Pursuing Or Pursued By His Tusked And Bristled Ancestor, And Then Slowly
Reverting Through The Different Invasions And Civilizations To
That
signal moment when, after three hundred Moslem years, Toledo became
Christian again forever, and pork resumed its primacy at
The table.
Dark, mysterious, fierce, the proud pig stood, a figure made for
sculpture; and if he had been a lion, with the lion's royal ideal of
eating rather than feeding the human race, the reader would not have
thought him unworthy of literature; I have seldom seen a lion that
looked worthier of it.
We must have met farmer-folk, men and women, on our way and have seen
their white houses farther or nearer. But mostly the landscape was
lonely and at times nightmarish, as the Castilian landscape has a trick
of being, and remanded us momently to the awful entourage of our run
from Valladolid to Madrid. We were glad to get back to the Tagus, which
if awful is not grisly, but wherever it rolls its yellow flood lends the
landscape such a sublimity that it was no esthetic descent from the high
perch of that proud pig to the mighty gorge through which, geologically
long ago, the river had torn its way. When we drove back the
bridge-menders stood aside for us while we were yet far off, and the
women came to their doorways at the sound of our bells for another
exchange of jokes with our driver. By the time a protracted file of
mules had preceded us over the bridge, a brisk shower had come up, and
after urging our grays at their topmost speed toward the famous church
of San Juan de los Reyes Catolicos, we still had to run from our
carriage door through the rain.
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