Four Months Afoot in Spain

by Harry Alverson Franck

To-day it is Lugo, a modest city ensconced in the lap of a plain near a thousand feet above the railway station that bears its name. Politically Spanish, it is so in little else. The last traces of the Arab, so indelible in the rest of the peninsula, have disappeared. The racial amalgam, now the gallego, is close akin to the Portuguese, like all long dominated peoples docile, unassertive, born to be a servant to mankind. He is the chief butt, the low comedian of the Spanish stage, slow, loutish, heavy of mind and body, without a suggestion of the fire of that bubbling child of enthusiasm, the Andaluz; none of the native dignity and consciousness of personal worth of the Castilian, not even the dreaminess of the Manchegan. He is fitted to be what he is,--the domestic, the server of his fellow-countrymen.

From the posada at the city gate I climbed to Lugo's chief promenade and Alameda, the top of her surrounding wall. This is some forty feet high, of flat, irregular slabs of slate-stone on Roman foundations, with a circuit of nearly a mile and a half. The town within and below is of the same material, the dull gray or drab so predominating as to give the place the somberness of a stone village of Wales. The inhabitants, moreover, have little of the Spaniard's love of color, being as sober in garb as in demeanor. It is noteworthy that those communities that are least embellished by nature are most prone to garb themselves in all the colors of the spectrum. The Venetian above his muddy water has been noted in all times as a colorist; the peasants of the Apennines barely a hundred miles away have very little brightness of dress.

So the Lugense; for if the town itself is somber gray, the moss and vines that overrun the low, leaden houses, the gardens scattered among them, the flowers that trail from the windows of the dwellings built medieval-fashion into the walls make the scene gay even within. While outwardly it is unsurpassed. From the wall-top promenade the eye commands an endless vista of richest green landscape, a labyrinth of munificent hill forms and mountain ridges dense-wooded with veritable Alpine forests rolling away on every side to the uttermost horizon.

In the town itself is almost nothing of what the tourist calls "sights"; which is, perhaps, a chief reason why his shadow almost never falls within it. There is only the dull, bluish-stone cathedral, and an atmosphere wholly individual; nothing exciting, nothing extraordinary, though one amusing detail of life is sure to attract attention. Like many towns of Spain, Lugo obtains her water through the mouths of stone lions in her central plaza. But here the fountain spouts are for some Gallegan reason high above the flagging, far out of reach. Whence the plaza and the streets of the city are at all hours overrun with housewives and domestics carrying not merely pitchers but a tin tube some ten feet long through which to conduct the water into their receptacles. In nothing does the town differ from familiar Spain more than in temperature. Her climate is like that of Bar Harbor. A change in a few hours as from Florida in August to Mount Desert brought quickly home to me the fact that my garb was fitted only for perpetual summer. Almost with the setting sun I fell visibly to shivering, and by dark I was forced to take refuge in bed.

I had come into Galicia proposing to strike across country to Oviedo, capital of the Asturias, in the hope of getting wholly and thoroughly "off the beaten track." Therein I seemed fully to have succeeded. Inquiries in Lugo elicited the information that Oviedo was reputed to lie somewhere to the eastward. Nothing more; except some nebulous notion of a highway beginning at the base of the city wall leading for a day or two in that direction. For which uncertainty I was in no sense sorry, delighted with the prospect of exploring by a route of my own that wooded wilderness of mountains that spreads endlessly away from Lugo's promenade, certain of finding a land and a people unsullied by tourists.

Dinner over on the day after my arrival, I descended from the city of Augustus by the unpaved road that was to set me a little way on my journey. It was soon burrowing through dense, scented forests, broken by scores of little deep green meadows along the way; so many and so inviting that it required a strong tug of the will to keep from lying down for a nap in each of them, in memory of the many grassless, siestaless, fly-bitten days in the rest of the peninsula. Truly the good things of this world are unevenly distributed. In fact, only by a dead lift of the imagination could one comprehend that this also was Spain. Switzerland, perhaps, but never a part and portion of the same country with the sear, deforested uplands of Castille, the sandy stretches of Andalusia, with osseous and all but treeless La Mancha. The division line between Europe and Africa was meant surely to be the Pyrenees and this Cantabrian range rather than the Mediterranean.

When darkness settled down I halted at a jumbled stone hamlet, where payment was refused except for the few cents' worth of peasant fare I ate. For my bed, was spread in an open stable a bundle of newly threshed wheat-straw that was longer than myself. A half-day's tramp had not left me sleepy. The night lay cool and silent about me, and I sank into that reverie of contentment that comes most surely upon the wanderer when he has left the traveled world behind and turns his face care-free toward the unknown, that mysterious land across which beckons the aërial little sprite men name Wanderlust. For the joy of travel is not in arriving but in setting forth, in moving onward; how fast matters little, where, even less, but ever on and on, forgetting, for the supremest satisfaction, that there is a goal to attain. Let a man wander away into unknown lands smiling with summer, his journey's end little more than conjecture, his day of arrival a matter of indifference, and if he feel not then the joy of the open road he may know for a certainty that he is a hug-the-hearth, and no gipsy and a vagabond.

In the morning continued a roadway hobble-skirted by forests, a country as pleasing as Caruso's voice, as soothing to the traveler from stony Spain as McDowell's music. To enumerate the details of life and landscape here is merely to tell by contrast what the rest of Spain is not. The inhabitants were in the highest degree laconic, as taciturn as the central and southern Spaniard is garrulous, self-conscious to the point of bashfulness, a characteristic as uncommon in the rest of the country as among the Jews or Arabs; a heavy-handed, unobserving peasantry that passed the stranger unaccosted, almost unnoticed. Such conversation as exchanged must be introduced by the traveler. The cheering "Vaya!" was heard no more, the stock greeting being a mumbled "Buenos."

In appearance, be the inspection not too close, this mountain people well deserves the outworn epithet "picturesque." The women young and old wore on their heads large kerchiefs of brilliant red, and most of them a waist of the same color, offering striking contrast to the rich green background, as the latter was sure to be. As footwear, except those unpossessed of any, both sexes had wooden shoes painted black and fancifully carved, which, scraping along the highway, carried the thoughts quickly back to Japan. At nearer sight, however, something of the picturesqueness was lost in the unfailing evidences of a general avoidance of the bath and washtub.

Of least interest were the dwellings of this peasantry,--villages neither frequent nor large, more properly mere heaps of gray huts built without order or plan of the slate-stone of which the province itself is chiefly formed, as was seen wherever the outer soil had been stripped away and the skeleton of the mountain laid bare. For all the character of the country abundance of rain and a pains-taking agriculture gave good crops. Galicia indeed supports, though in poverty, the densest population of the peninsula. Wheat, Indian corn, and hay abounded. The former was stacked, and threshed with flails--two customs unknown in Spain, as the latter products are entirely. The maize was sown. A species of cabbage on a stalk some two feet long was among the most common of the vegetables.