Spanish Highways and Byways

by Katharine Lee Bates

We dropped down past a noble line of deep-sea merchantmen, from Marseilles, Hamburg, and far-away ports of Norway and Sweden. We passed fishing boats casting their nets, and met a stately Spanish bark, the Calderon. On the shores we caught glimpses of orange grove and olive orchard, lines of osiers and white poplars, and we paused at the little town of Coria, famous for its earthen jars, to land one of our peasants, while a jolly priest, whose plain black garb was relieved by a vermilion parasol, tossed down cigars to his friends among the sailors.

Then our galleon pursued her course into the flat and desolate regions of the marismas. These great salt marshes of the Guadalquivír, scarcely more than a bog in winter, serve as pasture for herds of hardy sheep and for those droves of mighty bulls bred in Andalusia to die in the arenas of all Spain. For long stretches the green bank would be lined with the glorious creatures, standing like ebony statues deep amid the reeds, some entirely black, and many black with slight markings of white. The Guadalquivír intersects in triple channel this unpeopled waste, concerning whose profusion of plant life and animal life English hunters tell strange tales. They report flocks of rosy flamingoes, three hundred or five hundred in a column, "glinting in the sunshine like a pink cloud," and muddy islets studded thick with colonies of flamingo nests. Most wonderful of all, the camel, that ancient and serious beast of burden, a figure pertaining in all imaginations to the arid, sandy desert, keeps holiday in these huge swamps. It seems that, in 1829, a herd of camels was brought into the province of Cadiz, from the Canaries, for transport service in road-building and the like, and for trial in agriculture. But the peculiar distaste of horses for these humpy monsters spoiled the scheme, and the camels, increased to some eighty in number, took merrily to the marshes, where, in defiance of all caravan tradition, they thrive in aquatic liberty. The fascination of this wilderness reached even the dingy steamer deck. Gulls, ducks, and all manner of wild fowl flashed in the sunshine, which often made the winding river, as tawny as our James, sparkle like liquid gold.

If only it had been gold indeed, and had kept the traceries of the Roman keels that have traversed it, the Vandal swords whose red it has washed away, the Moorish faces it has mirrored, the Spanish—

"Usted come?"

It might have been Cortes who was offering that bowl of puchero, but no! Cortes would have mixed it in his plumy helmet and stirred it with that thin, keen sword one may see in the Madrid Armería. This was a barefooted cabin boy, in blue linen blouse and patched blue trousers, with a scarlet cloth cap tied over his head by means of an orange-colored handkerchief. The dancing eyes that lit his shy brown face had sea blues in them. He was a winsome little fellow enough, but I did not incline to his cookery. While I was watching river, shores, and herds and chatting with the simpático sailor, who, taking his cue from my look, expressed the deepest abhorrence of the bull-fights, which, I make no doubt, he would sell his dinner, jacket, bed, even his guitar, to see, I had taken secret note of the cuisine. This child, who could not have counted his twelfth birthday, kindled the fire in a flimsy tin pail, lined with broken bricks. He cracked over his knee a few pieces of driftwood, mixed the fragments with bits of coal which he shook out of a sheepskin bottle, doused oil over the whole, and cheerfully applied the match, while the commercial traveller hastily drew up a bucket of water to have on hand for emergencies. Then the boy, with excellent intentions in the way of neatness, whisked his blackened hands across the rough end of a rope and plunged them into the pot of garbanzos, to which he added beans, cabbage, remnants of fried fish, and other sundries at his young discretion. And while the mess was simmering, he squatted down on the deck, with his grimy little feet in his fists, rocking himself back and forth to his own wild Malaga songs, and occasionally disengaging one hand or the other to plunge it into the pot after a tasty morsel.

"Will you eat?" he repeated manfully, reddening under the scrutiny of stranger eyes.

"Many thanks! May it profit yourself!"

I opened my luncheon, and again we exchanged these fixed phrases of Spanish etiquette, although after the refusals enjoined by code of courtesy, the boy was finally induced to relieve me of my more indigestible goodies.

"Did you ever hear of Columbus?" I asked, as we munched chestnut cakes together, leaning on the rail.

"No, señora," he replied, with another blush, "I have heard of nothing. I know little. I am of very small account. I cook and sing. I am good for nothing more."