Mérida has a bridge built by the Emperor Trajan. And it has ruins of a very stately aqueduct standing in wheat and poppy fields. This is built of stone and brick ranged in regular lines, and though only about a hundred feet high, is truly majestic, the entrancing touch being given by the hundreds of storks who have built nests on the top of the arches. Some of our little friends had accompanied us through the fields to the aqueduct, and when we took a final ramble through the town, many were the smiling greetings, "Buenas Tardes." Mérida is too small to have visitors pass a day there without making friends among its courteous people.
We took an evening train on to Cáceres ten miles away, for its hotels sounded inviting; and a second happy day, a holy and tranquil Domingo de Resurrección, gave us another memory of Estremadura. Cáceres is an unspoiled mediæval town climbing up a crag, just such a place as Albrecht Dürer loved to paint. It is very individual. From the plaza with its acacia trees we mounted the steep grass-grown streets, past one baronial mansion after another, with old escutcheoned doorways blazoned with plumed helmet and shield. In one of them, the house of the Golfines, los Reyes Católicos stayed on a visit. Nowhere in the world save in Spain could such a bit of the Middle Ages stand untouched and unnoticed, giving one that thrilling sensation of the traveler, the meeting unheralded with a very rare thing. The views caught between the granite mansions were lovely, for Cáceres lies in the most cultivated district of the county. Across the river rose another steep crag, turned into a Way of Calvary, with a picturesque church crowning it.
The town has some excellent hotels, and we were well-fed and slept well for five pesetas a day in one of them. Easter Sunday morning I awoke to the sound of bleating animals, and looking out, there at every doorway was tied a tiny white or black lamb, with a bunch of soft greens to nibble on. It is the custom for each family to have this symbol of peace and innocence on the Christian Passover. All day long the children played with them, and toward evening when the toy-like legs trembled with fatigue, the little boys carried the lambs across their shoulders as shepherds do. In the midst of patriarchal ways, we kept congratulating ourselves that we had escaped the noisy city to the south, whose Easter crowds were pouring in eager excitement to the first bull-fight of the year; it was the thought of the scene being enacted in Seville that made us a little unjust to the city where so happy a winter had been passed.
After Mass in a gray old church on the hill, a procession formed to carry the pasos of Cáceres. Each house was hung with the national colors, and on the balconies tall men of the hidalgo type and proud Spanish ladies (Madrid has not drained the provincial places of their leading families) knelt respectfully as the cortège passed. The statues were simple and poor, they were borne by pious peasants, and the silent crowd dropped to its knees on the pavement with a prayer. Not a tourist was there, save two who felt so in sympathy with old Spain that they disclaimed the title. To think that the gorgeous materialistic pasos of Seville had once begun in this way! Easter afternoon made as pastoral a memory as the hours in Mérida. We walked out with the people to the hill of the Stations of the Cross. Life seemed a happy and normal thing when all, old and young, grandee and peasant, gave courteous greeting to those who passed; also it was a joy to hear pure Castilian after the somewhat slovenly Andalusian dialect.
However, the week in Estremadura was not to end on an idyllic note. We attempted an excursion beyond our strength and got well punished; the moral is, avoid all diligence journeys in Spain, they are only for those who have the nerves of oxen. The real reason why we had come into this little-visited province was because that old emperor born in Italica near Seville, Trajan, the bridge builder, had in the year A.D. 105 put up one of his bridges at Alcántara, a town now on the Portuguese frontier. Such a reason sounds slightly absurd, but many who read certain descriptions of the bridge must feel the same impulse to hunt it up. Richard Ford calls it one of the wonders of Spain, "the work of men when there were giants on the earth," worth going five hundred miles out of one's way to see as it rises in lonely grandeur two hundred feet above the Tagus River. So it no doubt appeared to the English traveler who stumbled on it eighty years ago, for it was then an unrestored, picturesque ruin, probably unused since one of its arches had been blown up by the English in the Peninsula War. At any rate, it was such glowing words that enticed us into the wilderness of Estremadura.
It is strange in Spain how little they know of districts that lie at no appreciable distance. At the inn at Cáceres we asked for information about Alcántara, and they could give none. The landlord himself came over to our table to look at us in astonishment. "But there is nothing to see there!" he assured us, too polite to ask the question that showed in his voice,—why were two ladies seeking a dismal spot such as Alcántara? I positively blushed as I answered there was a bridge. "A bridge!" He beat a hasty retreat to his wife in the office, where their merriment burst out. The next day he told us, that having inquired, he found we could take the train to Arroyo, an hour away, whence a diligence ran in a short time to Alcántara. We left the train at Arroyo, and on the other side of the station found the smallest diligence ever seen, so packed already with big countrymen that we could just force our unwilling selves in. When we were well started, we found to our consternation that we did not reach Alcántara before ten hours, the distance being about thirty miles. Una legua una hora runs the saying, and this part of the world is ruled by its wise old proverbs. Too late to turn back, we tried to make the best of it. When in each of the desolate villages long pauses were made, we got out to visit the market or church. In the first village the altar was dressed with coarsest but freshest linen. Artistic pewter, unconscious of its charm, held the water and wine, and a score of sturdy young peasants came in from selling in the plaza outside, knelt on the very steps of the altar, then having made their serious preparation, each bashfully approached a white-haired priest who sat there all market day in readiness to hear confessions. The dismallest corner of Spain has compensations.
The first ten miles of the journey reminded me of New England, with its stone walls and semi-cultivated land. The next ten miles were indeed the proverbial desolation of Estremadura; hardly an inhabitant was to be found on those bleak hills. We had stumbled on one of the three days of the yearly fair of Brozas, so we passed flocks of sheep, cattle with a royal spread of horns, and dozens of the nervous Andalusian horses. Even automobiles went by, and one Portuguese noble drove abreast three truly glorious cream-white mules. Seeing them, one could understand how a mule here can cost more than a horse. The fair was held in meadows outside the town, and it looked so animated that we should have liked to stop, but no time was given us. A mile outside Brozas we found we had to change from the tiny diligence, a primitive enough way of travel, and to continue the remaining miles to Alcántara in the mail cart, which consisted of a board laid across two wheels, and that one seat had to be shared with the driver. Fuming did no good, not another vehicle would take us. The cold wind howled across the treeless upland, our umbrellas could not break its biting force, and we were far too thinly clad from the warm Seville winter; I could feel the chill seize on me that was to lead to a month's bad illness. The final touch was when the young scamp who drove the mail cart found it impossible to forego his eternal cigarette, which, despite remonstrance, he smoked continuously. That evening (we had left Cáceres in the pitch dark at 5 A.M.) we were set down at an inn whose spacious rooms and staircase told of former prosperity, but so shrunken was its hospitality that it could offer nothing fit to eat; yet, curiously enough, the old landlady made the best coffee I have tasted in Europe. We kept her busy grinding and boiling it.
Alcántara is one of the most God-forsaken places in the world. Pigs walk the ill-kept streets, and the vast buildings of the monkish-knights who formerly guarded the frontier pass are crumbling into such universal ruin that the lanes are a mass of broken rubbish. They are not romantic ruins, but depressing and almost terrifying. When we climbed down the precipitous hill that led to the bridge, our shoes were cut to pieces by the flinty stones.
And the bridge, that lode-star of our pilgrimage, worth going five hundred miles to see! We thought with exasperation of the sixty we were wasting on it. No doubt Trajan did build it eighteen centuries ago, but they have chipped off the beautiful gray toning of ages, filled in with mortar the boulders after they had stood unaided till our time, and made a modern boulevard from Portugal. All solitude and sublimity are well eliminated from the scene. We sat on the benches of that banal little park and glared at the disappointing thing. The Tagus, Lope de Vega's hidalgo Tajo, was here a low stream, yellow with mud, flowing beneath bleak, unimposing hills. The bridge, in spite of its two hundred feet of height, did not appear as high as the aqueduct at Mérida, an effect due probably to the arches standing on stilts. And it may sound blatant, but a memory of once passing under that superb thing the Brooklyn Bridge, at dawn, made this ancient monument suffer in comparison. The ludicrousness of our having traveled out of our way to see this sight struck us at last, and when we recalled the Cáceres landlord's astonishment, and that of Brazilian friends at Seville who had tried to persuade us our Estremadura plan was quite mad, we too burst into a hearty laugh, soon sobered at the prospect of the next day's weary return to Arroyo. We climbed back to the inn and dined on glasses of coffee.
The following morning, after some more glasses of our only modus vivendi, we explored the decayed town. In it is a pearl of architecture built by the Benedictine knights in 1506, the now ruined church of San Benito, with lofty slender piers, one of the most gracefully proportioned of semi-Renaissance things. Truly was the transition from Gothic to Renaissance a most harmonious moment in Spanish architecture. This interesting discovery could not do away with the fever and cold of the awful drive back to Arroyo. Such petty miseries are best passed over. More dead than alive, late the second night we reached again the comfortable hotel at Cáceres, where we were glad to pause a few days to pick up strength to push on.