“ He who will gather the real honey of travel must be on the scene, a "super" at least on the stage itself, not gossiping with his fellows in a box.
With all its aridity the vega was richly productive. Olive-trees hung heavy, on either hand spread broad fields of grain in which peasants were toiling swelteringly as if they had never heard of the common sense institution of Sunday. When sun and tree-tops met, the highway began to wind, leaving the vega behind and wandering through low hills among which appeared no villages, only an occasional rough-hewn house by the way. ”

“ Thus it was that, though I planned to reach Córdoba that evening, I left Seville during the morning of July 8 on foot. In my knapsack was a day's supply of both food and drink, in the form of three-cent's worth of those fresh figs that abound in Spain--the one fruit that is certainly descended directly from the Garden of Eden. For miles the route led across a desert-dry land as flat as a western prairie, grilling in the blazing sunshine. At rare intervals an olive-tree cast a dense black shadow. ”

“ There is to-day very little left of the national costume of Spain. One may except the stiff, square-cut sombrero, the alpargata of workman and beggar, the garb of the arriero, fitting and suiting him as if it had grown on him, the blanket which the peasant wears thrown over one shoulder, not because he realizes what a charm this adds to his appearance, but because he often sleeps out of doors or on the stone floor of public stables. Last, and least to be forgotten, is the mantilla. ”

“ The León of to-day is a large village, a dried-up, dirty, dilapidated, depopulated, cobble-streeted village of snarling, meretricious-minded inhabitants jumbled together inside a wall that with the cathedral is the only remaining proof of former importance. Here once more was the beggar with his distressing whine, his brow of bronze, and his all too evident injuries; not numerously but constituting a large percentage of the population. In all Spain the devise of insurance companies on the fronts of buildings is more than frequent; in León there was barely a hovel without one or more. ”

“ Before me lay the most laborious task of all my Spanish journey. A mountain as nearly perpendicular as man could hope to ascend, without a break or a knoll in all its slope, rose, a sheer wall, certainly four thousand feet above. The gorge seemed some boundary set by the gods between two worlds. Up the face of the cliff a path had been laid out with mathematical precision, every one of its score of legs a toilsome climb over loose stones, with the sun, untempered by a breath of wind, pouring down its fury upon my back. It was hot as Spain in the depth of the canyon ”

“ Three kilometers more and there lay before me the great open highway to Madrid, three hundred and seven kilometers away. I struck into it boldly, for all my drowsiness, reflecting that even the immortal Murillo had tramped it before me.
The landscape lay desolate on either hand, almost haggard in the glaring sunshine, offering a loneliness of view that seemed all at once to stamp with reality those myriad tales of the land pirates of Spain. Indeed, the race has not yet wholly died out. ”

“ Rough as is the life of these mountaineers of the north their entire freedom from convention, the contact with real men who know not even what pose and pretense are, the drinking into my lungs of the exhilarating mountain air had made the trip that was just ending by far the most joyful portion of all my Spanish experiences. Not since the morning I climbed into Astorga had I heard the whine of a beggar; not once in all the northwest had I caught the faintest scent of a tourist. The trip had likewise been the most inexpensive, for in the week's tramp I had spent less than twelve pesetas. ”

“ No type is missing from the strolling multitude. Strolling, too, it is, in spite of the congestion; for the slow tide-like movement of the throng not only gives opportunity but compels any lazy foreigner to walk whether he will or not. Everyone is busy with gallantry and doing nothing--doing it only as the Spaniard can who, thanks to temperament, climate, and training knows that peerless art and follows it with pleasure, not with the air of one who prefers or pretends to prefer to be working.
The Sevillian is in many things, above all in his amusements, a full-grown child. ”

“ By day, indeed, there is little else to do in Seville than the royal occupation of doing nothing, a stroll along the Sierpes in the morning, a retreat toward noisy, glaring noonday to the cool and silent cathedral or those other churches that rival it as museums of art, there to wander undisturbed among masterpieces of Spain's top-most century. The cathedral, by the way, houses the most recent traveler in the calendar of saints. ”

“ Richer by far would be the richest city of the earth could she purchase and transplant into her own midst the Plaza Mayor of Salamanca, with its small forest of palms, the rich brown medallioned façades and surrounding colonnades beneath which the salmantino is wont to stroll, la salmantina on his arm, while the band plays in the flower-shrouded stand in its center. Salamanca might sell, too, in spite of her boast that it is the finest in Spain, being poorer than the proverbial church mouse, were she not also Spanish and prouder than she is poor. ”

“ Politically Spanish, it is so in little else. The last traces of the Arab, so indelible in the rest of the peninsula, have disappeared. The racial amalgam, now the gallego, is close akin to the Portuguese, like all long dominated peoples docile, unassertive, born to be a servant to mankind. He is the chief butt, the low comedian of the Spanish stage, slow, loutish, heavy of mind and body, without a suggestion of the fire of that bubbling child of enthusiasm, the Andaluz; none of the native dignity and consciousness of personal worth of the Castilian, not even the dreaminess of the Manchegan. ”

“ From this summit the world fell pell-mell away at my feet into a bottomless gorge; and beyond, two or three miles away, the culminating point in a tumultuous landscape of ravines, gulleys and precipitous chasms, sat an Oriental city, close-packed and isolated in its rocky solitude, the sun's last rays casting over its domes and minaret-like spires a flood of color that seemed suddenly and bodily to transport the beholder into the very heart of Asia. My goal was won; before me lay the ancient capital of the Goths, history-rich Toledo. ”

“ I flung them open and leaned out over the reja; and all at once, unheralded, the Spain of my dreams leaped into reality. Below, to one side, flowed the murmuring stream of Gibraltar's main thoroughfare; further away the flat-roofed city descended in moonlit indistinctness into the Mediterranean. From a high-walled garden a pebble-toss away and canopied with fragrant fruit-trees, rose the twang of a guitar and a man's clear voice singing a languorous air of Andalusia. ”

“ There is one road to redemption for Spain,--that she shoot her priests and set her soldiers to work. As isolated individuals the merry, dissolute fellows of the cloth might be permitted to live on as they have, and suffer the natural end of such living. But as a class they are beyond reform; their point of view is so utterly warped and incorrigible, they have grown so pestiferous with laziness and "graft" that there is no other remedy, "no hay otro remedio" as the Spaniard himself would say could his throttled mind cast off the rubbish of superstition and cant for one clear thought. ”

“ Even though one deny the right of its inhabitants to pity the man who must live and die elsewhere, even he who finds it panting and simmering in the heat of summer, will still count it no punishment to spend a fortnight in Seville. Tranquillity and that laggard humor so befitting vacation days reign within its precincts; yet it is a real city, never falling quite inert even at the hour of siesta, which is so like the silence of the grave in other towns of Andalusia. ”

“ A stream trickles along its bottom, how deep down one recognizes only when he has noted how like toy buildings are the grist-mills that squat beside it pilfering their power.
Elsewhere within the town the eyes wander away to the enclosing mountains. The wonder is not that her inhabitants are dreamy-eyed; rather that they succeed at intervals in shaking off the spell of nature's setting to play their rôles in life's prosaic drama. As for myself, I rambled through her piping streets for half the afternoon because she is Spanish, and because my supply of currency was falling low. ”

“ Long before we had succeeded in that venturesome undertaking, however, there burst forth a sudden, unheralded roar of uncounted voices, the immense throng surged riverward with an abruptness that all but swept us off our feet, the thunder of thousands of hoofs swelled nearer, and down upon us rode an entire regiment of guardias civiles in uniforms so new they seemed but that moment to have left the tailor, and astride finer horses than I had dreamed existed in Spain. ”

“ There develops with much wandering an instinct to follow the right fork of a mountain trail, slight hints that could not be explained, but without the half-unconscious noting of which I must have gone a score of times astray. Twice or thrice I stumbled into a hamlet in some wrinkle of the range, a village of five or six hovels huddling in the shadow of an enormous, overtowering church, all built of flat field stones and swarming with huge white dogs. ”

“ The Spanish plaza de toros is the nearest modern prototype of the Roman Coliseum; when it is filled one may easily form a mental picture of the scene at a gladiatorial combat. By four-thirty the voice of the circular multitude was like the rumble of some distant Niagara. Howling vendors of thirst-quenching fruits climbed over our blistering knees; between the barriers circulated hawkers of everything that may be sold to the festive-humored. Spain may be tardy in all else, but her bullfights begin sharply on time. ”

“ Toward sunset, after the siesta, it is not merely à la mode but good sense to stroll down to the banks of the Guadalquivir by the Golden Tower and drift an hour or two back and forth along the deep-shaded Alameda. There one will be in the best company in Seville--and the worst; for all the city is there, lolling in its carriage or pattering along the gravel in its hempen sandals. ”

“ At fifteen kilometers the highway swerved slightly and lost from view for the first time the immense cathedral of Manzanares behind. On either hand, miles visible in every direction, huddled stone towns on bare hillsides and in rocky vales, each inconspicuous but for its vast overtowering church. "Si la demeure des hommes est pauvre, celle de Dieu est riche," charges colorful Gautier; which, if the church of Spain is truly the "demeure de Dieu," is sternly true. ”

“ On rare occasions the matador, disobeying the unwritten law that the animal must be despatched by a thrust down through the body, places the point of his sword just behind the horns and with the slightest of thrusts kills the bull so suddenly that his fall sounds like the thump of a barrel dropped from a height. Then does the spectator, the unseasoned at least, experience an indefinable depression as if this striking of a great brute dead by a mere prick in the back of the neck were a warning of how frail after all is the hold of the most robust on life. ”

“ Motioning to me to be seated, he raced away into the depths of the fonda calling for "Pasquale." That youth soon appeared, in tuxedo and dazzling expanse of shirt-front, extolling as he came the uncounted virtues of his house, in a flowing, unblushing imitation of French. Among those things that I had not come to Spain to hear was Spanish mutilation of the Gaelic tongue. For a long minute I gazed at the speaker with every possible evidence of astonishment. Then turning to the landlord I inquired in most solemn Castilian.
"Está loco, señor? Is he insane that he jabbers such a jargon?" ”

“ Except for it the women of Spain have succumbed to the ugly creations of Paris; may that day be centuries distant when the abomination masquerading under the name of woman's hat makes its way into the peninsula. Yet there is never among Spanish women that gaudy affectation of style so frequent elsewhere. Give her the merest strip of gay calico and the española will make it truly ornamental; with a red flower to wear over one temple and a mantilla draped across the back of her head she is more pleasingly adorned than the best that Paris can offer. ”

“ Two besmirched street Arabs, pouncing upon it almost as it fell--so extraordinary a curiosity was it in this unwooded region--waged pitched battle until each carried away a half triumphant. I pushed on across the massive Puente de Toledo high above the trickle of water that goes by the name of the river Manzanares and, mounting through a city as different from Toledo as Cairo from Damascus, halted at last in the mildly animated Puerta del Sol, the center of Spain and, to the Spaniard, of the universe. ”

“ A half-perpendicular hour passed by, and I seemed to have left Spain behind. The road was toiling sharply upward through deep forests of evergreen, cool as an Alpine valley, opening now and then to offer a vista of thick treetops and a glimpse of red-tiled villages; a scene as different from sterile, colorless, sunken-cheeked Castille as could well be imagined. Nor did the dusk descend so swiftly in these upper heights. The sun had set when I reached the summit at six thousand feet and, passing through the Puerto de Navacerrada, started swiftly downward in the thickening gloom ”

“ SPANISH ROADS AND ROADSTERS
In the gloom of evening I espied on a dull, sterile hillside a vast rambling venta, as bare, slate-colored, and marked with time as the hills themselves. Here was exactly such a caravansary as that in which he of the Triste Figura had watched over his arms by night and won his Micomiconian knighthood. It consisted of an immense enclosure that was half farmyard, backed by a great stable of which a strip around two sides beneath the low vaulted roof had been marked off for the use of man; the whole dull, gloomy, cheerless, unrelieved by a touch of color. ”