Part 49

Again we were on the highroad between Madrid and Seville; yet the waving ruts and ridges of hardened mud were sprinkled with a green glaze of grass, as if in treacherous attempt at concealment. Dust curled behind us like smoke, creeping under the tarpaulin that covered our luggage on the roof, and into our suit-cases, powdering our clothing like fine white sugar.

Despite the good springs and deep cushions of the car, Pilar’s light body danced up and down, as Dick said, like a bit of American popcorn over a hot fire; and our two guests, who had thought themselves motor enthusiasts, did not respond ardently to Dick’s forced praises of the sport.

How glorious, said he (every other word emphasized with a bump), how glorious not to be bound down to the fixed and inconvenient hours of trains. To stop where and when you like; to start on again when you choose; never to have your view of the choicest bit of scenery blotted out in a tunnel; to be grimed by no railway smoke; always to feel your face fanned by a fresh breeze, tingling with ozone; to read—if you had the seeing eye—the whole life of the country in writing on the road; the tracks of heavy carts; the delicate prints of donkey’s feet, trotting to market laden with wine or fruit; the tracing of diligence wheels, or old-fashioned carriages on their way to a bull-fight; the footmarks of peasants economically carrying their shoes over their shoulders; the clover-like imprint of sheeps’ little hoofs, and goats’; the pads of shepherd dogs. To flash through kinematographic glimpses of vineland and oliveland, and graceful blue mountain shapes; to see strange villages of whose existence you would never know when plodding along by train; to fly from one living reminder of Don Quixote to another, as we were doing to-day (had we not seen the inn where he was knighted?)—Bang! Never before can I remember hailing with delight the pistol-like report which can mean but one thing; the bursting of a tyre. But I was enchanted that Dick’s eloquence should be interrupted.

We had jolted through wine-making Valdepeñas, where the red juice of the grape seems to spout from a grey valley of stones; we had passed, in the quaint market-place, the posada which Don Quixote knew; we had bounced through Santa Cruz de Mudela, with its fine old fifteenth century church, and had seen its famous and gaily coloured garters exposed for sale in the shops; and now we were far from towns or villages, out in the country.

Luckily, everybody was ready for lunch, and Pilar and the Cherub had had the forethought to order things which would not have occurred to Dick or me. Not far away, on the crest of a hill-billow, stood a road-mender’s house, with an outside, adobe oven like a huge beehive. We crawled to it, travelling on the collapsed tyre, and were served by a delightful brown family; served as if we had been the King and his suite who had lunched (so said the brown family) on that spot a few weeks ago. Out came the chairs which the King and his friends had sat in, plates and glasses from which the King and his friends had drunk; and the simple people derived a childlike pleasure from dwelling on the episode.

As before, the news of our presence seemed to flash through the air and bring, in the same mysterious way, an audience out of empty space. Pilar said that the people who came were in reality wild birds, seen by our sophisticated eyes in the form of human beings; and as if they had been wild birds, we coaxed them, till they trusted us and fed with us, drinking from our wineskin the blood of the Spanish grape, almost innocent of alcohol. The soft Spanish language, as it fell from their lips, was rich as the taste of that Spanish wine on the tongue, and stirred in my heart a pride of kinsmanship.

While we others lunched, Ropes jacked up the Gloria and changed the inner tube, pausing now and then to munch a sandwich or swallow a draught of wine with an unruffled air characteristic of him. When the road-mender mentioned that four bandidos had been captured in the morning by the civil guard, on the road along which we had passed, his expression did not change by the twitching of a muscle. Indeed, he looked equal to disposing of half a dozen brigands without the aid of a single guardia civile.

After forty minutes by the wayside, we set off to penetrate farther into that melancholy country which Cervantes loved, and almost at once were in the Venta de Cordeñas, that wide and stony waste where Don Quixote rode to do his penance. The gayest spirits must have been dashed by the gloom of the knight’s self-imposed prison, and mine were not improved. I had a disquieting impression that Monica’s voice, calling an appeal, came echoing from the mountain walls.

Of course, there was nothing in it, except superstitious nonsense of which I ought to be ashamed; yet I could not shut my ears to her voice, which seemed to cry the words her fingers once had written: “Don’t desert me! Don’t leave me alone!”

Always the echo followed, as the car mounted higher on the slopes of the Sierra Morena, and such glories of Spain opened out before our eyes as we had not seen yet, even in the splendid Gorge of Pancorbo.

Crest above crest, great chains of mountains cut the smooth sapphire of the sky; and as we serpentined into their closer grasp, each loop of the Alpine road gave a new and more fantastic combination of rock and stream. The car was boring into a gorge of astounding sublimity, a hammer-stroke of Vulcan which had cleft the mountain and left behind chips of copper, of gold, of silver, and a rich sprinkling of precious gems.

As the god’s hammer fell, out of the ruin it made were shaped marvels of form; Olympian castles and giant statues, images of such savage creatures as roamed devastating the earth in days when man was in his childhood.

Even the calm countenance of Ropes was transfigured by this burst of splendour. “Makes you forget that roads can be bad, and tyres go wrong, doesn’t it, sir?” he said to me. “I could drive through places like these, day and night on end, without food or drink, never knowing if I was done up.”

And praise from a chauffeur is praise indeed!

We were in the defile of Despeñaperros, the most terrific and, at the same time, the noblest gorge of Spain; and I should have known it from stories told by my father, who had once fought with bandoleros upon this very road. Down into the river that tossed up white plumes of foam far below, he had flung one man, while another fired shot after shot from his carbine, screened behind a rock on the opposite side of the ravine, scarcely a biscuit-throw away.

Long before, too, history had been made in this mountain passage whose walls had rung with wilder sounds than the screaming of our siren. The rival battle-cries of Moor and Spaniard had echoed among the rocks, and Christian blood and pagan had mingled in the white spume of the river.

I thought of these things, as I looked down into the silent depths of the gulf, and saw the sparkling veins of granite, and purple masses of slate gleam with volcanic life and colour. But still I heard the haunting echo of Monica’s voice, in the solitude through which she must lately have passed, perhaps leaving some message, if I could only know.

Was it merely a fantastic twist of my nerves, or was her spirit calling, trying to make itself heard and understood?

It was Pilar who broke the spell by a sudden clapping of her hands. “Andalucía! dear Andalucía!” she cried; and each one of us, subdued and silenced by the majesty of the scene, started as if waking from sleep.

She was pointing at a stone obelisk, looking at which her father smiled and raised his hat.

“No more cold,” said he; “no more winds to nip our noses. Here’s the dividing line between the north countries and the country of the sun.”

Then, as if the obelisk had been the finger of some genie invoking a magic change, an enchantment blurred the stem features of the landscape. It was as though the fierce face of an angry giant had been transformed into that of a beautiful, laughing woman with the sun in her eyes.

The defile opened when we had slipped past a half-hidden mountain hamlet or two; widened into a valley bright with colour as the jewels on the spread tail of a peacock; and boat-like, the car rode an undulating sea of green and azure and gold, that scintillated as if a spray of diamonds were tossed into air with the speed of our going.

At Santa Elena we were in a Spain I had not seen. At La Carolina we burst into a world fair and fertile as the Garden of Eden; and I remembered the Moorish legend that Heaven is built on the blue that hangs over Andalucía.

Hedges of aloe brandished zincen swords and darts; cacti sprawled and leered along the roadside; set in the vivid green of ripening grain, olive groves seemed carved from jade; or the bare rosy shoulders of sloping hillsides turned by contrast their pale tints to tarnished silver. Vines with young gold leaves trailed the purple earth; avenues of acacias dripped perfumes; and as the sun leaned towards the west, the quivering pink light on violet mountains gave to Andalucía the vivid, almost violent colouring one sees in sensational posters.

Each girl we passed wore a bright flower shining star-like through the black cloud of her hair. The men had discarded the fur-trimmed Louis XI caps for the broad-brimmed, grey sombreros de Cordoba, and the horses or mules were harnessed with gay splashes of red and blue colour, and bobbing tassels.

We had talked of Linares, the lead-mining town, as a halting-place for the night, as we were pledged not to track down the Lecomte; and on the outskirts of Bailen, as twilight fell, the Gloria was brought to a sudden stop in the midst of a pulsating crowd, that we might ask the way.

If we aroused their curiosity, they piqued us to the same emotion, for most of the men, and there were hundreds, not only wore upon their legs a kind of divided pinafore, but carried on their backs an apparatus which would have excited wonder in any other than this fairy country.