But Castillejo seems to be an equally good subject for this warning. We recalled how lavishly, on the way to Toledo, we had presented bread, meat, and strawberries to some country folk who were not in the habit of eating, and how ardently they had thanked us. As we passed their house in returning it was closed and lifeless, and we were convinced that they had died of a surfeit. How willingly would we now have undone that deed! However, after making some purchases from an extremely deaf old woman who presided over such poor supplies as the place afforded, we asked her if she could have coffee prepared. "If there is enough in the house," she replied to our interrogatory shrieks. Accordingly, we carried a table out under some trees on the gravel platform, to eat al fresco.
When we found ourselves in this way for the first time thrown back on the Spanish sausage, we resisted that unsympathetic substance with all the vigor of despair. But, aided by some bad wine, an interesting conversation with the Novice, and the glow of a sunset sky that looked as if strewn with fading peony petals, we recovered from the shock caused in the beginning by a mingled flavor of garlic, raisins, and pork. In truth, there was something enjoyable about this wild supper around which our quartette gathered in the dry, dewless twilight. An ancient female, resembling a broken-down Medea, came out and kindled a fire of brushwood beyond the track, swung a kettle there, and cooked our coffee, bending over the flame-light the while with her scattered gray tresses, and wailing out doleful peteneras, the popular songs of Spain. The songs, the fire, the wine, the strange scene, were so stimulating that we were surprised to find all at once the dark vault overhead full of stars, the comet staring at us in its flight above the hills, and our ten-o'clock train nearly due.
The next morning we were in a region totally unlike anything we had seen before, excepting for the ever-present mountain ranges wild as the Pyrenees or Guadaramas. The light of dawn on these barren Spanish mountain-sides, drawn up into peaks as sharp as the points of a looped-up curtain, produces effects indescribable except on canvas and by a subtle colorist. The bare surfaces of rock or dry grass and moss, and the newly reaped harvest fields lower down, blend the tints of air and earth in a velvet-smooth succession of madder and faint yellow, olive and rose and gray, fading off into a reddish-violet at greater distances.
These eminences are a part of the Sierra Morena, where Don Quixote achieved some of his most noteworthy feats—the liberation of the galley-slaves, the descent into the Cave of Montesinos, the capture of Mambrino's helmet, and the famous penance. So weird is the aspect of these desolate hills, enclosing silent valleys in which narrow tracts of woods are harbored, that I suspected it would be easy to breed a few Don Quixotes of reality there. Craziness would become a necessary diversion to relieve the monotony of existence.
A winding river-bed near by was bordered by tufted copses of oleander in full flower, and hedges of huge serrated aloe guarded the roads. On the hill-sides a round corral for herds would occasionally be seen. In the fields the time-honored method of threshing out grain by driving a sort of heavy board sledge in a circle over the cut crop, and of winnowing by tossing up shovelfuls of the grain-dust into the breezy air, was in active operation. By-and-by the olive orchards began. As far as we could see they stretched on either side their ranks of round dusty green tree-heads. Thousands of acres of them—one grove after another: we travelled through fifty miles of almost unbroken olive plantations, until we fancied we could even smell the fruit on the boughs, and our eyes were sick and weary with the sameness of the sight. Then the river, which from time to time had shown its muddy current in curves and sweeps, moving through the land at the bottom of what might have been an enormous drain, turned out to be the famous Guadalquivir, which, as Ford vividly puts it, "eats its dull way through loamy banks." At last Cordova, seated in an ample plain—Cordova, in vanished ages the home of Seneca, Lucan, Averroës, and the poet Juan de Mena—Cordova, white in the dry and gritty sun-dazzled air, with square, unshadowed two-story houses, overlooked by the bell-tower of its incomparable Mezquita Cathedral: a cheerful Southern city, maintaining large gardens, abounding in palms and myrtles and orange and lemon trees; possessing, moreover, clean streets of perceptible width.
After the "interpreter," or hotel guide, the beggar: such is the order in these Spanish towns, and not seldom the guide is merely a bolder kind of beggar. Two or three of the most frantically miserable and loathsome charity-seekers I ever saw surrounded our omnibus as we awaited our baggage, and stuffed their hideous heads in at the windows and door, concentrating on us their fire of appeals. Velveteen had heard that the sovereign remedy for these pests was to treat them with consummate politeness and piety. "Pardon me, brother, for God's sake!" was the deprecatory formula which had been recommended, and he now proceeded to recite this, book in hand. Unfortunately it took him about five minutes to get it launched in good style and pure Spanish, during which time the beggars had an opportunity entirely to miss the sense. A few grains of tobacco dropped into the hat of one of them were more efficacious, for they had the result of mystifying him and hopelessly paralyzing his analytical powers. Finally the guide, coming with the baggage, recognized his rivals, and drove them off.