One must admit that there are pleasanter ways to be awakened. I looked in the faces of my travelling-companions with an expression of consternation, which made them all burst into a shout of laughter. Then they explained that at every railway-station there are vendors of knives and daggers who offer tourists their wares, just as the boys offer newspapers and refreshments in our country. Assured that my life was safe, I bought my scarecrow—five francs; a splendid dagger for a villain in a tragedy, with an ornamented handle, inscriptions on the blade, and a sheath of embroidered velvet; and I put it in my pocket, thinking that I might find it useful in Italy to settle difficulties with my publishers.
The vendor must have had fifty of those knives in a great red sash tied around his waist. Other travellers bought them, the civil guards complimented one of my neighbors on the good selection he had made; the boys cried, "Buy me one too!" The mammas answered, "We will buy you a bigger one some other time." "O happy Spain!" I exclaimed, and thought with horror of our barbarous laws, which forbid the innocent amusement of a little cold steel.
We crossed La Mancha, the celebrated La Mancha, the immortal theatre of the adventures of Don Quixote. It is such a place as I imagined—wide, bare plains, long tracts of sandy soil, here and there a windmill, a few wretched villages, lonely lanes, and forsaken huts. On seeing these places I felt that vague sense of melancholy which steals over me as I read the book of Cervantes, and repeated to myself what I always say on reading it: "This man cannot make one laugh without also making one's tears flow as the laughter dies away."
Don Quixote is a sad and sombre figure: his madness is a lament; his life is the history of the dreams, illusions, awakenings, and aberrations of each of us; the struggle of reason with imagination, of truth with falsehood, of the ideal with the real. We all have something of Don Quixote in our nature; we all mistake windmills for giants; we are all now and then spurred on by the impulse of enthusiasm, only to be driven back by the laugh of scorn; we are each a mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous; we all feel bitterly and profoundly the eternal conflict between the grandeur of our aspirations and the impotence of our powers. O beautiful dreams of childhood and youth! Generous impulses to consecrate our life to the defence of virtue and justice, fond imaginations of dangers faced, of adventurous struggles, of magnanimous deeds, and sublime loves, fallen one by one, like the petals of a flower, in the narrow and uneventful paths of life! To what new life have they arisen in our soul, and what vague thoughts and profound inspirations have we derived from thee, O generous and hapless cavalier of the sad figure!
We arrived at Argamasilla de Alba, where Don Quixote was born and died, and where poor Cervantes, the tax-gatherer of the great priory of San Juan, was arrested by angry debtors and imprisoned in a house which is said to be still in existence, and where he probably conceived the plan of his romance. We passed near the village of Val de Peñas, which gives its name to one of the most exquisite wines of Spain—dark, tingling, exhilarating, the only one, forsooth, which permits the foreigner from the North to indulge in copious libations at his meals; and finally we arrived at Santa Cruz de Mudela, a village famous for its manufactories of navajas (knives and razors), near which the way begins to slope gently upward toward the mountain.
The sun had risen, the women and children had left the carriage, and a number of peasants, officers, and toreros had entered on their way to Seville. One saw in that small space a variety of costume which would not be seen even in an Italian market-place—the pointed caps of the peasants of the Sierra Morena, the red trousers of the soldiers, the great sombreros of the picadores, the shawls of the gypsies, the mantles of the Catalans, Toledo blades hanging from the walls, capes, belts, and finery of all the colors of a harlequin.
The train entered the rocks of the Sierra Morena, which separate the valley of the Guadiana from that of the Guadalquivir, famous for the songs of poets and the deeds of brigands. The railway runs at times between two walls of rock sheer from the very peaks, so high that to see the top one must put one's head all the way out of the window and turn one's face up, as if to look at the roof of the carriage. Sometimes the rocks are farther away and rise one above the other, the first like enormous broken stones, the last straight and sharp like bold towers rising upon measureless bastions; between them a mass of boulders cut into teeth, steps, crests, and humps, some almost hanging in the air, others separated by deep caverns and frightful precipices, presenting a confusion of curious forms, of fantastic suggestions of houses, gigantic figures and ruins, and offering at every step a thousand outlines and surprising appearances; and, together with this infinite variety of form, an infinite variety of color, shadow, dancing and changing light. For long distances, to the right, to the left, and overhead, one sees nothing but stone, without a house, a path, or a patch of ground where a man could set his foot, and, as one advances, rocks, ravines, and precipices: everything grows larger, deeper, and higher until one reaches the summit of the Sierra, where the solemn majesty of the spectacle provokes a cry of wonder.
The train stopped a few minutes, and all the travellers put their heads out of the window.
"Here," said one in a loud voice,—"here Cardenio jumped from rock to rock to do penance for his sins" (Cardenio, one of the most remarkable characters in Don Quixote, who jumped about among the rocks of the Sierra in his shirt to do penance for his sins). "I wish," continued the traveller, "that Sagasta might have to do the same."
They all laughed, and began to find, each one on his own account, some political enemy upon whom in imagination he might inflict this punishment: one proposed Serrano, another Topete, and a third another, and so on, until in a few minutes, if their desires had been realized, one might have seen the entire Sierra filled with ministers, generals, and deputies in their shirts skipping from crag to crag like the famous rock of Alessandro Manzoni.