"Claro, hombre!" he replied, with another wink. "But that is one of the privileges of our trade."
I strolled out around the building. Back of it, sure enough, was a cavalry barracks, and any one of a score of young troopers sitting astride chairs in the shade of the building might have passed for Don José. Some of them were singing, too, in good clear voices; though rather a sort of dreamy malagüeño than the vivacious music of Bizet. But, alas! With Don Josés and to spare, when the factory gates opened and the thousands of cigarreras so famed in song and impropriety poured forth, not one was there who could by any stretch of the imagination be cast for Carmencita. Sevillanas there were of every age, from three-foot childhood upward; disheveled gypsy girls from Triana across the river; fat, dumpy majas; hobbling old witches; slatterns with an infant tucked under one arm; crippled martyrs of modern invention; hollow-chested victims of tobacco fumes; painted sinvergüenzas; above all, hundreds of hale, honest women who looked as if they worked to help support their families and lived life seriously and not wantonly. But not a face or even a form that could have seduced any young recruit to betray his trust and ruin his career. Fiction, frequently, is more picturesque than fact--and far less pleasing in its morality.
CHAPTER VI
TRAMPING NORTHWARD
To the man who will travel cheaply, interlarding his walking trips with such journeys by train as may be necessary to cover the peninsula in one summer, Spain offers the advantages of the "billete kilométrico." The kilometer ticket is sold in all classes and for almost any distance, and is valid on all but a few branch lines. One applies at a ticket agency, leaves a small photograph of one's self, and comes back a couple of days later to receive a sort of 16mo mileage-book containing legal information sufficient to furnish reading matter for spare moments for a week to come and adorned with the interesting likeness already noted.
I made such application during my second week in Seville, and received for my pains a book good for two thousand kilometers (1280 miles) of third-class travel during the ensuing three months. The cost thereof--besides the infelicity of sitting to a photographer in a sadly mosquito-bitten condition--covering transportation, government tax on the same, printing and the tax therefor, the photograph and the tax for that privilege, and the government stamp attesting that the government was satisfied it could tax no more, footed up to seventy-five pesetas, or concisely, thirteen dollars and thirty cents.
But--if there is anything in official Spain that has not a "but" attached it should be preserved in a museum--but, I say, the kilometer-coupons are printed in fives rather than in ones, and however small the fraction of distance overlapping, it costs five kilometers of ticket. Moreover--there is usually also a "moreover" following the "but" clause in Spanish ordinances--moreover, there are hardly two cities in Spain the railway distance between which does not terminate in the figures one or six. It does not seem reasonable to believe that the railroads were surveyed round-about to accomplish this result; it must be, therefore, that in the hands of Spanish railway measurers the kilometer is susceptible to such shrinkage as may be needful. At any rate--and this is the thought I had hoped to lead up to--at any rate it was very often possible, by walking six or eleven or sixteen kilometers, to save ten or fifteen or twenty kilometers of ticket; and the game of thus outwitting the railway strategists was incomparably more diverting than either solitaire or one-hand poker.
Thus it was that, though I planned to reach Córdoba that evening, I left Seville during the morning of July 8 on foot. In my knapsack was a day's supply of both food and drink, in the form of three-cent's worth of those fresh figs that abound in Spain--the one fruit that is certainly descended directly from the Garden of Eden. For miles the route led across a desert-dry land as flat as a western prairie, grilling in the blazing sunshine. At rare intervals an olive-tree cast a dense black shadow. There was no grass to be seen, but only an occasional tuft of bright red flowers smiling bravely above the moistureless soil.
Long hours the retrospect of the city of toreros remained, the overgrown cathedral bulking gigantic above all else. All the day through cream-white Carmona on her hilltop--a lofty island in a sea turned sand--gleamed off to the southward, visible almost in detail through the truly transparent air of Andalusia. I did not go to Carmona, near as she is to Seville; I never care to, for certainly she cannot be half so bewitching in reality as she looks on her sheer-faced rock across these burning plains of sand. To the north, beyond the brown Guadalquivir, lay the distance-blue foothills of the Sierra Morena, dying away in the northern horizon.
It was twenty-one o'clock by her station timepiece when I descended at Córdoba from the train I had boarded in the dusk at Tocina. A mile's stroll brought me to the city itself, and a lodging. Poor old Córdoba has fallen on parlous times. Like those scions of nobility one runs across now and then "on the road," it is well that she has her papers to prove she was once what she claims to have been. Surely none would guess her to-day a former imperial city of the Caliphs, the Bagdad and Mecca of the West. Her streets, or rather her alleys, for she has no streets, are bordered for the most part by veritable village hovels. Most African in aspect of all the cities of Spain, this once center of Arabic civilization looks as if she had been overwhelmed so often that she has utterly lost heart and given up, expending what little sporadic energy she has left in constructing a tolerable Alameda to the station, either that she may have always open an avenue of escape, or to entice the unsuspecting traveler into her misery.