Yesterday There Were More Or
Less Agreeable Shepherdesses In Pleasant Plaids Scattered Over The
Landscape; To-Day There Are Only
Shepherds of three days' unshornness;
the plaids are ragged, and there is not sufficient compensation in the
cavalcades of both
Men and women riding donkeys in and out of the
horizons on the long roads that lose and find themselves there. Flocks
of brown and black goats, looking large as cows among the sparse
stubble, do little to relieve the scene from desolation; I am not sure
but goats, when brown and black, add to the horror of a desolate scene.
There are no longer any white farmsteads, or friendly villages gathering
about high-shouldered churches, but very far away to the eastward or
westward the dun expanse of the wheat-lands is roughed with something
which seems a cluster of muddy protuberances, so like the soil at first
it is not distinguishable from it, btit which as your train passes
nearer proves to be a town at the base of tablelands, without a tree or
a leaf or any spear of green to endear it to the eye as the abode of
living men. You pull yourself together in the effort to visualize the
immeasurable fields washing those dreary towns with golden tides of
harvest; but it is difficult. What you cannot help seeing is the actual
nakedness of the land which with its spindling stubble makes you think
of that awful moment of the human head, when utter baldness will be a
relief to the spectator.
I
At times and in places, peasants were scratching the dismal surfaces
with the sort of plows which Abel must have used, when subsoiling was
not yet even a dream; and between the plowmen and their ox-teams it
seemed a question as to which should loiter longest in the unfinished
furrow. Now and then, the rush of the train gave a motionless goatherd,
with his gaunt flock, an effect of comparative celerity to the rearward.
The women riding their donkeys over
The level waste, the rounding gray
in the distance were the only women we saw except those who seemed to be
keeping the stations, and one very fat one who came to the train at a
small town and gabbled volubly to some passenger who made no audible
response. She excited herself, but failed to rouse the interest of the
other party to the interview, who remained unseen as well as unheard. I
could the more have wished to know what it was all about because nothing
happened on board the train to distract the mind from the joyless
landscape until we drew near Valladolid. It is true that for a while we
shared our compartment with a father and his two sons who lunched on
slices of the sausage which seems the favorite refection of the Latin as
well as the Germanic races in their travels. But this drama was not of
intense interest, and we grappled in vain with the question of our
companions' social standard.
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