There is one Spanish sentence that expresses the most with the least breath, perhaps, of any single word on earth. It is "Madrugáis?" and means nothing less than "Is it your intention to get up early to-morrow morning?" In these wayside fondas it calls always for an affirmative answer, for the bedroom is certain to be turned into the living room and public hall and stable exit at the first glimmer of dawn.
I was on the road again by four-thirty. Three hours of plodding across a rising country brought me to La Carolina, a town as pleasing in comparison with its neighbors as its name. Its customs, however, were truly Spanish, even though many of the ancestors of its light-haired populace were Swiss, and my untimely quest for breakfast did nothing more than arouse vast astonishment in its half-dozen cafés, wrecked and riotous places in charge of disheveled, heavy-eyed "skittles." In the open market I found fresh figs even cheaper than in Seville and, asking no better fare, turned back toward the highway.
I had passed through half the town when suddenly I heard in a side street a familiar voice, singing to the accompaniment of a guitar. I turned thither and found the blind singer I had first encountered in Jaen, just on the point of drawing out his bundle of handbills. While his wife canvassed the group of early risers, I accosted him with the information that I had bought one of his sheets in Jaen a month before.
"Ah! You too tramp la carretera?" he replied, turning upon me a glance so sharp that for the moment I forgot he could not see.
"Sí, señor. Do you not also sell the music of your songs?"
"How can music be put on paper?" he laughed. "It comes as you sing. Are you going far?"
"To Madrid."
"Vaya!" he cried, once more posing his guitar. "Well, there is much to be enjoyed on the road--when the sun is not too high. Vaya V. con Dios, young man."
Beyond Las Navas de Tolosa the face of the landscape changed, the carretera mounting ever higher through a soilless stretch of angular hills of dull-gray, slate-colored rock. Above Santa Elena these broke up into deep gorges and mountain foothills, an utterly unpeopled country as silent as the grave. I halted to gaze across it, and all at once, reflecting on the stillness as of desolation that hangs over all rural Spain, there came upon me the recollection that in all the land I had not once heard the note of a wild bird.
In the utter quiet I reached a deep slit in the flanking mountain, and even the stream, that descended along its bottom was as noiseless as some phantom river. It offered all the facilities for a bath, however, and moreover under an overhanging mass of rock that warded off the sun had watered to un-Spanish greenness a patch of grass of a few feet each way. There I spent half the afternoon in slumber. The highway shortly after plunged headlong down into the very depths of the earth, squirmed for a time in the abyss, then clambered painfully upward between precipitous walls of gloomy slate to a new level. When suddenly, unexpectedly, almost physically there rose before my eyes the picture of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, ambling past, close followed by thickset, hale-cheeked Sancho on his ass. For I had traversed the pass of Despeñaperros; languid Andalusia lay behind me, and ahead as far as the eye could reach spread the yet twice more barren and rocky tableland of La Mancha.