DISCOVERING SPAIN.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 18183, 20 September 1924, Page 13

DISCOVERING SPAIN.

I—-1 —- XXm.—"SEVILLE IN SIGHT"

(SPECIALLY WitITTBK TOE "TEB PBESS.")

(By W. D'A. Ckesswell.)

The next day, on the outskirts of Santa Ola, we converged upon the main road from Badajoz to Seville. I have never seen a more splendid road. Because of the bareness of the sierras, between Cala and El Rouquillo, it is visible, in places, for miles, a broad, white surface with a parapet of hewn stone, falling out of 6iglit a few yards from where you stand to look hack, and not visible again until distance has reduced it to the thickness of your finger, and at last, as though worn by the wildness of the hills, to a thinning, tenacious thread that you: gaze can barely distinguish from the fiery air and the confusing summits that border the battlefields of Albuera an«l Badajoz. Two days' march ahead, beyond expressionless descending downs and baffling, inevitable blue sky, was Seville, whose glitter you thought to have espied when the wind-screen of an approaching motor, so distant as to be invisible, scintillated joyously in the sun. And clouds gathered above us, for the first time since leaving England, tho sky was strange and altering to shapes of passion and ad vonturousness because of Seville; and when cars went flying ahsad of _ ns, strapped with luggage and luxurious within, from the sleepy, dissatisfied profiles that we Baw, these were persons. who would be in iSeville in an hour or two, when we were still tramping and excited in the hills. From the sullied brightness of the l -ky, from the brown, sandy sierras, from the faces that flew past us, from the disturbed, confusing dust and the excitement within us, our brains were focusing already the butchery and indolence of the great white bull-ring on the banks of the Guadalquiver, of which we heard more in every village, and defeating the agonising silence of the hills l>v the uproar of ten thousand throats. At which the scorching monotonous foothills of the Siorra Morena became so intolerable that we flung ourselves madly at every mile of road, believing as the hills receded and the • plain arose, that each turning would reveal some distant, shimmering vision of the eity to which we had bent our boyish imaginations for weeks. . A Eace With Htrnger. - Wo were impelled, too, by the need of reaching the city and the banks befora the pound we had cashed in Jerez should become quite exhausted, as was almost the case when we reached EI Rouquillo. We saw, in fact, on reaching that town, that unless we could do two days' march in one we should have no money and no food whatever on the last day, no matter how shrewdly we rationed our few pitiful coppers. That we should spend the whole lot on bread was M ''s sensible idea, to which I should gladly have agreed were the bread! of Southern Spain like that of Portugal and the North, coarse brown, agreeable, sustaining stuff, instead of disgusting nodules of close, white dust, baked without yeast and ■ quite with a pale, smooth crust like a polished eggshell. So at Santa Ola we bought a few cherries to assist us in chewing this stuff. Cheese, which is milk-white and delicious inside, but greasy and saturated without from the olive oil in which they preserve it, was here unobtainable. We approached Santa Ola in company with a handsome, sandalled youth from whom we learnt scant but invigorating particulars of the bullfights in Seville that are performed every Sunday, but who, I believe,, felt afraid of us until the village was in sight, believing us to be either mad or drunk from my begging him to sing us the old songs of Seville, whither he, too, was bound. Nevertheless I succeeded. with his permission, in replacing my pack across the shoulders of his_ decrepit donkey (forestalling M in this clever act), which I am certain he believed was the first step towards my stealing it; then, consulting the dictionary for every word, I asked him what 'we must pay for. cheap lodgings in Seville, such as he himself would use, and -whether he would assist us to secure them. The lodgings he described to us seemed cheap and disorderly and entirely suitable; but for himself, he added, the donkey was not his, and at Santa Ola he would leave the main joad and catch a train, as he advised us to do also. How excitedly should we have done so, had our funds allowed! As it was, I was obliged in Santa Ola to shoulder my pack 3gain as w.e bade the lucky fellow an envious adieu. We ate our meal a short distance from the village, by the side of a brackish stream where the hillside was littered with olive trees, whose dishevelled, ill-omened shade we could often dispense with on account of the great clouds that were passing at almost equal intervals across the sun and threatening the earth with their dragging, saturated fringes while the sky between them get remained summery and blue. I need not say how joyously vro plunged into the still stream, whose pools were covered in places with a heavy slime that broke up the lovely pictures of the clouds just as the clouds had broken up the blue of the Iberian sky. Whenever we ceased to swim we trod upon turtles, and altogether, from that and from the necessity to halve the cherries when we were dressed, it was an experience I shall never forget. We made a desperate effort to reach El Bouquillo by the evening, counting the milestones with which the road is meticulously marked, but failing in our purpose by five kilos, and thereby thsowing a heavier task on our hunger and endurance on the next day.

A Stolen MeaL The place in which -we sought a camp for the night and shelter from the downpour which we were certain would begin at any moment was rather a pleasant one. It. was on the summit of the hills, in a shallow gully, within which was the bed of a little stream, no more than a gutter. We saw beside at from the road three drooping, matted fig trees, beneath whose enormous, luminous green leaves it would be a positive delight to lie during the heaviest rain, and we made for them at once. Just there tho bed of this waterless waddy was of soft, and downhill "beside us, we became immediately aware as we made our beds, was an orchard bearing early fruit, beyond which was a house. We refrained from lighting a fire, with which we might have countered the rain, in order that we might more easily rob the orchard. Our first attempt, in which we aimed at a preliminiary inspection, and perhaps a bite or two, before dark, was not unseen, however. For M , who was shaking a plum tree, suddenly observed, with African sagacity, the'* head and shoulders of. a man who watched us from beside the house and then disappeared the moment ho found himself observed. We returned at once to our camp and lay down on our blankets with ridiculous innocenee, of which the mere presence of a pear tree behind us seemed a discomforting exposure, while two men came slowly up the gully until they stood before ub with the watercourse between. The appearance of one was unpleasantly burly and savage; the other was the wary fellow who had first

observed us; but I hail seen from their movements in approaching us. from tlieir manner of choosing a track through the long grass, that they acted from no positive proof. They answered our "Buenas! " in the curtest manner, and remained before us staring and sullen: when, feeling the suspense (M ! s cap was covering a heap of plums), we began putting into operation the only stratagem that had ever succeeded under similar circumstances in Spain, that of hastily displaying the few genteel and valuable-looking objects we possessed, which must instantly refute, in any onlooker, the suspicion that we could be hooligans or thieves. There was my Gilette razor, elegant and gleaming in a satin case, the electric torch, the tiny alarm clock—so chic and expensive, and the Bible—an exciting, disorderly book I had bought in England, whose binding, however, was reassuring and refined. The method is to appear in of something at the very bottoms of your packs and to display these trifles before your staggered audience en passant. Skill is needed, however, to keep your dirty socks and execrable under-wea-t, and the shirt that the iodine get spilt on, disentangled and suppressed.

Mot a word is uttc-red by the savages Across the gutter as we fro through Ais performance. M— ends by donning, in spite of the heat, his college sweater, a striking, sub-tropical affair, vrd combing his hair before a suedel>o'ind mirror. Now, imacrine the starng, confounded fellows, whose presence "'e have hardly yet remarked, having a ; hred of suspicion left to them that imongst such possessions, amongst the .obeasant and the cheddar cheese, we re concealing a store of their filthv 'ireen pears! There is this you can say for simplicity that its po-ses ors are he least prone to tnake offensive and absurd assertions.

I was wrapt in that reflection and hoping the unpleasant fellows wonU now depart, when one of ihem blurted loudly, . "Se venden aquellos?"—"Do vou sell those things?" And the •>ther. thc-v are an insistent and spirited jot, the Spanish, af 1 was to discover in the Madrid express, exclaimed fiorcelv that we had better keep out of the orchard! meaning that what had been done already they were willing to overlook. And with that they both tramped calmly away, leaving 'M I shall not sav in what state of defeat, tearing off his sweater and ruffling his iovelv hair as I told him, with exaggerations, what had been said.

I am certain those fellows watched the orchard all night, while the sky remained starless and dark, and lightning and thunder, the Satanic sexes, answered ©uch other from the crags of the around us, without, however, doing more than to threaten rain. We defeated our guards, however; for, awakening at midnight and takin;; the toreh, I stole away from M and amid gusts that shook the trees and lightnings that lit the grass with awful flashes, I gathered a capful of plums and gjeen apples and returned to awaken my friend. '' Then, redlining on our sides in the sand, wo ate the last substantial meal on which we staggered' into'' Seville. Reminded of Hinds. We were quickly through El Rouquillo in the morning, <*a .small town of which I have little recollection, so absorbed was I in the mountainous scenerv through which we were passing, tile streams' that came dashing towards us down the hills to disappear beneath our r»ad and emerge unaltered below, the crags of the Sierras thai were clothed in woods,- and above them the black clouds in the gleaming air, inviolate and free. Here wo encountered the lailway and followed it along > a ravine to the station, whither aft agreeable girlj leaning from her balcony abov6 the road, her face luminious. .wifth, refleicted lights and shadows from the grouna, iiau ad\i -j<l us to seek for bread, saying they had none they qould sell. About the little station grew bluegums and wattle, whoso scent hangs, so enduringly in the hot, Spanish air. It was not entirely Spain, but from the gums and wattle, and the intenseity of the sun, it was partly Hinds, or some largely lettered shed and yards along the burning railway border of the' Canterbury Plains, whence men more in drays towards the mountains as towards 'a' temple of whiteness and aspiring of which they know nothing—from its battle of easy brute flatness with the shadowy ana towering idealism of the Alps, the most divine and exciting scene in the world! *

Spain began again in ■ the side? of the gully that rose steeply from the rails, in'the hotter air, in our homeless condition,..in the swarthy faces, gay waistcoats, tightly trousered hips and sandalled feet of some men who ■were unloading flour. We had a difliculty in getting bread. The family inhabiting the back part of the station ptepcd out and frowned at us; but one of the drovers climbed over tlio gully to a house he know of and bought a loaf for us, an incredible charity from, a Spanish peasant, who, •while he will take the greatest pains to inform, you will never offer to do you a service that involves him in moving ■from the spot he is so contentedly occupying it tho moment, not even when ft is obvious you cannot understand him and the place you are seeking is only round the corjier. But, perhaps, on this occasion, he desired to escape from work. , TT , Wo had roached the Huelva luver, a tributary of tho Cala, itself a tiibutary of the Guadalquivir, by eleven o'clock, and there, where the road goes bounding on towering arches across the sullen green water within its spits ot shingle and the hills are bare again, wo halted to bathe. All that day, as wo swam arid dozed and swam again and wandered with bare, hardened ieet among the broom and wild pigs tmd inflammable flood rubbish that bordered the liver, I was wondering whether, bands of Visigoths and Arabs, and before those the single, sneaking Azilians, had really descended this valley ana crossed the river, whether such a thing could be true. The more I felt their presence the more I doubted it could have passed, and I sat and reasoned with the stiff, still lulls about this matter; while M , after using all the soap to wash his pants, wandered off among the bushes again, where I could see him staging, sullen and disconsolate, at the hiird, greon nozzles of the figs. He returned sometime, biting savagely at what looked to be a, hard-boiled egg with a bright green aboil and & wormy red interior. To show fou how hot it was, his khaki pants, that were sodden and greenish after "washing," were stilf and whitish an hour aftcj he had spread them on the stones. Last Camp Before Seville. This day, June the twenty-fifth, was the last of our complete days on tho road to Seville. That night, in fact, we camped, or rather we fell insensible betore its walls. So that wc had been two weeks and four days in tramping from which wo left on June the seventh. Deducting the days we remained in YfcncLis Jiovas, Bvora, Oliva and Jerez, we covered the road, merely, in something under two weeks. Leaving the Huelva river late in the afternoon wc soon reached the last summit of the Sierra Morena, in whose lowering recesses we had seen no brigands, but whence we now espied, at a great distance in the hazed, expres--piotiless plain below us, tho severed, irrepressible gleams of a great river, and soon after, when more of the plain wus in view we smote each other simultaneously and shouted, to realise on a sudden the true nature of a sight whose meaning had escaped us for some time because of the brighter beauty of the river—a thickening of the kaae, a faint, molten whiteness that first decoyed and then escaped your straining eyes, and about it a hint of blackness, (Continued at. foot of next column.)

perhaps of yards and factories in sepai - able from cities. Here was Seville, no more than an uncertain smudge below the blinding sky, a cessation in the winding of the Guatialquiver Mhcv.t wliHi it resumed again its silvery journev to the sea. Wo " knew exactly its distance m kilometres and we decided there find then, that we should tramp so.far that night as would place us within easy distance of the city we should enter in the morning. How easy the road became! how exquisite the air! how darkening and silent the hills, which hourly grew more lofty and inscrutable behind us as we descended. How enchanting the plains* upon which Seville had begun to reveal itself now, a bed of white fires in a blue mist. We paused for ail hour, ere making our last mad rush to the city, at a place where a wild orchard of rocks and trees fell away from the road. Here we had not long been reclining and finishing what scraps of food we had when three soldiers came by from the direction of Seville, in tidy, almost genteel, uniforms of grey and yellow, with rifles slung like knapsacks from the shoulder. On seeing U3 they halted abruptly, and one of them spoke to us sharply. Their well-kept and whiskered faces suggested to us, disorderly and truant in the rocks, the menacing conformity .and middle-aged righteousness of schoolmasters. Perhaps, iu Spain, schoolmasters are compelled to be soldiers from the lack of schools. Not understanding what had been said, and distrusting the manner of it, we remained silent; at which the one who had spoken came leaping down the rocks towards us, as though to right an affront and impress his comrades, who seemed, however, of a mind to go on. He appeared to be telling us that, • being undesirables, we could not sit where we liked, and next he poked me beneath my blanket with the butt' of j his rifle; so that I was obliged to rise and reveal even more undisciplined appearances beneath,- trousers torn off above the knees, and legs as browned as an. Arab's and somewhat muddy, but only to remark, as icily as one can in imperfect Spanish, that he was addressing two English gentlemen who toured Spain on foot. At which his companions on the road burst out laughing and called him to come on. He left us much more slowly than he had come; for my Spanish alone, and a closer inspection* of our belongings, must have told him we were foreigners. Tramp in the Dart. It was dark when we resumed our road. In a tiny villago, but notable to us, since we thought "these persons know Seville!" we bought raisins and wine with the very last of our money, and slipped away jubilantly with these into the darkness, aware of nothing but the descending whiteness of our road, the intense and trembling illuminations of the city in front, and pale, repressed lightenings on the mountains we had crossed, from which our road seemed falling like a cataract in a mirage of silence and bounding downward to the plain. We sang and shouted in a tempest of content. Never was "I'll Sing Thee (Songs of Araby" sung in such a setting, when every wold of that matchless lyric see pied real. (< Athl dreams of delight shall on tlic© break And rainbow visions rise .... A£ ended inevitably, being ever}' inch a Britisher, half pugilist and half puritan, with "Onwaru, Christian Soldiers." which, from its mention or war and soldiers, has always been a mania with the patriotically pious. The moon arose, that had grown bigger above us night by night since we left Evora, and now, beneath her completed floating light, we drank wine at every milestone and our paean libations that the bull-nghts be propitious, and toasted the names of friends far away in the barbarous daylight of Balboa and da Gama. In time the moon had set and the wine been finished, and wo staggered grimlv on, insensible to ail but tne awful"necessity to keep walking. We were on the flat now. Mot a tree rose from the garden of Andalusia beside us: nothing but thistles and grass, since Seville had been seized from tlie Moors and the aquaducts destroyed. One© a car came out of the hills, two Ion"' beams that looked sideways first, up "into the sky, then met our eyes with a ferocious stare, long before we heard any sound, then vanished. At last we could go no further,* though we were some distance from the point we had intended to reach. Leaning on a horse-trough, very near, we knew, to the city, we gave it up. Oloucts covered "tho sky, and aimless warm gusts of air seemed to be encouraging a shower. We headed for a dump of bluegums, upright upon the plain, and beside these wc fell insensible at once. (To be continued^)