We met few people in those beautiful but desolate hills. José told me that in the course of a few weeks, when the acorns ripened, a number of families would come from the villages round and live in chozas during the harvest. The chozas of the Sierra are very different from those of the plains. They are built of stones laid dry one on the other, and roofed with esparto grass from the streams, and they almost always have some sort of a chimney, for the cold here on autumn nights and on wet days is considerable. But these stone-built huts can be made very snug and warm, by mortaring the walls within and roofing with something more durable than reed, and I can imagine no more delightful summer holiday than one spent in a well-made choza among these glorious mountains—provided that the choza lay within reach of a Tartessian castle or necropolis wherein to excavate in the intervals of enjoying the view.
The few people we did meet always appeared at inconvenient moments. A fat young lady riding a very small donkey with very wide jamugas, and carrying a beautiful flounced silk parasol, suddenly came into the picture half-way down a precipitous hill, so steep and so strewn with boulders that I, feeling discretion to be the better part of valour, had got off my donkey to walk. Indeed I very often did get off to walk downhill on that journey, for in many places I felt that the only way to avoid diving over the donkey’s head would be to hold on to his tail, and it seemed on the whole safer as well as more dignified to trust to my own feet. The young lady with the parasol was coming up as I went down, but I am sure she would have held on to the donkey’s tail any number of times rather than get off once had our situations been reversed, for I never saw a more confirmed expression of bland laziness than hers. She was too sleepy even to respond to the “Go with God” with which we greeted her, and that is a breach of good manners that nothing but the torpor of extreme fatness could condone. I am not very clear how we managed to pass her and her convoy of servants and baggage donkeys: I only remember that I had to climb on to the top of the nearest boulder and stand there for a long time to be out of the way while the train went by.
She was the daughter of a neighbouring landowner, who lived in a fine house built on the ruins of a castle round the spur of a hill to our left, as José informed me. He could not remember the name either of the family or the castle, and I was not particularly anxious to know either. What interested me was the notion of a rich landowner building himself a fine house on the slope of a hill to which no road could be made. It was for the olives and the cork trees, said José: that caballero owned thousands and thousands of them, and came out to the Sierra from Arcos with all his family to “take the mountain air” when the crops were coming in.
Our next rencontre was a more exciting one. We had to cross the side of a steep hill sloping sharply down to the river far below, by a path just wide enough for the donkey and the mule to put one foot before the other, and no more. This in itself would have been nothing, had the slope been clothed with vegetation like the rest of the mountain. But it was the “bad step” of the pass, José said, the place which after a storm even of summer rain is not only dangerous but impossible, for the hillside here is of a shaly sort of slate, and a very little water is enough to send the whole path slithering down to the river. It was perfectly safe now, said José, for there had been no rain for three months, and everything was dust-dry. But my honour would well understand, seeing the bad step with her own eyes, why he could not have attempted to take her the journey to Morón, much as he delighted in pleasing her, had the dreaded thunderstorm come up last night, as he had been a little afraid it might.
“My honour” did indeed understand, and looked back rather anxiously at the hills behind, where a lovely but ominous background of purple-blue clouds threw the gorgeous sunshine around us into strong relief. Did José think the storm would come up during the day? Had we not better press on towards some house where we could shelter if we were caught in the rain?
My honour must free herself from anxiety. In no case could we hasten here, where a false step would be fatal, and there was no house within many miles. And the storm was still distant, on the other side of San Cristóbal: may be, if God pleased, it would not overtake us; and at the worst we should be well over the pass before it came.
As a rule I tie the halter round my donkey’s neck and let it pick its own way, but here José led it, leaving the pack mule to follow as best it could. It was clear that he felt a little anxious, and he explained that some heavily loaded animal must have had a slip at one spot, where the path disappeared altogether, and we had to make a detour above. For some minutes we had heard a voice singing, and just at this point a lad riding a donkey appeared. That boy proceeded with the utmost nonchalance to make a new path across the loose shale, rather than take the trouble to go off the direct line as we had done. He shouted to his donkey, kicked it hard with his heels, encased in the usual esparto sandals with soles an inch thick, and took the dangerous bit at a trot! It was not done for effect, as one might have imagined, for he paid no attention at all to us, and we heard him gaily singing as he rode on, apparently unaware that he had risked a sudden and terrible death by his foolhardy performance.
After this our way led downwards, and at one o’clock, as the clouds seemed to have dispersed, we ventured to stop for a rest under two fine walnut trees which had sown themselves above the bank of the river, now beginning to assume respectable proportions, but still a good way below us. José unharnessed his animals, fixed up a sort of tent with the blanket from under my jamugas and the cloth from his mule, to give us shade, and after we had lunched he lay down with his head on my hold-all and I with mine on my riding-cushion, and we both slept soundly for over an hour. More than that we could not allow, he had said, if I was to catch the five o’clock train at Morón, for we were already behindhand owing to my frequent pauses to enjoy the scenery, and we still had a very long way to go.
While we slept the clouds came up, and I awoke to find a thundery suffocating heat in the air, the sun obscured, and not a breath of wind anywhere. José looked grave, and devoutly thanked God that we were over the pass. Had we been caught by this weather on the other side we should have had no alternative but to return to Algodonales, and the Señora would not have crossed this pass before next summer.
As he talked he was hurriedly saddling the animals and packing the lunch basket, etc., into the panniers, while I unstrapped my hold-all and got out umbrella and mackintosh, which undoubtedly I should very soon need.