I descended for supper. It is the lot of man that he has no sooner climbed to a height where he may look down calmly on the scramble of life than he must again plunge down into it to eat--or to earn more bread. To-morrow I must set my face toward the frontier, toward New York and a return to labor.
On my way to the five-o'clock train next morning I passed through Saragossa's vast covered market and halted to lay in a last supply of figs. The cheery old woman who sold them grasped my fifteen céntimos tightly in her hand and solemnly made with it the sign of the cross. I expressed surprise, and a misgiving lest I had unwittingly parted with coppers possessing peculiar virtues.
"Cómo, señor!" she cried, in wonder at my ignorance. "It is the first money of the day. If I do not say a paternoster with it I may sit here until nightfall without selling another perrito-worth, you may be sure."
The train labored back along the Ebro to Castejon, where I changed cars and journeyed northward, every click of the wheels seeming to cry out that my Spanish summer was nearing its end. At high noon I descended in a dusty plain before the sheer face of the rock on which stands Pamplona of Navarre. When I had climbed into the city I inquired of the first policeman for a modest casa de huéspedes. He rubbed his head a moment and set off with me along the street, chatting sociably as we went. Soon we came upon another officer, to whom the first repeated my question. He scratched his head a moment and fell in beside us, babbling cheerily. Fully a half-mile beyond we accosted a third officer. He rasped his close-shaven poll yet another moment and joined us in the quest, adding a new stock of anecdotes. Here was courtesy extraordinary, even for Spain. Had the police force of Pamplona discovered in me some prince incognito, or was mine to be the rôle of the rolling pancake? We rambled on, but without success, for not another officer could we find in all our circuit of the city. It was certainly close upon an hour after my original inquiry, and something like a hundred yards from the same spot, that we entered a side street and mounted, still in quartet, to a cheap but homelike boarding-house high up in an aged building. The courtesy was quickly explained. The landlady, having expressed her deep gratitude for being brought a new guest, begged each of the officers to do her the favor of accepting a glass of wine. They smacked their lips over it, exchanged with the household the customary salutations and banter, and sauntered back to their beats.
When I had eaten, I descended for a turn about the city with the uncle of my grateful hostess, a mountain-hardened Basque of sixty, in the universal boína, who had but recently retired from a lifetime of rocky hillside farming. Of both his province of Navarre and of himself he talked freely until suddenly my tongue stumbled upon some question of military conscription. He fell at once silent, his jaws stiffened, and into his face came the reflection of a bitter sadness. For the Basques are by no means reconciled to the loss of their cherished fueros, or special political privileges. In silence the sturdy old man led the way half across the city to one of her gates and, climbing a knoll that gave a good view of the surrounding fortifications, said in cheerless tones:
"Don Henrico, we have here the strongest city walls in Spain. But what use are they now against the king's modern artillery? No hay remedio. We must serve in his armies."
As we threaded our way slowly back to the boarding-house I halted at a money changer's to buy a twenty-franc piece. The transaction left me only a handful of coppers in Spanish currency, and I went early to bed lest there be not enough remaining to carry me out of the country.
On a glorious clear September morning I turned my back on Spain and set forth from Pamplona to tramp over the Pyrenees by the pass of Roncesvalles, being just uncertain enough of the road to lend zest to the undertaking. At the edge of the plain to the northward of the city a highway began to wind its way upward along the bank of a young river, not laboriously, but steadily rising. Habitations were rare. Late in the morning a spot above whirling rapids in shaded solitude suggested a plunge; but as I pulled off my coat a sound fell on my ear and, looking across the stream, I saw a half-dozen women kneeling on the bank and staring curiously across at me. When I retreated, they laughed heartily and fell once more to pounding away at their laundry-work on the stones.
Some distance higher I found another pool in which, by rolling over and over, I won the afterglow of a real swim. Sharper ascents succeeded, though still none steep. I was soon surrounded by a Tyrolian scenery of forest and deep-cut valleys, and among up-to-date people--the farming implements being of modern type and the smallest villages having electric lights run by power from the mountain streams. Every fellow-mortal, young or old, as is usual in mountain regions, gave me greeting, not with the familiar "Vaya!" nor the "Buenos!" of Galicia, but with "Adiós!" which seemed here to mean much more than the grammatical "Good-by." In the place of guardias civiles were carabineros in a provincial uniform, whose advances, if less warm and companionable, were none the less kindly.
Toward evening the road flowed up into a broad, oblong meadow, ankle-deep in greenest grass, musical with the sound of cow-bells, across which it drifted as if content to rest for a time on its oars before taking the final climb. The sun was setting when I reached Burguete at forty-four kilometers, station of the trans-Pyrenean diligence and the point that I had been assured I should do well to reach in a two-day's walk. But I felt as unwearied as at the outset; the towers of Roncesvalles stood plainly visible five kilometers ahead across the green tableland. I rambled on in the cool of evening and by dark was housed in a good inn of the mountain village.