Ferdinand hurried his forces across the river in pursuit. His own army, as usual in medieval days, could not be maintained at fighting strength for many weeks together, and he was now nowise loth “to put it to the touch to gain or lose it all.” He came up with his foe a little distance short of Toro. Mendoza was leading; and headed the charge against the troops of his brother prelate the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo, with a breezy vehemence worthy of old Picton at Vitória, “Come on, you villains! I’m as good a Cardinal as he!” The weary, overmarched Portuguese were unable to sustain the onset; and their only retreat to Toro lay over the narrow patchwork bridge. Alfonso himself escaped, but there was no further fighting. The Catholic kings commemorated their victory by the erection of the great church of San Juan de los Reyes at Toledo, and the revolted nobles hastened to “come in” upon the best available terms.{152}
CHAPTER VIII
SALAMANCA
SPAIN is far poorer in lakes than in mountains: and the deficiency has compensations, as it discourages the breeding of flies. But it offers a rare opportunity for the disquisitions of a militant geologist, for the lakes must have swamped all other physical features in the days when the hills were young. Liebana and the Vierzo have been already conceded, but he regards these as drops in the ocean. Now he claims the whole basin of the Duero from the Cordillera of Cantabria to the Sierras of Grédos and Guadarrama, from the highlands of la Demanda and Moncayo to the rocky barrier on the frontiers of Portugal, through which the pent-up waters at length cleft their passage to the sea.
Now the dry bed of an ancient lake is not in itself an ideal foundation for a landscape; particularly when its original conformation is remorse{153}lessly emphasised by the entire omission of fences and of trees. The mud which formed the bottom has settled unevenly; and the rivers have eroded it into yawning channels, whose steep sides (so prominent at Toro) are scarped and furrowed into myriads of wrinkles by the scouring of the winter rains. The district is not unfertile, for it is a land of corn and wine and oil-olive, and water may be found at no great depth; yet the surface soil is parched and dusty, the villages few and far between, and great tracts of the higher ground consist of untilled heaths where the ilex and cistus make their profit out of the heritage unclaimed by man.
It scarcely seems an interesting district for a walking tour, yet we were barely started before we fell in with one who thought otherwise. He was English, of course:—mad as usual, despite his Spanish domicile; and we fraternised with him at a wayside fountain where he recognised us as compatriots (by our Spanish) directly we saluted him. Our programmes had something in common, but his was by far the more onerous, and none but the veriest devotee of the Wanderlust could have ventured to undertake it without some inward qualms. A long solitary tramp, and mostly{154} through desolate country, over mountain and moorland, from Toro, all the way to Valéncia del Cid. True, he was a naturalist and an antiquary, and could speak the language like a native; yet, if he was proof against boredom, he must have been very good company to himself. It is not every traveller who could rely so exclusively on his own resources. The ideal tramp, like Don Quixote’s ideal knight-errant, needs to be equipped with “most of the sciences in the world.”
Fortunately the cyclist’s self-sufficiency is not tested nearly so highly. He moves both further and faster than the pedestrian,—covering two days’ march in a single morning’s ride. For him the great Spanish plains are shorn of half their monotony; and if he loves Spain he may blame me for hinting at monotony even here. He finds something strangely exhilarating in the gorgeous sunshine, the dry crisp air, the unrivalled immensity of landscape, and the all-pervading silence, so grateful after London’s maddening din. Spain is pre-eminently a land of ample horizons, of panoramas, and bird’s-eye views. The hollow conformation of the plains gives the widest of scope to the vision, and the pale blue peaks which enclose them may be as much as one hundred{155} miles away. Standing on the summit of the Guadarrama passes, we were wellnigh able to persuade ourselves that the peaks just above us might disclose a view extending from the Cantabrian mountains even to the Sierra Nevada;—all the kingdoms of Spain and the glory of them at a single coup-d’œil.
The purity of the atmosphere indeed is downright bewildering, and our first preconceptions of distances went wandering wildly astray. Even as far on our way as Madrid, a fortnight later, we found that we had not yet been schooled to credit the milestones against the evidence of our eyes. Madrid lay there before us: we could tell every house, every window. It was absurd to try and convince us that it was ten kilometres away! Yet we passed nine stony compurgators ere we reached the Toledo gateway; and even our own cyclometers professed themselves “all of a tale.” The illusion is accentuated by the great distances which separate the hamlets, and the absence of any intervening landmarks on the bare red plains between.
Meanwhile the details of the landscape are far from uninteresting. The heath flowers are varied and plentiful and the butterflies brilliant in the{156} extreme. The whole air rings with the yelling of the cicadas or the croaking of the frogs in the rare and starveling streams. Little brown lizards are numerous even in the mountains, but here on the plains is a more imposing breed; great green monsters fifteen inches in length, who lie out sunning themselves in the dust of the roadway, and scuttle wildly to cover as our shadows sweep silently by. The natives eat them;—so possibly does the tourist also, for many are the unsuspected ingredients which are involved in the meshes of a Spanish stew.
The birds also, such as there are, seem exclusively decorative specimens. First among these are the hoopoes, with their black and white barred plumage, and their feather crowns, the gift of Solomon the Wise. They have a strong fellow-feeling for the cyclist, and flit from tree to tree along the road beside him with the most engaging cameraderie. If they get too far ahead they will perch and await him, cocking their crests and hoo-poo-pooing encouragement; and once more resume their swift drooping flight as soon as he draws level. Should these lines meet their eyes they are assured that their companionship was much appreciated. The little watery gullies where the frogs live are{157} generally picketted by the storks. Magpies too are alarmingly plentiful in the wild stony districts along the feet of the mountains. Seven at a time is all very well,—at least one knows Who to expect then,—but what grislier horror is portended by thirteen? A Grand Inquisitor?