“Well,” added another, “it’s all very well for people to say they don’t like it; they go all the same. These English Señoras went, I’ll be bound; and yet they’ll go back to England and talk about us.”
My companion shook her head. I pleaded guilty.
“But,” I said in extenuation, “I only went to convince myself, with my own eyes, that the sport is so popular as travellers report. I couldn’t have believed it otherwise.”
Meantime train after train came and went, the train to Badajoz, the train to Alicante, the train to Saragosa, and, at last, the one which was to bear us to Cordova. There it came, creeping through the darkness with its big red eyes, like some monster of Eastern fable, but much more kindly, for it gave us what we needed—quiet, and sleep, and solitude. As usual, we found the ladies’ coupé empty, and, as usual, we curled ourselves up in our rugs, wished each other “good night,” and went to sleep.
There is a cant phrase about railways having done away with the poetry of travelling. Was ever such an absurdity uttered and believed in? I think if ever the poetry of travel was realised, it is now, especially at night and in Spain. You are whirled from region to region apparently by elemental fire alone. You pass through new, sweet, starry atmospheres, like a bird; you go to sleep, and never know under what strange or happy auspices you will awake. This beautiful moonlight landscape of tiny homesteads lying on the banks of a silvery river, of green meadows skirting snow-tipped mountains, and long lines of fir-trees pricking against a blue-black sky,—is it real or a picture only? These dreary table-lands that seem to stretch into infinity, these sloping olive-grounds, these sharp sierras, these alternating scenes of loveliness, and grandeur, and desolation, seem more like the phantasmagoria of dreams than anything else.
And then the aspects of human life, though fleeting, are yet so full of charm. You see faces that tell their own story, and in a moment they have vanished. You are let into little domestic scenes touching, or comic, or painful, or passionate, as the case may be. You cannot stop five minutes at a village station, or linger five minutes in a village waiting-room, without being moved to smiles or tears.
For my part I have never taken a railway journey, however short, that has not had some incident worth remembering; but in Spain, which is a collection of kingdoms, each rich in different sorts of interest, one is troubled, like the silk-merchant at Toledo, with the embarras de richesses. You see a hundred landscapes in a day you would fain remember. You see a hundred faces and hear a hundred things, that seem too characteristic to forget. But, like the changing colours of the sunset, these impressions melt one into the other, and, unless seized at the moment, are utterly lost. When day broke we found that we were traversing a mountainous region of olive-orchards and bare brown fields made ready for sowing, some no larger than a cottager’s garden, others covering acres. A tawny land is this Spain, as Shakespeare says, a gipsy among gipsies, and a Moor by complexion.
We were now in Don Quixote’s country,—such a dreary country, that every one should take Cervantes’ book to read on the way. Then La Mancha, though a mere waste of steppes, with here and there wretched mud-hovels, becomes enchanted ground, and every village named on the map, as sacred as Mecca. “Never let Don Quixote be out of our reader’s saddle-bags,” says the guide to Spain; “it is the best Hand-Book to La Mancha, moral and geographical; there is nothing in it imaginary except the hero’s monomania.”
What is more real than fiction after all?
The battle-fields of Spain are not more interesting than the spots immortalized by Cervantes’ marvellous novel, and one longs to make a pilgrimage to each. As we glide through the charmed region, how familiar do the names and aspects of places seem to us? We are near the village of El Toboso, where lived Dulcinea, whose real name was said to be Aldonza Corchuelo; we pass group after group of windmills, any of which are grim enough to appear like giants to a madman now; here the Don was knighted, there he did penance; amid those craggy heights of the Sierra Morena, he found Cardenio; there glides the stream in which beautiful Dorothea bathed her feet. New names, new faces, new associations, seem alone untrue, unreal, and out of place; and we live all day in Don Quixote’s country among Don Quixote’s friends; Dulcinea, the hospitable goatherd, the wicked little Duchess, the homely Maritornes, the curate and the niece, all are here; and we look across the brown lines of the table-land, and see, or seem to see, the Don himself, spare and spectre-like, followed by burly Sancho Panza, riding out in search of adventure.