Four Months Afoot in Spain

by Harry Alverson Franck

"Do you see those lights?" he asked.

Far away and to the right, so far and so high in the heavens that they seemed constellations, twinkled three clusters of lights, almost in a row but far separated one from another.

"The third and farthest," said my companion, "is El Escorial; and your time is well-chosen, for to-morrow is the day of Saint Lawrence, her patron saint."

We returned to the hut, where the wife of the peon was moved to cook me a bowl of garbanzos and spread me a blanket on the stone floor. In the morning the sharply descending highway carried me quickly down the mountain, and by sunrise I was back once more in the familiar Castille. It was verging on noon when, surmounting a sterile rise, I caught sight of the dome and towers of the Escorial. A roadside stream, of which the water was lukewarm, removed the grime of travel, and I climbed sweltering into the village of Escorial de Arriba, pitched on a jagged shoulder of the calcined mountain high above the monastery.

Spain is wont to show her originality and indifference to the convenience of travelers, and on this, the anniversary of the grilling of him in whose honor it was built, the great monastery was closed for the only time during the year. I experienced no regret, however, for the vast gloomy structure against its background of barren, rocky hills had far too much the aspect of some dank prison to awaken any desire to enter. Least impressive of famous buildings, the Escorial is certainly the most oppressive. There is poetry, inspiration in many a building, in the Taj Mahal, the Cathedral of Cologne; but not in the Escorial. It suggests some frowning, bulky bourgeois of forty whose mother thinks him and who would fain believe himself one of the most poetic and spiritual of men.

I wandered away the day in the town, drifting in the afternoon down into the village "de Abajo." There, in the multitude about the stone-pile of a bullring, I ran across Curdito in festive garb. He was scheduled to kill all three bulls of the day's córrida, but in spite of his urgent invitation I felt in no mood to sit out the blistering afternoon on a bare stone slab of this rough-and-tumble plaza.

El Escorial was so overrun with visitors to her annual celebration that not a lodging of any sort was to be had in either the upper or the lower village. The discovery brought me no shock, for a night out of doors I neither dreaded nor regretted. But as I sauntered at dusk down past the great building into the flanking "woods of Herrera," I could not but wonder how those travelers who bewail the accommodations of the "only possible hotel" would have met the situation.

Behind the monastery extends a broad, silent forest, not over thick, and beneath the trees squat bushes and brown heather. I spread the day's copy of the Heraldo between two shrubs and, stretching out at my ease, fell to munching the lunch I had bought in the village market. Let the circumstances be right and I know few more genuine joys than to sleep the night out of doors. Lie down in the open while a bit of daylight still lingers, or awaken there when the dawn has come, and there is a feeling of sordidness, mixed with the ludicrous, a sense of being an outcast prone on the common earth. But while the night, obscuring all details, hangs its canopy over the world there are few situations more pleasing.

When I had listened a while to the panting of the August night I fell asleep. For weeks past I had been viewing too many famous spots, perhaps, had been delving too constantly into the story of Spain, My constant use of Castilian, too, had borne fruit; English words no longer intruded even on my inner meditations. Was it possible also that the market lunch had been too heavy, or the nearness of the gloomy monastery too oppressive? At any rate I fell to dreaming.

At first there passed a procession of all Spain,--arrieros, peasants, Andalusian maidens, toreros, priests, Jesús the tramp, a chanting water-seller, merchants and beggars; close followed by two guardias civiles who looked at me intently as they passed. Then suddenly in their place Moors of every garb and size were dancing about me. They seemed to be celebrating a victory and to be preparing for some Mohammedan sacrifice. A mullah advanced upon me, clutching a knife. I started to my feet, a distant bell boomed heavily, and the throng vanished like a puff of smoke.