VI
We Were Going To Spend The Rest Of The Day Driving Out Through The City
Into The Country Beyond The Tagus, And We Drove Off In Our Really
Splendid Turnout Through Swarms Of Beggars Whose Prayers Our Horses'
Bells Drowned When We Left Them To Their Despair At The Hotel Door.
At
the moment of course we believe that it was a purely dramatic misery
which the wretched creatures represented; but sometimes I have since had
moments of remorse in which I wish I had thrown big and little dogs
broadcast among them.
They could not all have been begging for the
profit or pleasure of it; some of them were imaginably out of work and
worthily ragged as I saw them, and hungry as I begin to fear them. I am
glad now to think that many of them could not see with their poor blind
eyes the face which I hardened against them, as we whirled away to the
music of our horses' bells.
The bells pretty well covered our horses from their necks to their
haunches, a pair of gallant grays urged to their briskest pace by the
driver whose short square face and humorous mouth and eyes were a joy
whenever we caught a glimpse of them. He was one of those drivers who
know everybody; he passed the time of day with all the men we met, and
he had a joking compliment for all the women, who gladdened at sight of
him from the thresholds where they sat sewing or knitting: such a driver
as brings a gay world to home-keeping souls and leaves them with the
feeling of having been in it. I would have given much more than I gave
the beggars in Toledo to know just in what terms he and his universal
acquaintance bantered each other; but the terms might sometimes have
been rather rank. Something, at any rate, qualified the air, which I
fancied softer than that of Madrid, with a faint recurrent odor, as if
in testimony of the driver's derivation from those old rancid
Christians, as the Spaniards used to call them, whose lineage had never
been crossed with Moorish blood. If it was merely something the carriage
had acquired from the stable, still it was to be valued for its
distinction in a country of many smells; and I would not have been
without it.
When we crossed the Tagus by a bridge which a company of workmen
willingly paused from mending to let us by, and remained standing
absent-mindedly aside some time after we had passed, we found ourselves
in a scene which I do not believe was ever surpassed for spectacularity
in any theater. I hope this is not giving the notion of something
fictitious in it; I only mean that here Nature was in one of her most
dramatic moods. The yellow torrent swept through a deep gorge of red
earth, which on the farther side climbed in precipitous banks, cleft by
enormous fissures, or chasms rather, to the wide plateau where the gray
city stood. The roofs of mellow tiles formed a succession of levels from
which the irregular towers and pinnacles of the churches stamped
themselves against a sky now filled with clouds, but in an air so clear
that their beautiful irregularities and differences showed to one very
noble effect. The city still looked the ancient capital of the two
hundred thousand souls it once embraced, and in its stony repair there
was no hint of decay.
On our right, the road mounted through country wild enough at times, but
for the most part comparatively friendly, with moments of being almost
homelike. There were slopes which, if massive always, were sometimes
mild and were gray with immemorial olives. In certain orchard nooks
there were apricot trees, yellowing to the autumn, with red-brown
withered grasses tangling under them. Men were gathering the fruit of
the abounding cactuses in places, and in one place a peasant was bearing
an arm-load of them to a wide stone pen in the midst of which stood a
lordly black pig, with head lifted and staring, indifferent to cactuses,
toward Toledo. His statuesque pose was of a fine hauteur, and a more
imaginative tourist than I might have fancied him lost in a dream of the
past, piercing beyond the time of the Iberian autochtons to those
prehistoric ages
When wild in woods the noble savage ran,
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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