CHAPTER XIV

A DESCENT INTO ARAGON

There was an unwonted excitement in the air when I boarded the train next morning for the longest unbroken ride of my Spanish journey. Pernales, the anachronism, the twentieth-century bandit of the environs of Cordoba, had fallen. Aboard the train newspapers were as numerous as on the New York "Elevated" at a similar hour. I bought one and was soon lost like the rest in the adventures of this last defier of the mighty guardia civil.

The story was simple. Two evenings before, about the time I had been yawning over the king's fireworks, Pernales had met a village arriero among the foothills of his retreat, and asked him some question about the road. The rustic gave him the desired information, but guessing with whom he was speaking, had raced away, once he was out of sight, as fast as he could drive his ass before him, to carry his suspicions to the village alcalde. The rest was commonplace. A dozen guardias stalked the unsuspecting bandolero among the hills, and coming upon him toward sunrise, brought his unsanctioned career abruptly to a close.

"Our special correspondent" had dismally failed to cast over his account the glamour of romance, but in compensation had taken a reporter's care to give the precise point in the right temple where the ball had entered, with the exact dimensions of the orifice, as well as the life story of the hero who had bored it. Nay, with almost American haste and resourcefulness the paper printed a full-length portrait of the successful hunter--or one at least of a man who could not have been vastly different in appearance, in a uniform that was certainly very similar. Alas! The good old days of the bandit and the contrabandista are forever gone in Spain; the humdrum era of the civil guard is come. Pernales' is but another story of a man born a century too late.

All day long as we toiled and twisted over the Cantabrian range and descended southward, this only was the topic of conversation of all grades and sexes of travelers. An hour's halt at Miranda and we creaked on along the bank of Spain's greatest river, the Ebro, talking still of bandoleros and the regret of their passing. Slowly the green tinge in the landscape faded away and in its place came reddish cliffs and a sun-seared and all but desert country spreading away from either bank of the red-dyed river, sterile rolling plains relieved only by small oases of fertility and isolated and in all probability bigoted villages standing colorless on colorless hillsides. As central Spain may be likened to rocky Judea, so this resembles in some degree Egypt, with the Ebro as the Nile.

It was late in the evening when I arrived in Saragossa and, crossing the broad river by the Puente de Piedra, found myself in one of the most labyrinthian cities of Spain. But so practiced had I grown in such quest that in less than an hour I had engaged accommodation at my own price, which by this time had descended to two and a half pesetas.

The "sight" par excellence of Saragossa is of course her "Virgen del Pilar." The story runs that Santiago, who is none other than Saint James, while wandering about Spain, as he was wont to ramble in various corners of the earth, was favored one evening by a call from the Mother of Christ, who, during all their little chat, stood on the top of a stone pillar. That the tale is true there seems little chance for doubt, for they have the pillar yet; and it is over this that has been erected the vast cathedral to which flock thousands of pilgrims during every month of the year.

I repaired to it early, but was soon turned melancholy with the recollection of Puck's profound saying anent the folly of mankind. The interior of the edifice is as impressive as that of an empty warehouse. Under the main dome is a large chapel screaming with riches, in the back of which, on her pillar, stands the Virgin--turned to black, half-decayed wood--dressed in more thousands of dollars' worth of gold and silver, of resplendent robes and vociferous gaudiness than god Juggernaut of India ever possessed at the height of his influence. Before it worshipers are always kneeling. In the back wall of the chapel is an opening through which one can touch the pillar--and find a cup-shaped hole worn in it by such action during the centuries. I sat down on a bench near the far-famed orifice, and for close upon an hour watched the unbroken procession file past. Beggar women, rag-pickers, ladies of wealth, cankerous old men, merchants, city sports, lawyers--Saragossa is the one city of Spain where even men go to church--every grade and variety of Aragonese pressed close upon the heels one of another, each bowing down as he passed to kiss the hole deeper into the pillar. At bottom the difference is slight indeed between the religion of the Spaniard and that of the Hindu.

In the city swarms a hungry, ragged people, more often than not without shoes, yet one and all with the proverbial haughty pride and somber mood of Aragon in face and bearing, stiff-shouldered, bristling with a touch-me-not-with-a-pole expression. Here, too, may still be found, especially among the peasants from the further districts, the old provincial costume,--knee breeches, a jacket reaching barely to the waist, and a red cloth wound about the head.

Tiring of such things, there is a pleasant promenade along the banks of the Ebro, whence one will drift naturally through the Portillo gate where the "flying Gaul was foil'd by a woman's hand." It is startling to find the settings of two such world-famed dramas so close together, but from the gate one has only to saunter a few yards along the Madrid highway to come upon the weather-battered Aljaferia of "Trovatore" fame. To-day it is a barracks. Within its towers, through now unbarred windows, may be seen soldiers polishing their spurs and muskets, humming now and then a snatch of popular song; but one may wait in vain to hear some tuneful prisoner strike up the expected "miserere."

There is one stroll in Saragossa that I would commend to the wanderer who finds pleasure in gaining elevations whence he may look down, as it were, on the world. It is out along the Canal Imperial, past the swollen-paunched statue of its sponsor Pignatelli, and across the Huerva; then winding lazily southwest and upward the stroller comes suddenly out on the crown of a bald hillock. There, below him in its flat valley, spreads all Saragossa, far enough away to lose the crassness of detail, yet distinct, the two finished towers of the Pilar rising above it like minarets, the whole girded by the green huerta, and beyond and all around the desert in gashed and gnarled hills like the Libyan range of another continent. Here I lounged until the setting sun, peering over my shoulder, cast the radiant flush of evening on the city below, which gradually fading away was at length effaced in the night, its sounds mingling together in a sort of music that drifted up to me long after the scene itself had wholly disappeared.

I descended for supper. It is the lot of man that he has no sooner climbed to a height where he may look down calmly on the scramble of life than he must again plunge down into it to _eat_--or to earn more bread. To-morrow I must set my face toward the frontier, toward New York and a return to labor.

On my way to the five-o'clock train next morning I passed through Saragossa's vast covered market and halted to lay in a last supply of figs. The cheery old woman who sold them grasped my fifteen centimos tightly in her hand and solemnly made with it the sign of the cross. I expressed surprise, and a misgiving lest I had unwittingly parted with coppers possessing peculiar virtues.

"Como, senor!" she cried, in wonder at my ignorance. "It is the first money of the day. If I do not say a paternoster with it I may sit here until nightfall without selling another perrito-worth, you may be sure."

The train labored back along the Ebro to Castejon, where I changed cars and journeyed northward, every click of the wheels seeming to cry out that my Spanish summer was nearing its end. At high noon I descended in a dusty plain before the sheer face of the rock on which stands Pamplona of Navarre. When I had climbed into the city I inquired of the first policeman for a modest casa de huespedes. He rubbed his head a moment and set off with me along the street, chatting sociably as we went. Soon we came upon another officer, to whom the first repeated my question. He scratched his head a moment and fell in beside us, babbling cheerily. Fully a half-mile beyond we accosted a third officer. He rasped his close-shaven poll yet another moment and joined us in the quest, adding a new stock of anecdotes. Here was courtesy extraordinary, even for Spain. Had the police force of Pamplona discovered in me some prince incognito, or was mine to be the role of the rolling pancake? We rambled on, but without success, for not another officer could we find in all our circuit of the city. It was certainly close upon an hour after my original inquiry, and something like a hundred yards from the same spot, that we entered a side street and mounted, still in quartet, to a cheap but homelike boarding-house high up in an aged building. The courtesy was quickly explained. The landlady, having expressed her deep gratitude for being brought a new guest, begged each of the officers to do her the favor of accepting a glass of wine. They smacked their lips over it, exchanged with the household the customary salutations and banter, and sauntered back to their beats.

When I had eaten, I descended for a turn about the city with the uncle of my grateful hostess, a mountain-hardened Basque of sixty, in the universal boina, who had but recently retired from a lifetime of rocky hillside farming. Of both his province of Navarre and of himself he talked freely until suddenly my tongue stumbled upon some question of military conscription. He fell at once silent, his jaws stiffened, and into his face came the reflection of a bitter sadness. For the Basques are by no means reconciled to the loss of their cherished _fueros_, or special political privileges. In silence the sturdy old man led the way half across the city to one of her gates and, climbing a knoll that gave a good view of the surrounding fortifications, said in cheerless tones:

"Don Henrico, we have here the strongest city walls in Spain. But what use are they now against the king's modern artillery? No hay remedio. We must serve in his armies."

As we threaded our way slowly back to the boarding-house I halted at a money changer's to buy a twenty-franc piece. The transaction left me only a handful of coppers in Spanish currency, and I went early to bed lest there be not enough remaining to carry me out of the country.

On a glorious clear September morning I turned my back on Spain and set forth from Pamplona to tramp over the Pyrenees by the pass of Roncesvalles, being just uncertain enough of the road to lend zest to the undertaking. At the edge of the plain to the northward of the city a highway began to wind its way upward along the bank of a young river, not laboriously, but steadily rising. Habitations were rare. Late in the morning a spot above whirling rapids in shaded solitude suggested a plunge; but as I pulled off my coat a sound fell on my ear and, looking across the stream, I saw a half-dozen women kneeling on the bank and staring curiously across at me. When I retreated, they laughed heartily and fell once more to pounding away at their laundry-work on the stones.

Some distance higher I found another pool in which, by rolling over and over, I won the afterglow of a real swim. Sharper ascents succeeded, though still none steep. I was soon surrounded by a Tyrolian scenery of forest and deep-cut valleys, and among up-to-date people--the farming implements being of modern type and the smallest villages having electric lights run by power from the mountain streams. Every fellow-mortal, young or old, as is usual in mountain regions, gave me greeting, not with the familiar "Vaya!" nor the "Buenos!" of Galicia, but with "Adios!" which seemed here to mean much more than the grammatical "Good-by." In the place of guardias civiles were carabineros in a provincial uniform, whose advances, if less warm and companionable, were none the less kindly.

Toward evening the road flowed up into a broad, oblong meadow, ankle-deep in greenest grass, musical with the sound of cow-bells, across which it drifted as if content to rest for a time on its oars before taking the final climb. The sun was setting when I reached Burguete at forty-four kilometers, station of the trans-Pyrenean diligence and the point that I had been assured I should do well to reach in a two-day's walk. But I felt as unwearied as at the outset; the towers of Roncesvalles stood plainly visible five kilometers ahead across the green tableland. I rambled on in the cool of evening and by dark was housed in a good inn of the mountain village.

When the supper hour arrived, the landlord stepped across to me to ask whether I would eat as a guest or as a member of the family. I inquired what the distinction might be.

"No difference," he answered, "except that as a member of the family you pay a peseta upon leaving, and as a guest you pay two."

It was of course en famille that I supped, and right royally, at a board merry with good-humored peasants and arrieros rather than in the silent, gloomy company of a half-dozen convention-ridden travelers in an adjoining room.

Roncesvalles would have been an unequaled spot in which to pass an autumn week, roaming in the forest glens of the mountains, dreaming of the heroic days of Roland. But the hour of reckoning and of New York was near at hand. Of all sensations I most abhor the feeling that I must be in a given place at a given time.

A short climb through wooded hillsides strewn with gigantic rocks and I found myself all at once and unexpectedly on the very summit of the Pyrenees. In no sense had the ascent been toilsome, vastly less so than several scrambles of two or three hours' duration between Lugo and Oviedo. From the French side, no doubt, it would have been far more of a task. Gazing northward I recognized for the first time that I stood high indeed above the common level of the earth. Miles below, blue as the sea, lay France, the forested mountains at my feet rolling themselves out into hills, the hills growing lower and lower and spreading away into the far, far distance like another world. The modern world--and I was all at once assailed with a desire to ask what it had been doing in all the days I had been gone. Then the highway seized me in its grasp and hurried me away down, racing, rushing, almost stumbling, so fast I was forced to break away from it and clamber down at my own pace through dense unpeopled forests, to fall upon it again far below and stalk with it at lunch-time into the village of Val Carlos. Yet another hour's descent and I crossed a small stream into the little hamlet of Arneguy; the long-forgotten figure of a French gendarme slouched forth from a hut to shout as I passed, "Anything dutiable, monsieur?" and my Spanish journey was among the things that have been.