Avila is connected with Salamanca by rail, but the route forms a sharp angle with its apex many miles to the north. I had decided, therefore, to walk. Swinging down through the western city gate and across the babbling Adaja by the aged stone bridge, I clambered again upward to where a huge stone cross invites to a rest in its shade and a final retrospect of crumbling Avila and her many-turreted, constraining wall. An easy two-days' walk lay before me. For had not Heir Baedeker, so seldom in error as to plain facts, announced the distance as thirty-five miles?
As I wended on up the hillside, however, I was suddenly stricken profane by a stone sign-post rising before me with the dismal greeting:
"Salamanca 99 kilómetres."
Herr Baedeker was wrong by a little matter of thirty miles.
But I had set the time of my entrance into Salamanca; delay would bring havoc to my delicately adjusted itinerary. I doubled my pace.
The way led through a country as savage of aspect as any in Spain, waterless, dusty, glaring, overspread with huge rocks tumbled pell-mell as if the Mason of the universe had thrown here the materials left over from His building. By afternoon a few lean farms began to crowd their way in between the rocks, now and then a sturdy, thick-set tree found place, and over all nature hovered great clouds of locusts whose refrain reminded how euphonious is the Spaniard's name for what we dub "dog days,"--"canta la chicharra--the locust sings." The inhabitants of the region seemed somewhat more in fortune's favor than the rest of the peninsula. Passing peasants, though rare, had none a hungry look; their carts were fancifully carved and painted both on body and wheels, while the trappings of their cattle were decorative in the extreme.
All a summer day I tramped forward over hill and hollow toward the great jagged range, the hardy trees dying out, the fields growing in size and number, but the sierra seeming to hold ever as far aloof. Beyond a small withered forest in which were roaming flocks of brown goats, I climbed a steady five miles to a summit village exhibiting every outward sign of poverty and most fittingly named "Salvadios--God save us." The keeper of its one quasi-public house deigned after long argument to set before me a lame excuse for supper, but loudly declined to furnish lodging. I withdrew, therefore, to a threshing-floor across the way, heaped high with still unbroken bundles of wheat, and put in a shiveringly cold night--so great is the contrast between the seething plains by day and this hilltop bitten by every wind--not once falling into a sound sleep for the gaunt, savage curs that prowled about me.
At dawn I was already afoot and three hours later entered the city of Penaranda, in the outskirts of which a fine plaza de toros was building, but within all the confines of which was no evidence of school, library, nor indeed of restaurant. I contented myself with a bit of fruit and trudged on. This may not, perhaps, have been the hottest day of all that Spanish summer, but it bore certainly all the earmarks thereof. The earth lay cracked and blistered about me, the trees writhing with the heat, the rays rising from the rocky soil like a dense stage-curtain of steam. In a shriveled and parched pueblo of mud huts, exactly resembling the villages of Palestine, I routed out a kindly old woman for a foreshortened lunch; and then on again in the inferno, choking fields of grain and vineyards soon becoming numerous on either hand. The wise husbandmen, however, had sought refuge, and in all the grilling landscape was not a human being to be seen, save and except a sweat-dripping pedestrian from foreign parts straining along the scorching highway.
This swung at length to the right, swooped down through a river that had not a drop of water, and staggering to the top of an abrupt knoll, showed me far off, yet in all distinctness, a rich reddish-brown city gathered together on a low hilltop and terminating in glinting spires. It was Salamanca; and of all the cities I have come thus upon unheralded and from the unpeopled highway none can rival her in richness of color, like ripe old wine, a city that has grown old gracefully and with increasing beauty. So fascinating the sight that I sat down beneath the solitary tree by the way to gaze upon it--and to swing half round the circuit of the shrub as the sun drove the scanty shadow before it.
But I was still far off the golden-brown city and, setting slowly onward in the descending evening, I all but encircled the place before the carretera, coming upon the ancient puente romano, clambered upward into its unrivaled Blaza Mayor.