My evening meal consisted of a gazpacho, olives, eggs, cherries, blood-dripping pomegranates, a rich brown bread, and wine; my couch of a straw mattress in a corner of the great kitchen--and my reckoning was barely twelve cents.
Afoot with the dawn, I had soon entered the vast cork forest that covers all the northern slope of the sierra. Wherever a siding offered, stood long rows of open freight cars piled high with bales of the spongy bark; the morning "mixto" hobbled by bearing southward material seemingly sufficient to stop all the bottles in Christendom.
By rail Ronda was still a long day distant--but not afoot. Before the morning was old I came upon the beginning of the short-cut which my hosts of the night had described. It straggled uncertainly upward for a time across a rolling sandy country knobbed with tufts of withered grass and overspread with mammoth cork-trees, some still unbarked, some standing stark naked in the blistering sun. Then all at once, path, sand and vegetation ceased, and above me stretched to the very heavens the grilling face of a bare rock. I mounted zigzagging, as up the slate roof of some gigantic church, swathed in a heat that burned through the very soles of my shoes. A mile up, two guardias civiles emerged suddenly from a fissure, the sun glinting on their muskets and polished black three-cornered hats. Here, then, of all places, was to be my first meeting with these officious fellows, whose inquisitiveness was reported the chief drawback to a tramp in Spain. But they greeted me with truly Spanish politeness, even cordiality. Only casually, when we had chatted a bit, as is wont among travelers meeting on the road, did one of them suggest:
"You carry, no doubt, señor, your personal papers?"
I dived into my shirt--my knapsack, and drew out my passport. The officers admired it a moment side by side without making so bold as to touch it, thanked me for privilege, raised a forefinger to their hats, and stalked on down the broiling rock.
A full hour higher I brought up against a sheer precipice. Of the town that must be near there was still not a trace. For some time longer I marched along the foot of the cliff, swinging half round a circle and always mounting. Then all at once the impregnable wall gave way, a hundred white stone houses burst simultaneously on my sight, and I entered a city seething in the heat of noonday.
CHAPTER III
THE LAST FOOTHOLD OF THE MOOR
Ronda crouches on the bald summit of a rock so mighty that one can easily fancy it the broken base of some pillar that once upheld the sky. Nature seems here to have established division of labor. The gigantic rock bearing aloft the city sustains of itself not a sprig of vegetation. Below, so far below that Ronda dares even in summer to fling down unburied the mutilated carcasses from her bullring, spreads the encircling vega, producing liberally for the multitude above, but granting foothold scarcely to a peasant's hovel. Beyond and round about stretches the sierra, having for its task to shelter the city against prowling storms and to enrich the souls of her inhabitants with its rugged grandeur.
Travelers come to Ronda chiefly to gaze elsewhere. As an outlook upon the world she is well worth the coming; as a city she is almost monotonous, with her squat, white-washed houses sweltering in the omnivorous sunshine. Her only "sight" is the Tajo, the "gash" in the living rock like the mark of some powerful woodman's ax in the top of a tree-stump. A stork-legged bridge spans it, linking two unequal sections of the town, which without this must be utter strangers. A stream trickles along its bottom, how deep down one recognizes only when he has noted how like toy buildings are the grist-mills that squat beside it pilfering their power.