Four Months Afoot in Spain

by Harry Alverson Franck

The moon was absent, but the stars that looked down upon the steaming earth seemed more brilliant and myriad than ever before. In spite of them the darkness was profound. The Spaniard, however, is still too near akin to the Arab to be wandering in the open country at such an hour, and I heard not a sound but my own footsteps and the restless repose of the summer night until, in the first hour of the morning, I arrived at the solitary station of Arcoléa.

There I stretched out on a narrow platform bench, but was still gazing sleeplessly at the sky above when a "mixto" rolled in at two-thirty. The populous third-class compartment was open at the sides, and the movement of the train, together with the chill that comes at this hour even in Spain, made the temperature distinctly cold. That of itself would have been endurable. But close beside me, oppressively close in fact, sat a woman to the leeward of forty, of the general form of a sack of wheat, in her hand the omnipresent fan. Regularly at two-minute intervals she flung this open from force of habit, sent over me several icy draughts of air, and noting the time and place, heaved a vast "ay de mi!" and dropped the fan shut again--for exactly another two minutes.

I slept not at all and, descending as the night was fading at the station of Espeluy, shouldered my bundle and set off toward the sunrise. Three kilometers more and there lay before me the great open highway to Madrid, three hundred and seven kilometers away. I struck into it boldly, for all my drowsiness, reflecting that even the immortal Murillo had tramped it before me.

The landscape lay desolate on either hand, almost haggard in the glaring sunshine, offering a loneliness of view that seemed all at once to stamp with reality those myriad tales of the land pirates of Spain. Indeed, the race has not yet wholly died out. Since my arrival the peninsula had been ringing with the exploits of one Pernales, a bandit of the old caliber, who had thus far outgeneraled even that world-famous exterminator of brigands, the modern guardia civil. His haunt was this very territory to the left of me, and not a week had passed since a band of travelers on this national carretera had seen fit to contribute to his transient larder.

But his was an isolated case, a course that was sure to be soon run. The necessity of making one's will before undertaking a journey through Spain is no longer imperative. In fact, few countries offer more safety to the traveler; certainly not our own. For the Spaniard is individually one of the most honest men on the globe, notwithstanding that collectively, officially he is among the most corrupt. The old Oriental despotism has left its mark, deep to this day; and the Spaniard of the masses asks himself--and not without reason--why he should show loyalty to a government that is little more than two parties secretly bound by agreement alternately to share the spoils. Hence the law-breaker is as of yore not merely respected but encouraged. Pernales in his short career had become already a hero and a pride of the Spanish people, a champion warring single-handed against the common enemy.

Without pose or pretense I may say that I would gladly have given two or three ten-dollar checks and as many weeks of a busy life to have fallen into the clutches of this modern Dick Turpin. His retreat would certainly have been a place of interest. But fortune did not favor, and I passed unmolested the long, hot stretch to the stony hilltop village of Bailen, a name almost better known to Frenchmen than to Spaniards.

There, however, I was waylaid. I had finished a lunch of all that the single grocery-store offered, which chanced to be stone-hard cheese and water, and was setting out again, when two civil guards gruffly demanded my papers. This was the only pair I was destined to meet whose manners were not in the highest degree polished. The screaming heat was, perhaps, to blame. I turned aside into the shade of a building and handed them my passport, which they examined with the circumspection of a French gendarme. In general, however, it spoke well of my choice of garb that I was rarely halted by the guardia as a possible vagrant nor yet by the officers of the octroi as a possessor of dutiable articles.

It would seem the part of wisdom in tramping in southern countries to walk each day until toward noon and, withdrawing until the fury of the sun is abated, march on well into the night. But the plan is seldom feasible. In all this southern Spain especially there is scarcely a patch of grass large enough whereon to lay one's head, to say nothing of the body; and shade is rare indeed. On this day, after a sleepless night, a siesta seemed imperative. In mid-afternoon I came upon a culvert under the highway and lay down on the scanty, dust-dry leaves at its mouth, shaded to just below the arm-pits. But sleep had I none; for about me swarmed flies like vultures over a field of battle, and after fighting them for an hour that seemed a week, I acknowledged defeat and trudged drowsily on.

Soon began a few habitations and a country growing much wheat. In nothing more than in her methods of husbandry is Spain behind--or as the Spaniard himself would put it--different from the rest of the world. Her peasantry has not reached even the flail stage of development, not to mention the threshing machine. The grain is cut with sickles. As it arrives from the field it is spread head-down round and round a saucer-shaped plot of ground. Into this is introduced a team of mules hitched to a sled, which amble hour by hour around the enclosure, sometimes for days, the boy driver squatting on the cross-piece singing a never-ceasing Oriental drone of a few tones. From each such threshing-floor the chaff, sweeping in great clouds across the carretera, covered me from head to foot as I passed.

It was some distance beyond the town of Guarramán and at nightfall that I entered a village of a few houses like dug-out rocks tossed helter-skelter on either side of the way. The dejected little shop furnished me bread, wine, and dried fish and the information that another of the hovels passed for a posada. This was a single stone room, half floored with cobbles. The back, unfloored section housed several munching asses. The human portion was occupied by a stray arriero, the shuffling, crabbed old woman who kept the place, and by a hearty, frank-faced blind man in the early thirties, attended by a frolicsome boy of ten. It was furnished with exactly four cooking utensils, a tumbled bundle of burlap blankets in one corner, a smouldering cluster of fagots in another, and one stool besides that on which the blind man was seated.