I Will Not Be Sure, But
I Think We Began To See His Kind As Soon As We Got Out Of Yalladolid,
When We Began Running Through A Country Wooded With Heavy, Low-Crowned
Pines That Looked Like The Stone-Pines Of Italy, But Were Probably Not
The Same.
After twenty miles of this landscape the brown pig with pigs
of other complexions, as much guarded as possible, multiplied among the
patches of vineyard.
He had there the company of tall black goats and
rather unhappy-looking black sheep, all of whom he excelled in the art
of foraging among the vines and the stubble of the surrounding
wheat-lands. After the vineyards these opened and stretched themselves
wearily, from low dull sky to low dull sky, nowise cheered in aspect by
the squalid peasants, scratching their tawny expanses with those crooked
prehistoric sticks which they use for plows in Spain. It was a dreary
landscape, but it was good to be out of Valladolid on any terms, and
especially good to be away from the station which we had left emulating
the odors of the house of Cervantes.
I
There had been the usual alarm about the lack of places in the
Sud-Express which we were to take at Valladolid, but we chanced getting
them, and our boldness was rewarded by getting a whole compartment to
ourselves, and a large, fat friendly conductor with an eye out for tips
in every direction. The lunch in our dining-car was for the first time
in Spain not worth the American price asked for it; everywhere else on
the Spanish trains I must testify that the meals were excellent and
abundant; and the refection may now have felt in some obscure sort the
horror of the world in which the Sud-Express seemed to have lost itself.
The scene was as alien to any other known aspect of our comfortable
planet as if it were the landscape of some star condemned for the sins
of its extinct children to wander through space in unimaginable
desolation.
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