"With regret, señor," he replied, raising his hat and offering me the stool on which he had been seated, "I am forced to say that we are a small village so rarely honored by the presence of travelers that we have no public house. But--" he hesitated a moment, then went on "--the weather is fine, señor; the night is warm, the pure air hurts no one; why do you not make your bed on the soft, clean straw of the threshing-floor yonder?"
"Caballero," I responded, with my most Spanish salute, "a thousand thanks--and may your grace remain with God."
For the first time during my journey the heat was tempered next morning, though by no means routed, by a slightly overcast sky. The wind continued. The highway led on through a seared brown country, for the most part a silent, smokeless, unpeopled land. The windmills of La Mancha were numerous now on either hand as the road sank slowly down to a gap in the low, gaunt mountains of Ciudad Real. At last it reached them and, picking its way through the narrow pass of Lápiche, strode off again across a still hotter, drier region, unmitigated even by the wind, which had stopped short at the mountain barrier--a land flowing not even with ditch-water. I halted but briefly at the large village of Madridejos, peopled by a slow, dreamy-eyed, yet toil-calloused peasantry, as if their world of fancy and the hard stony life of reality never quite joined hands.
Hot, thirsty and hungry, I came in mid-afternoon to an isolated ramshackle venta in a rocky wilderness. An enormous shaggy man of a zoölogical cast of countenance, and a male-limbed girl were harnessing mules in the yard. No other living thing showed itself. I offered a peseta for food. The man glared at me for a time in silence, then growled that he sold nothing, but that I should find a posada not far beyond. He was evidently the champion prevaricator of that region, for not the suggestion of a hovel appeared during the rest of the afternoon. But he would be a fellow with Sancho indeed, who could not overrule a few hour's appetite in thinking of higher things, and no fit traveler in this hard, toilsome land where overeating is not numbered among the vices.
The setting of the sun was perhaps an hour off when the highway, swinging a bit to the left and surmounting a barren, rocky ridge, laid suddenly before me an enthralling prospect. Below, far down on a distinctly lower level, a flat, ruffled country still misty with rising waves of heat, stretched away to the uttermost endless distance. The whole, glinting in the oblique rays of the setting sun, was scored in every direction with dull rock villages huddled compactly together, while on every hand, like signal fires on a western prairie, rose from a hundred threshing-floors columns of chaff straight and slender into the motionless air to an incredible height before breaking up. The road descended with decision, yet in no unseemly haste and, marching for an hour across a country traveled only by an occasional donkey loaded with chopped straw, led me at nightfall into the scene of Sancho's labors in the wheat-piles--the village of Tembleque.
In its immense fonda, but for the underground stables one single, vast, cobble-paved room, a vacant-eyed old man, a girl, and a leviathan of a woman sat among the carts, wine-casks, and heaps of harnesses, the latter knitting. In strictest Castilian the establishment was no fonda, but a parador, from parar, to stop; and certainly it could not with honesty have laid claim to any more inviting name, for assuredly no man in his senses would have dreamed of choosing it as a staying-place. When I asked if lodging was to be had, the woman replied with a caustic sneer that she had always been able thus far to accommodate any who were able and willing to pay.
"And can one also get supper?" I inquired timorously.
"How on earth do I know?" snapped the woman.
I stared with a puzzled air at the old man and he in like manner at the knitter, who turned out to be his wife, espoused in budding maidenhood when his march in life had well begun.
"How can I cook him supper if he has none with him?" snarled the no longer maidenly.