CHAPTER XVII
LA MANCHA
THE LAGOONS OF DAIMIEL
IMMEDIATELY to the north of our “Home-Province” of Andalucia, but separated therefrom by the Sierra Moréna, stretch away the uplands of La Mancha—the country of Don Quixote. The north-bound traveller, ascending through the rock-gorges of Despeñaperros, thereat quits the mountains and enters on the Manchegan plateau. A more dreary waste, ugly and desolate, can scarce be imagined. Were testimony wanting to the compelling genius of Cervantes, in very truth La Mancha itself would yield it.
Yet it is wrong to describe La Mancha as barren. Rather its central highlands present a monotony of endless uninteresting cultivation. League-long furrows traverse the landscape, running in parallel lines to utmost horizon, or weary the eye by radiating from the focal point as spokes in a wheel. But never a break or a bush relieves one’s sight, never a hedge or a hill, not a pool, stream, or tree in a long day’s journey. Oh, it is distressing, wherever seen—in Old World or New—that everlasting cultivation on the flat. True, it produces the necessary fruits of the earth—here (to wit) corn and wine.
Farther north, where the Toledan mountains loom blue over the western horizon, La Mancha refuses to produce anything.
The unsympathetic earth, for 100 miles a sterile hungry crust, stony and sun-scorched, obtrudes an almost hideous nakedness, its dry bones declining to be clad, save in flints or fragments of lava and splintered granite. Wherever nature is a trifle less austere, a low growth of dwarf broom and helianthemum at least serves to vary the dreariness of dry prairie-grass. There, beneath the foothills of the wild Montes de Toledo, stretch whole regions where thorn-scrub and broken belts of open wood vividly recall the scenery of equatorial Africa—we might be traversing the “Athi Plains” instead of European lands. Evergreen oak and wild-olive replace mimosa and thorny acacia—one almost expects to see the towering heads of giraffes projecting above the grey-green bush. In both cases there is driven home that living sense of arid sterility, the same sense of desolation—nay, here even more so—since there is lacking that wondrous wild fauna of the other. No troops of graceful gazelles bound aside before one’s approach; no herds of zebra or antelope adorn the farther veld; no galloping files of shaggy gnus spurn the plain. A chance covey of redlegs, a hoopoe or two, the desert-loving wheatears—birds whose presence ever attests sterility—a company of azure-winged magpies chattering among the stunted ilex, or a woodchat—that is all one may see in a long day’s ride.
Another feature common to both lands—and one abhorrent to northern eye—is the absence of water, stagnant or current. Never the glint of lake or lagoon, far less the joyous murmur of rippling burn, rejoice eye or ear in La Mancha.
Alas, that to us is denied the synthetic sense! In vain we scan Manchegan thicket for compensating beauties, for the Naiads and Dryads with which Cervantes’ creative spirit peopled the wilderness; no vision of lovely Dorotheas laving ivory limbs of exquisite mould in sylvan fountain rewards our searching (but too prosaic) gaze—that may perhaps be explained by the contemporary absence of any such fountains. Nor have other lost or love-lorn maidens, Lucindas or Altisidoras from enchanted castle, aided us to add one element of romance to purely faunal studies. Castles, it is true, adorn the heights or crown a distant skyline; nor are Dulcineas of Toboso extinct or even in the posada at Daimiel, while excellent specimens graced the twilight paséo of Ciudad Real or reclined beneath the orange-groves of its alameda.