Crest above crest, great chains of mountains cut the smooth sapphire of the sky; and as we serpentined into their closer grasp, each loop of the Alpine road gave a new and more fantastic combination of rock and stream. The car was boring into a gorge of astounding sublimity, a hammer-stroke of Vulcan which had cleft the mountain and left behind chips of copper, of gold, of silver, and a rich sprinkling of precious gems.
As the god’s hammer fell, out of the ruin it made were shaped marvels of form; Olympian castles and giant statues, images of such savage creatures as roamed devastating the earth in days when man was in his childhood.
Even the calm countenance of Ropes was transfigured by this burst of splendour. “Makes you forget that roads can be bad, and tyres go wrong, doesn’t it, sir?” he said to me. “I could drive through places like these, day and night on end, without food or drink, never knowing if I was done up.”
And praise from a chauffeur is praise indeed!
We were in the defile of Despeñaperros, the most terrific and, at the same time, the noblest gorge of Spain; and I should have known it from stories told by my father, who had once fought with _bandoleros_ upon this very road. Down into the river that tossed up white plumes of foam far below, he had flung one man, while another fired shot after shot from his carbine, screened behind a rock on the opposite side of the ravine, scarcely a biscuit-throw away.
Long before, too, history had been made in this mountain passage whose walls had rung with wilder sounds than the screaming of our siren. The rival battle-cries of Moor and Spaniard had echoed among the rocks, and Christian blood and pagan had mingled in the white spume of the river.
I thought of these things, as I looked down into the silent depths of the gulf, and saw the sparkling veins of granite, and purple masses of slate gleam with volcanic life and colour. But still I heard the haunting echo of Monica’s voice, in the solitude through which she must lately have passed, perhaps leaving some message, if I could only know.
Was it merely a fantastic twist of my nerves, or was her spirit calling, trying to make itself heard and understood?
It was Pilar who broke the spell by a sudden clapping of her hands. “Andalucía! dear Andalucía!” she cried; and each one of us, subdued and silenced by the majesty of the scene, started as if waking from sleep.
She was pointing at a stone obelisk, looking at which her father smiled and raised his hat.
“No more cold,” said he; “no more winds to nip our noses. Here’s the dividing line between the north countries and the country of the sun.”
Then, as if the obelisk had been the finger of some genie invoking a magic change, an enchantment blurred the stem features of the landscape. It was as though the fierce face of an angry giant had been transformed into that of a beautiful, laughing woman with the sun in her eyes.
The defile opened when we had slipped past a half-hidden mountain hamlet or two; widened into a valley bright with colour as the jewels on the spread tail of a peacock; and boat-like, the car rode an undulating sea of green and azure and gold, that scintillated as if a spray of diamonds were tossed into air with the speed of our going.
At Santa Elena we were in a Spain I had not seen. At La Carolina we burst into a world fair and fertile as the Garden of Eden; and I remembered the Moorish legend that Heaven is built on the blue that hangs over Andalucía.
Hedges of aloe brandished zincen swords and darts; cacti sprawled and leered along the roadside; set in the vivid green of ripening grain, olive groves seemed carved from jade; or the bare rosy shoulders of sloping hillsides turned by contrast their pale tints to tarnished silver. Vines with young gold leaves trailed the purple earth; avenues of acacias dripped perfumes; and as the sun leaned towards the west, the quivering pink light on violet mountains gave to Andalucía the vivid, almost violent colouring one sees in sensational posters.
Each girl we passed wore a bright flower shining star-like through the black cloud of her hair. The men had discarded the fur-trimmed Louis XI caps for the broad-brimmed, grey sombreros de Cordoba, and the horses or mules were harnessed with gay splashes of red and blue colour, and bobbing tassels.
We had talked of Linares, the lead-mining town, as a halting-place for the night, as we were pledged not to track down the Lecomte; and on the outskirts of Bailen, as twilight fell, the Gloria was brought to a sudden stop in the midst of a pulsating crowd, that we might ask the way.
If we aroused their curiosity, they piqued us to the same emotion, for most of the men, and there were hundreds, not only wore upon their legs a kind of divided pinafore, but carried on their backs an apparatus which would have excited wonder in any other than this fairy country.
The machine reminded me at first glance of a fire-extinguisher; then of some appliance used by miners to hold a supply of oxygen. One part of me wished to know what the instrument was; the other preferred to remain in ignorance, lest the explanation should prove too commonplace. But Waring had all my curiosity, and none of my scruples; so he asked a question with a gesture more intelligible than his Spanish; and just as I had feared, the weird union of reservoirs and nozzles was no more than a contrivance for spraying vines to protect them from phylloxera.
As always, we brought the fascinations of the Cherub to bear upon the crowd, as one trains the latest gun upon the enemy; and his crooning brought out facts which made Dick think it high time he got things into shape, and his motor service to running. It seemed that once upon a time a good road had been made from Bailen to Linares, but the road was crossed by a river; and when the masonry supports for a bridge had been built, it turned out that girders had been forgotten. Somehow, it was nobody’s place to jog anybody else’s memory, and there the matter had ended, so long ago that grass and flowers had sprouted among the futile stones.
It appeared the most natural thing in the world to the people of Bailen, who were accustomed to ford the river, when they wanted to cross, with horses; but though the weather had been dry for the last few days, the recent torrents which had fallen in the mountains, still swelled the volume of water to such a height that it might “put out the fire in the automobile.”
I was glad to hear this, because if it would put out our fire, it would put out Carmona’s; and as he was prudent in matters concerning his car, he would probably have stopped at Andujar; thus fate would again bring me near to Monica, despite our promise.
The main reason for going to Linares was because the Cherub believed there was a fair hotel, built to accommodate Englishmen collected for the lead-mining; therefore it was without regret that we turned the Gloria to follow the _carretera_ to Cordoba.
Our advisers ran after us with a warning to avoid the rough cobbles of Bailen by taking the _ronda_ which skirts the town on its left. So slowly, in dusk that blossomed blue as the myrtle flower, we passed round outside the town, regained the high road, leaping at speed into a world of wide, silvery spaces and mystery of violet hollows, diving into the deep valley of the swollen river, and rejoicing in a hard surface of good macadam for fifteen miles or more.
Thus we arrived at Andujar, the lights of our great acetylene lamps (lit before the sky turned from opal to amethyst) prying into dark doorways and windows as Röntgen rays pry through flesh to bone.
In the white glare, pretty girls in doorways looked like actresses in a costume play, waiting in the wings to “go on.” But no yells of a stage mob ever were so realistic as those of the unrehearsed band who howled over my poor Gloria as she deposited her passengers at the _fonda_; and Ropes and I pushed her through a wall of human beings to a stable-garage, where her flywheel gushed a protest of fiery sparks on the high stone step of entrance.
The _fonda_ was passable; but Carmona and his party were not there; neither were they anywhere else in Andujar, as we made it our business to discover; and we guessed that the grey car must after all have ventured to Linares.
As it had vanished, we were free to start when we chose next morning. So we chose an early hour, flying over good roads through a land embroidered with the scarlet of poppies, the blue of gentian, the pink of clover, and gold of buttercups, stitched in with the silver of little running streams.
“ ‘Give us bread and give us bulls,’ is the cry of this country,” said the Cherub, greeting with joyous glances each feature of his loved Andalucia.
“It sounds like a beef sandwich,” Dick reflected aloud; but Pilar reproached him for flippancy. “You mustn’t make jokes about bread in Andalucia!” she exclaimed. “And it’s called a sin ever to throw away a crumb. Because it’s the gift of Heaven, if you drop a bit you must pick it up and apologize by kissing it.”