"Cómo, señor!" he cried, raising his hands in a comical gesture of quasi-horror. "I, a cristino viejo, no Catholic!"
"Do you go to church and do what your cura commands?"
"What nonsense!" he cried, using a still more forcible term. "Who does? My wife goes now and then to confession. I go to church, señor, to be baptized, married, and buried."
"Why go then?"
"Caramba!" he gasped. "How else shall a man be buried, married, and baptized?"
Toward morning I fell into a doze, from which I was awakened by the extraordinary sensation of feeling cold. Dawn was touching the far horizon. The train was straining upward through a sharply rising country. As the sun rose we came in sight of Astorga, standing drearily on her bleak hilltop, and in memory of Gil Blas and for the unlimbering of my legs I alighted and climbed into the town. It proved as uninteresting as any in Spain, and before the morning was old I was again riding northwestward. Soon there came an utter change of scene; tunnels grew unaccountable, the railroad winding its way doggedly upward through a wild, heavily wooded mountain region that had little in common with familiar Spanish landscapes. In mid-afternoon I dismounted at the station of Lugo, the capital of Galicia.
CHAPTER XII
WILDEST SPAIN
Nearest of all the Iberian peninsula to our own land, the ancient kingdom of Galicia is as well-nigh unknown to us as any section of Europe. As far back as mankind's memory carries it has been Spain's "last ditch." Up into this wild mountain corner of the peninsula retreated in its turn each subdued race as conqueror after conqueror swept over the land,--the aboriginal Iberians before the Celts, the Celtiberians before the coast-hugging Phoenicians and Carthaginians, these before the omniverous Romans, followed as the centuries rolled on by Vandal, Suevi, Goth and Moor. Further they could not flee, for behind them the world falls away by sheer cragged cliffs into the fathomless sea. Here the fugitives melted together into a racial amalgam, an uncourageous amalgam on the whole, for in each case those who reached the fastnesses were that remnant of the race that preferred life to honor, those who "fought and ran away," or who took to their heels even earlier in the proceedings.
Yet it was a long two centuries after Hannibal had followed his father Hasdrubal into the Stygian realms of the defeated, after Rome had covered the rest of the peninsula with that network of roads that remains to this day, that the power of the outside world pushed its way into this tumbled wilderness. But for the necessity of loot to pay the gambling debts of his merry youth the conqueror indeed might never have appeared. Yet appear he did,--a young Roman just beginning to display a crownal baldness, known to his legions as Caesar and answering to his friends of the Roman boulevards and casinos to the name of Julius. He conquered; and when he, too, had written his memoirs and passed his perforated way, that lucky heir of all Roman striving caused to be built in these his mountains a city that should--like all that sprouted or grew under his reign--bear his name,--"Lucus Augusti--Gus's place."