I stumbled into it just beyond, a cow-path indeed, though too little used to be clearly marked, and meandering in and out with it for twenty kilometers through rocky barrancas and across sandy patches, gained as the day was nearing its close the wind-bitten village of Nambroca. A few miles more through a still greater chaos of rocks and I came out unexpectedly on the crest of a jagged promontory that brought me to a sudden halt before one of the most fascinating panoramas in all Spain.
A still higher rise cutting off the foreground, there began a few miles beyond, the vast, wrinkled, verdureless plateau of Castile, rolling away and upward like an enormous tilted profile-map of the world, sea-blue with distance and heat rays, all details blended together into an indistinctness that left only an undivided impression like a Whistlerian painting. I pushed forward and at the top of the next ridge gasped aloud with new wonder. From this summit the world fell pell-mell away at my feet into a bottomless gorge; and beyond, two or three miles away, the culminating point in a tumultuous landscape of ravines, gulleys and precipitous chasms, sat an Oriental city, close-packed and isolated in its rocky solitude, the sun's last rays casting over its domes and minaret-like spires a flood of color that seemed suddenly and bodily to transport the beholder into the very heart of Asia. My goal was won; before me lay the ancient capital of the Goths, history-rich Toledo.
I sat down on the crest of the precipice overhanging the Tajo, almost beneath the enormous iron cross set in a rock to mark Toledo as the religious center of Spain, and remained watching the city across the gulf, full certain that whatever offered within its walls could in no degree equal the view from this facing hilltop. Richly indeed did this one sight of her reward the long day's tramp across the choking hills, even had there not been a pleasure in the walk itself; and upon me fell a great pity for those that come to her by railroad in the glare of day and the swelter of humanity.
As I sat, and the scene was melting away into the descending night, a voice sounded behind me and a ragged, slouching son of fortune proffered the accustomed greeting and, rolling a cigarette, sat down at my side. He was a "child of Toledo," and of his native city we fell to talking. At length he raised his flabby fist and, shaking it at the twinkling lights across the Tajo, cried out:
"O Toledo, my city! Gaunt, sunken-bellied Toledo, bound to your rock and devoured by the vulture horde of bloated churchmen while your children are starving!
"Señor," he continued, suddenly returning to a conversational tone, "let me show you but one of a thousand iniquities of these frailuchos."
He rose and led the way a little further along the path I had been following, halting at the edge of a yawning hole in the rocks, like a bottomless well, the existence of which I was thankful to have learned before I continued my way.
"Señor," he said, "no man can tell how many have died here, for it lies, as you see, in the very center of the trail over these hills. For a hundred years, as my grandfather has known, it has stood so. But do you think yon cursed priests would spend a perrito of their blood-sweated booty to cover it?"
It was black night when I picked my way down into the valley of the Tajo and, crossing the Alkántara bridge, climbed painfully upstairs into Toledo. Even within, the Oriental impression was not lost, though the Castilian tongue sounded on every side. With each step forward came some new sign to recall that for half the past eight hundred years Toledo was an Arab-ruled and Arabic-speaking city. Thus it is still her Eastern fashion to conceal her wealth by building her houses inwardly, leaving for public thoroughfare the narrow, haphazard passageways between them, and giving to the arriving stranger the sensation of wandering through a haughty crowd of which each coldly turns his back.
Her medley of streets was such as one might find in removing the top of an ant-hill, an ant-hill in which modern improvements have made little progress; her pavements of round, century-polished cobble-stones, glinting in the weak light of an occasional street-lamp, were painful indeed to blistered feet. Ugly and barn-like outwardly, like the Alhambra, hen houses frequently resemble that ancient palace, too, in that they are rich with decoration and comfort within. It was an hour or more before I was directed to a casa de huéspedes in the calle de la Lechuga, or Lettuce street, a gloomy crack between two rows of buildings. The house itself was such as only a man of courage would have entered by night in any other city. I ventured in, however, and found the family out-of-doors--lolling in the flower and palm-grown patio beneath the star-riddled sky, the canvas that formed the roof by day being drawn back. Even the well was in the patio, on which opened, like the others, the room to which I was assigned, presenting toward the street a blank, windowless wall.