Four Months Afoot in Spain

by Harry Alverson Franck

All these products grew, not on the level, but in little isolated, precipitous fields in which it seemed impossible that the laborers, male and female with sickles or mattocks, could stand upright. Flocks of sheep and goats were many, and as the final change from the Spain that I had hitherto known there was nowhere silence. The forests on either hand were vocal with the songs of birds. Mountain streams came plunging, headlong down the ravines, or brawled along through stony channels beside the winding way. The water was of the purest and clearest, which may, perhaps, have led the inhabitants to give most of their mundifying attention to the vessels in which it was carried,--great oaken buckets each with three wide hoops scoured spotless and shining as a Hindu's lota.

But most unfailing breakers of the silence and most characteristic of all the features of the province was its vehicles. The Phrygian peasants who dragged their produce into Troy before the siege had certainly as up-to-date a conveyance. The traveler's first encounter with one of these Homeric contrivances is sure to be startling. There is only one word that exactly expresses their sound from afar,--the French bourdonner--the noise of the bumblebee. Indeed, when first I heard it I fell to threshing about my ears, sure that one of those insects was upon me. Slowly the sound grew to the meowling of a thousand cats, and around a turn of the forest-hedged road came a peasant's cart drawn by little brown oxen--they are as often cows--much like our Jerseys in appearance, a great sheepskin thrown over their heads, to the horns of which the yoke was fastened. The unwieldy edifice, wabbling drunkenly as it came, consisted of little more than two solid disks of wood like cistern covers turning on a wooden axle, the whole having about it neither an ounce of iron nor a smell of axle-grease. Its pace certainly did not exceed a mile an hour, the oxen see-sawing from side to side of the road, twisting their burdened heads to stare at me with curious, sad eyes. As it passed, my ears literally ached with its scream. I doubled my pace to flee the torture. But there was no entire escape; hardly once thereafter was I out of sound of a cart or two, now screaming by, now "bourdonning" away across some valley, buzzing at times even after the night had settled down.

Early on this second day, which was Sunday, there appeared a far more precipitous and rocky country through which the road began to wind its way upward amid a chaos of rugged tumbled valleys, gaining by early afternoon an elevation above the line of vegetation. For two hours I kept lookout for a bit of level space for a siesta, without finding a patch of flat ground as large as my knapsack. I stepped over the edge of the highway and lay down on a bank so sheer that I was obliged to brace my stick against the small of my back to keep from pitching down the thousand-foot slope into a brook; and even as it was I awoke to find I had shifted some ten feet down the hill.

The ascent thereafter grew still sharper, the surrounding world being at last wholly enveloped in a dense cloud. From out of this I heard, at what I fancied must be toward sunset, sounds of revelry, by which, marching onward, I was soon encompassed, though still unseeing and unseen. Suddenly there came waltzing toward me out of the fog a couple in each other's arms, disappearing again as another pair whirled forth out of the unknown. Wandering on through a merry but invisible multitude I ran all but into the arms of two guardias civiles leaning on their muskets. They greeted me with vast surprise, welcoming me to their mountain-top town of Fonsagrada and, far from demanding my papers, offered to find me a partner that I might join the village in its Sunday celebration on the green. I declined such hilarity, but for an hour stood chatting with them while the dancers whirled unseen about us.

Fonsagrada has no regular accommodations for strangers. The peregrinating band of musicians, however, furnishing the day's melody, was to be cared for in a sort of grocery, to which I repaired with them when the dance was over. Having partaken of a substantial supper in which the far-famed bacalao--cod preserved in great chunks in barrels like salt pork; a main staple in this region--made its initial appearance, I laid my case before the proprietor. He was a Yankee-like man in the middle thirties, of modern business methods even though he knew next to nothing of the world outside his cloud-bound village. Notwithstanding, therefore, that there was no "costumbre" to sanction it, he bade me spend the night under his roof--which I did all too literally, for when I had left off swapping yarns with the melodious nomads my host led the way to the garret, half-filled with straw, where in the midst of a too realistic dream I rose up suddenly and all but shattered my head on the roof in question.

In the morning the clouds were still wandering like lost souls through the streets of Fonsagrada. A mist that barely escaped being a rain was falling when I set off in an attempt to follow the voluminous directions of the dubious village. According to these, when I had passed the "Mesón de Galo," a lonely stone tavern a few miles out, I left the road, which was bending toward Gijón on the north coast, and fell into a descending mountain path. A tang of the salt sea was in the air. All the day through I climbed, slipped, and scrambled over jagged mountain slopes and through deep, rocky barrancas. There develops with much wandering an instinct to follow the right fork of a mountain trail, slight hints that could not be explained, but without the half-unconscious noting of which I must have gone a score of times astray. Twice or thrice I stumbled into a hamlet in some wrinkle of the range, a village of five or six hovels huddling in the shadow of an enormous, overtowering church, all built of flat field stones and swarming with huge white dogs.

At Grandas, a bit larger village overhung by massed up mountains, I was at length so fortunate as to get after much search an intangible imitation of a meal. From there I panted a long time upward and came out at last above a seemingly bottomless gorge, a gorge so deep that I had scrambled nearly a half-hour along its brink before I noted that far down in its depths was a town, encircled by vertical vineyards, like embroidery on the lower skirts of its overhanging mountains. My path lay plainly visible on the opposite slope, only a long jump away, but a jump for Pegasus or the princess of the Rosstrappe, and I, mere mortal, was forced to wind a long hour and a half to and fro on the rubbled face of the mountain before I entered the town below, called Saline.

Before me lay the most laborious task of all my Spanish journey. A mountain as nearly perpendicular as man could hope to ascend, without a break or a knoll in all its slope, rose, a sheer wall, certainly four thousand feet above. The gorge seemed some boundary set by the gods between two worlds. Up the face of the cliff a path had been laid out with mathematical precision, every one of its score of legs a toilsome climb over loose stones, with the sun, untempered by a breath of wind, pouring down its fury upon my back. It was hot as Spain in the depth of the canyon; it was chilling cold when I reached the summit heavily crested in clouds and threw myself down breathless on my back. Darkness was coming on, and I fell soon to shivering in the biting mountain air and must rise and hurry forward. It was not strange that in the fog and darkness instinct failed and that when finally I reached a village of eight or nine hovels and inquired its name the inhabitants replied "Figuerina," not in the least like the "La Mesa" I had expected.

Of a brawny, weather-beaten girl milking a cow by the light of a torch in what passed for the principal street, I asked:

"Is there a posada in town?"