“A SADDLE FOR FEMININITY.”
CHAPTER VIII
Fancy bread and sun-worship—Prehistoric sandals—A bower of oleanders—An Andalucian St. John—Fashion and footpaths—The mauvais pas—The midday rest—A mountain storm—Thunder, lightning, and flood—Kind-hearted donkey-drivers—A welcome shelter.
All too soon my allotted time came to an end, and I found myself at seven o’clock of a glorious September morning bidding farewell to my kind friends, as I started for a ride of 30 kilometres over the mountains to the railway station at Morón de la Frontera. My host as a parting gift presented me with some curious bread of his own making, in what is called a caracól design—a primitive sun-symbol of Egyptian origin, had he only known it. I asked him where he got the design, and he said, “From his father: it was nothing, but as I liked cosas antiguas (old things) it had occurred to him to make it.” I have since found that this form of “little bread” is peculiar to Algodonales, and my parting gift is preserved in a glass case with other interesting survivals of sun-worship in the Tartessus of the Greeks, the Baetica of the Romans, and the Andalucia of to-day.
This was one of the longest and most beautiful rides I have ever taken, as also the most adventurous. I had indeed cut my visit short by a few days because there were indications that the weather was likely to break up, and this mountain path—often no more than a goat-track—is impassable after rain, when parts of it may be washed away into the river Guadálporcón hundreds of feet below.
We climbed up and up for a couple of hours, until vines and olive groves were left behind, and forests of evergreen oaks, covered with acorns, took their place. This oak, which grows almost up to the line where snow sometimes lies till June, is only second in value to the olive on mountain estates, for it costs very little in labour, and its acorns are the best food that can be given to the droves of brown long-haired pigs which haunt these lofty solitudes.
On we went, sometimes up the hill, sometimes down under the shade of the oaks, sometimes along a water-course through thickets of brambles and pink oleanders, which in this climate grow almost into trees when their roots can reach a stream. Over one such thicket a wild vine, growing from a rock above, had spread its tangled branches, and the goatherds had cut and trained it to form a shelter impervious to the sun. A flock of goats was browsing around, guarded by a man and a boy wearing wide straw hats, blue cotton jackets, and short trousers with striped socks and sandals made of twisted esparto grass, just like those in use three thousand years or more ago among their Tartessian progenitors. They lay half asleep under their bower of vine leaves and oleander blossom, but rose at our approach and insisted on my sitting down to rest in the shade, while they chatted outside in the sun with José. It was so cool and pretty that I would gladly have stopped there for the noonday siesta, but it was still too early for that, and we had many miles yet to travel.
A cry of distress from a nannygoat broke the sunny calm round us, and the boy ran up the hill like a hare to see what had happened to his charges. The last I saw as I rode away was the little goat-herd standing on a rock far above us, waving a hand in adieu, with an injured kid slung round his neck. One constantly meets with incidents of this kind, and of course one is inevitably reminded of the boy St. John with his lamb. In a recent country fair I saw two men taking turns to carry a full-sized goat in their arms, she having somehow hurt a leg on the journey into the town. It was less picturesque than a kid on the shoulders, but the spirit was the same; for the goat could still walk, so that not necessity but kindness dictated the action.