"They were all men in the prime of life," says Borrow, "mostly of tall stature and of Herculean brawn and limbs. They wore huge whiskers, and walked with a fanfaronading air, as if they courted danger, and despised it.... Their proper duty is to officiate as a species of police and to clear the roads of robbers, for which duty they are in one respect admirably calculated, having been generally robbers themselves at one period of their lives."
Alas! these romantic ruffians have disappeared from Galician highways, and their nearest prototypes to-day are harmless peasants adorned with flowing side-whiskers, the style of decoration favoured by respectable and inoffensive British butlers.
To my lasting regret I did not thoroughly re-read my Borrow until I returned from Galicia, because Galicia fascinated him, and he covered much of the ground that I personally traversed, and looked upon many awesome sights which I, in a spirit of modernity and commerce, would have photographed.
At the bridge of Castellanos, "a spot notorious for robbery and murder, and well adapted for both," Borrow passed "three ghastly heads stuck on poles standing by the wayside; they were those of a captain of banditti and two of his accomplices, who had been seized and executed about two months before. Their principal haunt was the vicinity of the bridge, and it was their practice to cast the bodies of the murdered into the deep black water which runs rapidly beneath." Borrow added that the three heads would always live in his remembrance, particularly that of the captain, which "stood on a higher pole than the other two: the long hair was waving in the wind and the blackened, distorted features were grinning in the sun."
All this sounds very gruesome and barbarous; yet such sights were common in England at the same time, for those were the days of public executions and gibbeting of corpses.
The things seen in Galicia do not include the woeful exhibitions of ignorance of the native language which are so common on the part of the Englishman abroad, especially in France. Even the hardy British matron who in Paris will address the cabman as cochon refrains from speech in Galicia, because no word of Spanish has formed part of her education. Yet a working acquaintance with the language can be easily obtained, for Spanish, though of all modern tongues the least understood by Englishmen, is the easiest to learn. Borrow declared it to be the most sonorous tongue in existence. In my own wanderings I had the constant help and guidance of an excellent interpreter, and the tourist would do well to avail himself of such skilled assistance, which leaves him free to enjoy the charms of the country and the customs and peculiarities of the people. The system also removes the need for travellers to adopt Borrow's idea of making a foreigner understand them in his own language; that method being to speak "with much noise and vociferation, opening their mouths wide." He protests that when his fellow-countrymen attempt to speak the most sonorous of all tongues they put their hands in their pockets and fumble lazily, instead of applying them (their hands, not their pockets) to the indispensable office of gesticulation. "Well may the poor Spaniards exclaim," he adds despairingly, "These English talk so crabbedly that Satan himself would not be able to understand them." To do my countrymen justice, I am bound to say that, with a single exception, I never heard them attempt to speak Spanish in Galicia; and as for the isolated case, I was assured that his Spanish was too bad to be intelligible.
THE CHURCH AT BOUZAS, ON THE COAST