A long mile from the wooded base of Sobroso I had watched a train of bullock-carts crawl up the white high road—a train of seven, timber-laden, making an extraordinary noise as they approached. Amongst the drivers was an old woman, bare-footed, who, as she trudged alongside her patient pair of oxen, wove wool with a distaff which she carried in her hands. Later, from Sobroso itself, I listened to the distant noises of the bullock-train—a musical creaking, groaning, and rasping—with a sudden silence when the cattle were brought up to rest. Sometimes the creaking would be like church bells, at other times the sound resembled the whistle of a locomotive. It was an uncanny medley, like, and yet unlike, both bells and whistle, and to be compared only with itself, for there is nothing else like the creaking of the bullock-cart of Galicia. They say that the noise is made deliberately, to give warning, in narrow, dangerous roads where there is no room to pass, that a bullock-cart is coming; but they do not explain how a driver, dulled and deafened by the uproar of his own conveyance, hears the noises of a rival vehicle.
A PEASANT'S FUNERAL IN THE HILLS
A PEASANT WOMAN, WITH HER DISTAFF, DRIVING A BULLOCK-CART
Down in the foreground is a white, peaceful church, near it a tall, slender pillar of stone, surmounted by an effigy of the crucified Redeemer on the one side, and on the other a figure of the Virgin and Child; on the tops of neighbouring walls are crosses, emblems of that faith which all Galicians have adopted, for here, as elsewhere in Spain, there is one religion only, and it is that of the Holy Mother Church. The whole scene is wonderful and impressive, and the country has the great merit of being almost untravelled by and unknown to ordinary tourists.
From Sobroso's solitude you walk back to the high road where your motor-car or Spanish cab awaits you and resume your journey, or, being untroubled by thoughts of time or vehicles, walk onward in the strangely fascinating twilight of Galicia. You pass the peasant women, and they smile and murmur "Adios," and instinctively you raise your hat in recognition of the salutation.
All roads near Mondariz lead to the hydro, and an hour or two after you have descended from the ruins of Sobroso you are in the great dining-hall of the hotel or in its brilliant salon, or are smoking in the verandah outside, in the pine-scented air, with semi-tropical vegetation around you. It is no exaggeration to speak of this great undertaking as Mondariz the marvellous.
