Four Months Afoot in Spain

by Harry Alverson Franck

"Vaya, señor!" he replied, with the placid deliberation of age, and pointing with his cane to the shops that bordered the square. "He buys a perrito of bread in the bakery there, dos perros of ham in the butchery beyond, fruit of the market-woman--"

"And eats it where?" I interrupted.

"Hi jo de mi alma!" responded the patriarch with extreme slowness and almost a touch of sarcasm in his voice. "Here is the broad plaza, all but empty. In all that is there not room to sit down and eat?"

I continued my quest and entered two posadas. But for the only time during the summer the proprietors demanded my cédula personal. I explained that Americans are not supplied with these government licenses to live, and showed instead my passport. Both landlords protested that it was not in Spanish and refused to admit me. One might have fancied one's self in Germany. It was some time after dark that I was directed to a private boarding-house that almost rewarded my long search. For the supper set before me was equal to a five-course repast in the Casa Robledo of Granada, and for the first time since leaving Seville I slept in a bed, and not in my clothes.

In the morning an absolutely straight road lay before me across a land treeless but for a few stunted shrubs, a face of desolation and aridity and solitude as of Asia Minor. From the eastward swept a hot, dry wind across the baked plains of La Mancha that recalled all too forcibly the derivation of its name from the Arabic manxa--a moistureless land.

At fifteen kilometers the highway swerved slightly and lost from view for the first time the immense cathedral of Manzanares behind. On either hand, miles visible in every direction, huddled stone towns on bare hillsides and in rocky vales, each inconspicuous but for its vast overtowering church. "Si la demeure des hommes est pauvre, celle de Dieu est riche," charges colorful Gautier; which, if the church of Spain is truly the "demeure de Dieu," is sternly true. City, town, village, hamlet, a church always bulks vast above it like a hen among her chicks--rather like some violent overpowering tyrant with a club. To the right of the turn one might, but for a slight rise of ground, have espied a bare twelve kilometers away immortal Argamasilla itself.

During the day there developed a hole in my shoe, through a sole of those very "custom-made" oxfords warranted by all the eloquent Broadway salesman held sacred--whatever that may have been--to endure at least six months of the hardest possible wear. Sand and pebbles drifted in, as sand and pebbles will the world over under such circumstances, and for some days to come walking was not of the smoothest.

Almost exactly at noonday I caught sight of the first windmills of La Mancha, three of them slowly toiling together on a curving hillside, too distinctly visible at this hour to be mistaken by the most romance-mad for giants. The few peasants I fell in with now and then were a more placid, somber people than the Andaluz and, as is commonly the case in villages reached by no railway, more courteous to the roadster than their fellows more directly in touch with the wide world.

It was that hour when the sun halts lingering above the edge of the earth, as if loath to leave it, that I entered the noiseless little hamlet of Puerto Lápiche. It contained no public hostelry, but the woman who kept its single shop cooked me a supper, chiefly of fried eggs, which I ate sitting on a stool before the building. The fried eggs of Spain! Wherein their preparation differs from that in other lands I know not, but he who has never eaten them after a long day's tramp cannot guess to what Epicurean heights fried eggs may rise. How, knowing of them, could Sancho have named cow-heel for his choice?

The evening was of that soft and gentle texture that invites openly to a night out-of-doors. On the edge of the open country beyond, too, was a threshing-floor heaped with new straw that would certainly have been my choice, had not the village guardia been watching my every movement from across the way. When I had returned the porcelain frying-pan to its owner, I strolled boldly across to the officer and inquired for a lodging.