Et dès qu'un zephir se lève
On frémit sur le carreau.
And yet, if a journey was a "fragment of hell," it is comforting to meet some very merry devils by the way. Quevedo,[115] for one, took his troubles lightly. Getting out of a bed in which his legs had been hanging over the end, he and three others left Linares for Condado in a conveyance drawn by ten mules. The road, he says, might have been the road to salvation, so narrow was it, so full of troubles, a purgatory in little. One hill seemed to be reserved for mule-hunting when the carriage had stuck in the mud.
It was February, too; February at its worst. On smaller provocation men have retired to madhouses. It seemed like sleeping in the coach; those who tried to walk pulled their legs out from where they had planted them without hose or shoes; one called out, "You down there, who's pulling off my boots?" After playing at dying for four hours, men arrived to release them from imprisonment, except one whose litter had given way and who was too full of bruises to move, and a clergyman who was missing altogether, the latest news of whom is that men were going round about the marshes calling out his name.
Dallam, too, has a tale to tell. His companions and himself, passing through Thrace, took a house to spend the night in, a two-roomed house, one room above the other. The lower was used as a cellar; a ladder outside led up to a balcony, the balcony to a door, the door to their sleeping room, which was lighted by one small hole. Now, that evening they had gone for a walk and seen "divers sorts of vermin of which we have not the like in England," and, remembering that they had nothing but boards to lie on, gathered plenty of a thick soft moss for pillows. But half an hour after laying their heads down, they discovered that these pillows harboured one more sort of vermin "the which did bite far worse than fleas," with the result that even when the pillows had been thrown away and the room swept, still they couldn't go to sleep. So Mr. Glover (afterwards Sir Thomas Glover), who had dwelt long in the country, told them stories about the native vermin, "snakes, adders, and sarpentes." Gradually some dropped off to sleep; the others ceased talking. But one Mr. Baylye had occasion to leave the room; the door was narrow, the wind strong; "so that when he came into the gallery, the wind blew the garter round about his leg; it was a great silk garter and by the force of the wind it fettered his legs both fast together. Our talk a little before of adders, snakes, and sarpentes was yet in his remembrance and the place near where much vermin was. He thought they swarmed about him, but about his legs he thought he was sure of a sarpente, so that, suddenly, he cried out with all the voice he had, 'A sarpente, a sarpente, a sarpente,' and was so frighted he could not find the door to get in, but made a great bustling and noise in the gallery. We that were in the house did think that he said, 'Assaulted, assaulted,' for before night we doubted that some treachery would happen unto us in that town. There was fifteen of us in the room—and it was but a little room. Every man took his sword in his hand, one ready to spoil another, not any one knowing the cause. One that could not find his sword, got to the chimney and trying to climb up, down fell a part of the chimney on his head; another that was suddenly awakened, struck about him with his sword and beat down the shelf and broke the pitchers and platters which stood thereon, the room being very dark, for it was about midnight. Our Janizary, who should have been our guard and have protected us from all dangers, took up a loose board whereon he lay, and slipped down into the vault. As we were all thus amazed, at the last Mr. Baylye found the way in at the door. When Mr. Glover saw him, he said, 'How now, man, what is the matter, who do you see?' Mr. Baylye was even breathless with fear, crying out and struggling to get in at the door; at last he said, 'A sarpente, a sarpente,' troubled him. When Mr. Glover heard him say so, he went to the door, and there he found Mr. Baylye's garter ready to be carried away with the wind."
Another who was more frightened than hurt was the Jesuit Possevino, on his way to Muscovy. Tired out with a day on the main road thither from Poland, spent handling the axe to clear the road of vegetation, dragging the waggons by hand, sometimes carrying them on their shoulders, he and his lay down to sleep (in the rain) and were kept awake by Cossacks in among the trees imitating the sounds of wild beasts to terrify them. Pleasanter was it for those in Hungary, where the custom was, when strangers came in sight, to bake some bread fresh in the cinders that served as ovens, and send it to their lodgings by the youngest and prettiest girls, who gathered themselves into a ring and danced round the visitors singing.
Yet another picture is of a Frenchman whose way lay through the Ardennes in time of war; he was journeying on business. Tales were plentiful of bands of peasants in the forests, killing passers-by without distinction. One evening he makes his escape from four men, takes a by-road where the highroad was in particularly bad repute; snow begins to fall, the wind is dead against him; his by-road leads him cross-country, which founders his horse; he sits down on a tree-trunk, back to the wind, and thinks how his brother and four sisters are providing him with nephews and nieces who will never give a guess at the troubles he has gone through in making a fortune, but will take it for granted that they are to have a share of it. The nephews, perhaps, would have told him that it was lucky for him he was in the Ardennes and not outside St. Malo at so late an hour, with the twelve or twenty-four, whichever it was,[116] savage English dogs waiting for him, who were sent out every night with their keeper to guard the town, "killing and tearing any living creature they encounter withal." In 1627 a man did die so. Even without the dogs, at St. Malo or anywhere else, it was troublesome, or worse, to arrive late. Gates were closed, and kept closed, and this applied, of course, to seafarers as well; one tourist making for Monaco, another for Genoa, had for that reason to sleep out in an open boat. In towns where a strict "Reformed" sect had the upper hand, this waiting might have to be done in daytime also; gates as well as shops being shut during sermon-time. But even supposing he found means to enter at night, it might be wiser not to take the offer, seeing that he would find himself wandering about in a pitch-dark maze of dirty alleys during the hours when it was permissible for the inhabitants to throw "slops" out of window.
BENIGHTED 'SIGHT'-SEERS