose and in old-world styles of life—right down (if you will) to its inertia.
Yes, may progress come, yet leave unchanged the innate courtesy, the dignity and independence of rural Spain—unspoilt her sierras and glorious heaths aromatic of myrtle and mimosa, alternating with natural woods of ilex and cork-oak—self-sown and park-like, carpeted between in spring-time with wondrous wealth of wild flowers. There is nothing incongruous in such aspiration. Incongruity rather comes in with misappreciation of the fitness of things, as when a coal-mine is planked down in the midst of sylvan beauties, to save some hypothetic penny-a-ton (as per Prospectus); where pellucid streams are polluted with chemical filth and vegetation blasted by noisome fumes; or where God’s fairest landscapes are ruined by forests of hideous smoke-stacks.
If vandalisms such as these be progress then we prefer Spain as she is.
A Note on the Spanish Fauna