We had jolted through wine-making Valdepeñas, where the red juice of the grape seems to spout from a grey valley of stones; we had passed, in the quaint market-place, the posada which Don Quixote knew; we had bounced through Santa Cruz de Mudela, with its fine old fifteenth century church, and had seen its famous and gaily coloured garters exposed for sale in the shops; and now we were far from towns or villages, out in the country.
Luckily, everybody was ready for lunch, and Pilar and the Cherub had had the forethought to order things which would not have occurred to Dick or me. Not far away, on the crest of a hill-billow, stood a road-mender's house, with an outside, adobe oven like a huge beehive. We crawled to it, travelling on the collapsed tyre, and were served by a delightful brown family; served as if we had been the King and his suite who had lunched (so said the brown family) on that spot a few weeks ago. Out came the chairs which the King and his friends had sat in, plates and glasses from which the King and his friends had drunk; and the simple people derived a childlike pleasure from dwelling on the episode.
[pg 193] As before, the news of our presence seemed to flash through the air and bring, in the same mysterious way, an audience out of empty space. Pilar said that the people who came were in reality wild birds, seen by our sophisticated eyes in the form of human beings; and as if they had been wild birds, we coaxed them, till they trusted us and fed with us, drinking from our wineskin the blood of the Spanish grape, almost innocent of alcohol. The soft Spanish language, as it fell from their lips, was rich as the taste of that Spanish wine on the tongue, and stirred in my heart a pride of kinsmanship.
While we others lunched, Ropes jacked up the Gloria and changed the inner tube, pausing now and then to munch a sandwich or swallow a draught of wine with an unruffled air characteristic of him. When the road-mender mentioned that four bandidos had been captured in the morning by the civil guard, on the road along which we had passed, his expression did not change by the twitching of a muscle. Indeed, he looked equal to disposing of half a dozen brigands without the aid of a single guardia civile.
After forty minutes by the wayside, we set off to penetrate farther into that melancholy country which Cervantes loved, and almost at once were in the Venta de Cordeñas, that wide and stony waste where Don Quixote rode to do his penance. The gayest spirits must have been dashed by the gloom of the knight's self-imposed prison, and mine were not improved. I had a disquieting impression that Monica's voice, calling an appeal, came echoing from the mountain walls.
Of course, there was nothing in it, except superstitious nonsense of which I ought to be ashamed; yet I could not shut my ears to her voice, which seemed to cry the words her fingers once had written: “Don't desert me! Don't leave me alone!”
Always the echo followed, as the car mounted higher on the slopes of the Sierra Morena, and such glories of Spain opened out before our eyes as we had not seen yet, even in the splendid Gorge of Pancorbo.
[pg 194] Crest above crest, great chains of mountains cut the smooth sapphire of the sky; and as we serpentined into their closer grasp, each loop of the Alpine road gave a new and more fantastic combination of rock and stream. The car was boring into a gorge of astounding sublimity, a hammer-stroke of Vulcan which had cleft the mountain and left behind chips of copper, of gold, of silver, and a rich sprinkling of precious gems.
As the god's hammer fell, out of the ruin it made were shaped marvels of form; Olympian castles and giant statues, images of such savage creatures as roamed devastating the earth in days when man was in his childhood.
Even the calm countenance of Ropes was transfigured by this burst of splendour. “Makes you forget that roads can be bad, and tyres go wrong, doesn't it, sir?” he said to me. “I could drive through places like these, day and night on end, without food or drink, never knowing if I was done up.”