I trudged on deep in such reflections as such occurrences awaken, noting little of the scene. At sunset I found myself tramping through a warmer, less abrupt country, half conscious of having passed Grado, with its palaces, nurse-girls, and conventional costumes. As dusk fell I paused to ask for an inn. "A bit further on," replied the householder. I continued, still pensive. Several times I halted, always to receive the same reply, "A bit further, señor." Being in no sense tired, I gave the matter little attention until suddenly the seventh or eighth repetition of the unveracity aroused a touch of anger and a realization that the night was already well advanced. A lame man hobbling along the dark road gave me once more the threadbare answer, but walked some two miles at my side and left me at the door of a wayside wineshop that I should certainly not have missed even without him.
The chief sources of the boisterousness within were three young vagabonds who were displaying their accomplishments to the gathering. One was playing tunes on a comb covered with a strip of paper, another produced a peculiarly weird music in a high falsetto, while the third was a really remarkable imitator of the various dialects of Spain. With the three I ascended near midnight to the loft of the building, where a supply of hay offered comfortable quarters. For an hour he of the falsetto sat smoking cigarettes and singing an endless ditty of his native city, the refrain of which rang out at frequent intervals:
"Más bonita que hay,
A Zaragoza me voy
Dentro de Ar-r-r-rago-o-ón."
It was with genuine regret that I noted next morning the reapproach of civilization. Rough as is the life of these mountaineers of the north their entire freedom from convention, the contact with real men who know not even what pose and pretense are, the drinking into my lungs of the exhilarating mountain air had made the trip that was just ending by far the most joyful portion of all my Spanish experiences. Not since the morning I climbed into Astorga had I heard the whine of a beggar; not once in all the northwest had I caught the faintest scent of a tourist. The trip had likewise been the most inexpensive, for in the week's tramp I had spent less than twelve pesetas.
A few hours more down the mountainside brought me into Oviedo, where I took up my abode in the Calle de la Luna. The boyhood home of Gil Blas is a sober, almost gloomy town, where the sun is reputed to shine but one day in four. Its inhabitants have much in common with the slow-witted Lugense, though they are on the whole more wide-awake and self-satisfied. Of window displays the most frequent was that of a volume in richly illustrated paper cover entitled, "Los Envenenadores (poisoners) de Chicago." It was, possibly, an exposé of the packing houses, but I did not find time to read it. August was nearing its close, and there was still a considerable portion of Spain to be seen. Luckily my kilometer-book was scarcely half-used up; but of the joyful days of freedom on the open road there could not be many more.
CHAPTER XIII
THE LAND OF THE BASQUE
My knapsack garnished, I turned my back on Oviedo early on Sunday morning. The train wound slowly away toward the lofty serrated range that shuts off the world on the south. As we approached the mountains, the line began to tie itself in knots, climbing ever upward. In one section two stations seven miles apart had twenty-six miles of railroad between them. At the second of the two a flushed and puffing Spaniard burst into our compartment with the information that, having reached the former after the train had departed, he had overtaken us on foot.
Still we climbed until, at the turning of the day, high up where clouds should have been we surmounted the ridgepole of the range and, racing, roaring downward, were almost in a moment back in the barren, rocky, sun-baked Spain of old, dust swirling everywhere, the heat wrapping us round as with a woolen blanket, drying up the very tobacco in my pouch; a change almost as decided as from the forests of Norway to the plains of India.
Arrived in León at three, I set off at once tourist-fashion for the cathedral, with its soaring Gothic towers and delicate, airy flying-buttresses the first truly inspiring bit of Christian architecture I had seen in Spain; the first indeed whose exterior was anything. Much of the edifice, however, was glaringly new, the scaffolds of the renovators being still in place.