IT is with astonishment and a kind of fear that the traveller passes through the high-lying plains of Old Castille, journeying swiftly from city to city, to

for in these intervening tracts, sun-parched and windswept, it seems scarcely possible that men should live. The villages are closely huddled together, little compact masses of low, unwhitewashed houses, without a tree or garden, so colourless, and clinging to the soil as sometimes to pass unnoticed. Rivers flow between low, bare banks without bush or tree, like streaks of mother-of-pearl inlaid in earthenware. And there are wide tracts of land without a house or boundary, a continuous desolation with no signs of life, except here and there a flock of sheep or herd of goats, or a line of peasants returning at sunset from their work. Surely life here can have but few attractions; there can be no joy of the soil, little temptation for Berceo’s “mal labrador” of the thirteenth century, who “loved the earth more than he loved the Creator,” and “would alter landmarks to enlarge his estate”—cambiaba los mojones por ganar eredat. Yet the slower trains are invaded by a merry throng of pleasant, courteous, good-looking peasants, oval-faced, with splendid teeth and eyelashes, who speed the journey with gay conversation and shrill singing, and pass constantly from one carriage to another to greet friends or to avoid the officials who inquire awkwardly after tickets. They have plenty of life and cheerfulness, and it is with renewed wonder that one looks at the dead, crumbling villages where they live, and remembers the piercing force of the Castilian sun in summer and the icy, penetrating winter winds. All day they must work without the shelter of a single hedge or tree in the searching wind[84] that sifts the soil, or under a sun that parches and shrivels it into dust. But a nearer acquaintance reveals a certain charm[85] about these villages of hard, clear names: Campillo, Cantalapedra, Pedroso, Madrigal—a charm of clean-swept spaces, and clear, luminous air and silent intensity; and the country ceases to be uniformly colourless. Here a woman in a dress of light-blue linen, with long flowing headkerchief of white, passes on a donkey through fields of golden ripe corn; there, from narrow windows in a street of yellow-brown houses, hang bright patches of geraniums and carnations in flower. And the doorways of square or round or pointed arches give entrance to cool, silent courts. AzorÍn has described the old Castilian hidalgo, who has never left his ancestral house, with its large rooms, many of them unfurnished, and old portraits consigned to an attic and covered with the dust of centuries: “His lands have disappeared, his furniture has disappeared; he does nothing; he has a sad intensity of expression,” and when further misfortune befalls him he says, “There is no help for it—quÉ le vamos Á hacer!” Everywhere is decay, and the trace of vanished splendour. So these old ruined hidalgos live out their grey, monotonous lives in some ancient town or village of Castille, amid the immense plains with “distances of radiant sky and faint blue lines of mountains.” The blue smoke rises from scented fires of rosemary, and, as the bells ring to Matins, the doves swerve and circle, the grey doves sweep slowly across the sky perpetually blue. And night and day the doors of the houses are kept continually closed, with a deserted air beneath the broad coats-of-arms carved in stone. AzorÍn describes minutely a Castilian town, standing among cornfields and olives—one of those towns that the foreigner rarely has the courage to visit. Its streets are narrow and tortuous. It contains three ancient inns, four churches, three hermitages, two convents. It has no industries save a few ruined cloth manufactures, and only the usurer flourishes. It contains fourteen students (who have not taken their degree), four doctors, twelve lawyers (only six of whom earn a living, and this by slandering one another, and from time to time bringing a blackmail suit against some poor-spirited inhabitant). There is a Guild of the Christ of the Dying, and when a member dies a messenger goes through the streets ringing a bell and crying: “At such an hour the funeral of Don Fulano.” The summers are fiery, the winters are long and cruel. No visits are paid; doors and windows remain closed; few persons go through the streets, but in the plazas, on clear days of winter, dense groups of men may be seen taking the sun, wrapped in their brown plaids and capas. Nothing happens; the deep silence is broken by the clang of a forge-hammer or by the crowing of a cock. In time of Carnival a few “masks” pass, dressed up with mats and carrying old brooms. The labourers are poverty-stricken, and meat is the luxury of a few “rich” inhabitants. AzorÍn notes the Castilian’s “fundamental energy, aloofness, indifference, and lofty disdain, with sudden inspirations of heroism”; and we may count it no small heroism to live on, proudly uncomplaining, in surroundings so harsh and discomfortable.