The Alcalde, although of noble birth, was very old and had not been to Court for so long that he had even forgotten how to address his King. He began by taking the seat of honour in the carriage, and when the King asked him the depth of the Tajo—that tremendous cleft in the rock through which flows the Guadelevín—he replied that he did not know. The Tajo is the pride and glory of all good Rondeños, for the gorge has a sheer drop of between five hundred and six hundred feet, and great was the indignation of the town when the Alcalde’s indifference to those all-important local statistics became known.
The King was driven up to the new hotel, the Reina Victoria, on the crest of a hill where the Tajo opens out into a fertile valley. And here the Alcalde seems to have set his royal guest down and left him to his own devices, without so much as having a glass of wine set before him.
Later in the day a poor muleteer, toiling up the winding path which leads from the flour mills below to the “old town” on the top of the hill, was accosted by a strange young gentleman who, with a companion, was beginning the ascent. No one is more responsive to a pleasant greeting than the Andalucian peasant, and the arriero at once slipped off his donkey in order to carry on the conversation more comfortably on foot.
“I suppose you gentlemen, being strangers, got a sight of the King this morning,” said he. “They say he is very simpático, and very good to the poor.”
“I am glad to hear that,” said one of the strangers, “but haven’t you seen him yourself?”
“Not I,” said the arriero; “I can’t afford to lose my day’s wage merely to enjoy myself, and I have no chance of seeing His Majesty unless he comes down into the Tajo to look for me.”
They climbed on up the stony zigzag path, and presently the young man asked the arriero if the donkey could carry his weight, for he found walking up the almost vertical hill rather hard work.
“Of course he could get on the donkey, and welcome. Castaño often carried two hundredweight of potatoes up to the town, and the Señor certainly did not weigh that. He, Castaño’s owner, thought very little of climbing the hill several times a day when there was a lot of produce to take to market, but he could understand that a forastero [stranger—any one not belonging to the speaker’s native place] who was not used to the Tajo might find it heavy walking.”
So the gentleman got on the donkey, sitting on the panniers with his long legs dangling on each side of the beast’s neck in true country fashion, and in this wise the little procession reached the new road recently made through a breach in the town walls to give an easy approach for motors.