Spanish Highways and Byways Part 32

We have sometimes talked enthusiastically of democracy, but we did not discuss such exalted subjects then. Indeed, we had enough to do in guarding our doors, often by frank exercise of muscle, from further intrusion, and in trying to provide ourselves with food and water. A struggling mob of soldier boys besieged the refreshment stalls at every station, and drained the jars of the water-venders long before these could arrive at the car windows. At last, by a union of silver and violence, we succeeded in gaining from an astounded little girl, who was racing after the departing carriages, all her stock in trade, even the great russet jar itself, with its treasure of cold spring water. The historian possesses a special genius for cooking over an alcohol lamp on a rocking mountain train, and having augmented our knapsack stores with scalded milk and k.n.o.bby bread from a tavern near one of the depots, we lived like feudal barons "of our own" for the rest of that memorable journey.

Reminders of the pilgrims were all along our route. Overflowing as Santiago's young knights were with martial and romantic spirit, when the brigands did not give their steel sufficient sport they would break lances for the love of ladies or on any other conceivable pretext. We pa.s.sed the bridge of twenty arches, where ten companions in arms once posted themselves for ten successive days, and challenged to the tilt every cavalier who came that way in journey to the Compostela jubilee.

All the afternoon we were climbing into the hill-country. The waste slopes were starred with purple clumps of heather, and crossed by light-footed maids, who balanced great bunches of bracken on their heads. The patches of green valley, walled in by those barren steeps, held each a few tumble-down old houses, while elsewhere we noticed human dwellings that seemed scarcely more than nests of mud plastered to the stone. Yet the soil appeared to be cultivated with the most patient thrift,--wheat and potatoes growing wherever wheat and potatoes might. The view became a bewildering medley of Scottish hills, Italian skies, and Gothic castles, with occasionally a tawny and fantastic rock from the Garden of the G.o.ds. The city of Astorga, whose cathedral was founded, so the pilgrims used to say, by St. James in his missionary tour, greeted us from the midst of the flinty hills.

These are the home of a singular clan known as the Maragatos. They wear a distinctive dress, marry only among themselves, and turn a sullen look upon their neighbors.

As night came on, the road grew so rough that we had to cork our precious water-jar with a plump lemon. The historian was sleeping off her headache, except as I woke her at the stations to aid in the defence of our ign.o.ble luxury. We remembered that queen of Portugal who made the pilgrimage to Compostela on foot, begging her way. In the close-packed third-cla.s.s carriages it must have been a cramped and weary night, and we did not wonder that young socialists occasionally tried to raid our fortress. But we clung stoutly to the door-handles, l.u.s.tily sounding our war cry of "Ladies only" in lieu of "Santiago,"

and early in the small hours had the shamefaced pleasure of seeing the herd of drowsy conscripts, with their red and yellow bundles, driven into another train, where they were tumbled two or three deep, the under layer struggling and protesting. One little fellow, nearly smothered in the hurly-burly about the steps, cried out pitifully; but the conductor silenced him with angry sarcasm: "Dost mean to be a soldier, thou? Or shall we put thee in a sugar-bowl and send thee back to mamma?"

There was less need of sentry duty after this, but the night was too beautiful for sleep. We were crossing the wild Asturian mountains, the Alps of Spain, and a full moon was pouring down white l.u.s.tre on crag, cascade, and gorge. By these perilous ways had streamed the many-bannered pilgrim hosts,--men and women of all countries and all tongues seeking the Jerusalem of the West. Each nation had its own hymn to Santiago, and these, sung to the mingled music of bagpipes, timbrels, bugles, flutes, and harps, must have pealed out strangely on many a silver night. The poor went begging of the rich, and often a mounted crusader cast his purse of broad gold pieces on the heather, trusting Santiago and his own good sword to see him through. Up and down these sheer ravines stumbled the blind and lame, sure of healing if only they could reach the shrine. Deaf and dumb went in the pilgrim ranks, the mad, the broken-hearted, the sin-oppressed; only the troop of lepers held apart. Some of those foot-sore wayfarers, most likely the raggedest of all, carried a secret treasure for the saint. Some staggered under penitential weights of lead and stone, and others bore loads of bars and fetters in token of captivity from which St. James had set them free.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ST. PAUL, THE FIRST HERMIT]

But these pathetic shapes no longer peopled the moonlight. Since it was the nineteenth century, a first-cla.s.s pa.s.senger might as well lie down and watch the gracious progress of the moon across the heavens,--

"Oft, as if her head she bowed, Stooping through a fleecy cloud."

But the clouds perversely made of themselves wayside crosses, urns, cathedral towers; and just as one sky-creature, "backed like a weasel"

but with the face of Santiago, began to puff a monstrous cigarette, I roused my dozing senses and discovered that we were entering Lugo, the capital of Galicia, and once, under Roman rule, of all Spain.

This city of tumultuous history, stormed by one wild race after another, and twice sacked in our own century, first by the French and then by the Carlists, lay very peacefully under the white dawn. While the chivalrous Spanish sun rose un.o.btrusively, so as not to divert attention from the fading graces of the moon, the historian made sustaining coffee, and we tried to look as if we liked Galicia. This far northwestern province is the Boeotia of Spain; its stupid, patient peasantry are the b.u.t.t of all the Peninsula, and to be called a Gallego is to be called a fool. The country, as we saw it from the train, was broken and hilly, but the Alpine majesty of Asturias was gone. In the misty drizzle of rain, which soon hushed the pipings of the birds, all the region looked wretchedly poor. It was a wooded, watered, well-tilled land, with tufts of heather brightly fringing every bank; but the houses were mere cabins, where great, gaunt, dark-colored pigs pushed in and out among bedraggled hens and half-clad children. Women were working in the fields by five o'clock in the morning, their saffron and carmine kerchiefs twisted into horns above the forehead. Women were serving as porters at the stations, carrying heavy trunks and loads of valises on their heads. Women were driving the plough, swinging the pickaxe in the quarries, mending the railway tracks. Short, stout, vigorous brownies they were, and most of them looked old.

It was mid-forenoon when we reached Coruna, the seaport whence sailed the Invincible Armada. We had meant to rest there for the afternoon and night before undertaking the forty-mile drive to Santiago, but the hotel was so filthy that, tired as we were, there was nothing for it but to go on. Tarrying only for bath and breakfast, we took our places in a carriage which, setting out at one, promised to bring us into Santiago in time for the eight o'clock dinner.

This conveyance was a species of narrow omnibus, which an Andalusian, an Englishman, a son of Compostela returning home after a long sojourn in foreign parts, his young wife of Jewish features, and our weary selves filled to overflowing. Our Jehu had agreed to transport the six of us, with our effects, for the sum of sixteen dollars; but deep was our disgust when he piled our handbags, shawl straps, and all our lesser properties in upon our wedged and helpless forms, and crammed six rough Gallegos, with a reeling load of trunks and boxes, on the roof. Remonstrance would be futile. The places in the regular diligence were not only taken for the afternoon but engaged for several days ahead, and carriages are rare birds in Galicia. The Spanish gentlemen merely shrugged their shoulders, the Englishman had but that morning landed in Spain and could not speak a word of the vernacular, and feminine protest was clearly out of order. The four puny horses took the top-heavy vehicle at a rattling pace down the granite-paved streets of Coruna, but hardly were we under way when our griefs began.

On our arrival that forenoon, a fluent porter had over-persuaded us to leave our trunk at the station, letting him retain the check in order to have the baggage ready for us when we should pa.s.s the depot _en route_ for Santiago. We had been absent scarcely three hours, but meanwhile the trunk had disappeared. A dozen tatterdemalions ran hither and thither, making as much noise as possible, all the top fares shouted contradictory suggestions, and our porter, heaping Ossa-Pelions of execration upon the (absent) railroad officials, declared that they in their most reprobate stupidity had started the trunk on that eighteen-hour journey back to Leon. They were dolts and a.s.ses, the sons of imbecile mothers; but we had only to leave the check with him, and in the course of an indefinite number of "to-morrows" he would recover our property. We had grown sadder and wiser during the last five minutes, however, and insisted on taking that soiled inch of paper into our own keeping. At this the porter flew into a Spanish rage, flung back his fee into my lap, and so eloquently expressed himself that we left Coruna with stinging ears.

It was the historian's trunk, stored with supplies for the camera, as well as with sundry alleviations of our pilgrim lot, but she put it in the category of spilled milk, and turned with heroic cheerfulness to enjoy the scenery. The horses had now drooped into the snail's pace which they consistently maintained through the rest of their long, uphill way, for the city of the Apostle stands on a high plateau. As we mounted more and more, Coruna, lying between bay and sea, still shone clear across the widening reach of smiling landscape. Maize and vines were everywhere. So were peasants, who trudged along in family troops toward Compostela. But whether afoot or astride donkeys of antique countenance, they could always outstrip our lumbering coach, and we were an easy prey for the hordes of childish bandits who chase vehicles for miles along the pilgrim road, shrieking for pennies in the name of Santiago.

About two leagues out of Coruna we did pa.s.s something,--a group composed of a young Gallego and the most diminutive of donkeys. The peasant, walking beside his beast, was trying to balance across its back an object unwonted to those wilds.

"Strange to see a steamer trunk here!" I remarked, turning to the historian; but she was already leaning out from the window, inspecting that label-speckled box with an eagle gaze.

"It's mine!" she exclaimed, and in a twinkling had startled the driver into pulling up his horses, had leapt from the coach, and was running after the peasant, who, for his part, swerving abruptly from the main road, urged his panting donkey up a steep lane. n.o.body believed her.

Even I, her fellow-pilgrim, thought her wits were addling with our penitential fasts and vigils, and did not attempt to join in so mad a chase. As for the scandalized Spaniards, inside and out, they shouted angrily that the thing was impossible and the senora was to come back.

The coachman roared loudest of all. But on she dashed, ran down her man, and bade him, in inspired Galician, bring that trunk to the omnibus at once. He scratched his head, smiled a child's innocent and trustful smile, and, like a true Gallego, did as he was told. By this time masculine curiosity had been too much for the driver and most of the fares, and they had scrambled after, so that the few of us who kept guard by the carriage presently beheld an imposing procession advancing along the road, consisting of a Galician peasant with a steamer trunk upon his head, a group of crestfallen Spaniards, and a Yankee lady, slightly flushed, attended by an applauding Englishman.

Beyond a doubt it was her trunk. Her name was there, a New York hotel mark, which she had tried to obliterate with a blot of Leon ink, and the number corresponding to the number of our check. "By Jove!" said the Englishman. As for the peasant, he said even less, but in some way gave us to understand that he was taking the trunk to a gentleman from Madrid. Thinking that there might have been a confusion of checks in the station, we gave this childlike native a _peseta_ and a card with our Santiago address in case "the Madrid gentleman" should suspect us of highway robbery. Our fellow-pa.s.sengers took the tale to Santiago, however; it made a graphic column in the local paper, and none of the several Spaniards who spoke to us of the matter there doubted that the trunk was stolen by collusion between the porter and the peasant.

Our next adventure was more startling yet. The coachman had been heard, at intervals, vehemently expostulating with a roof pa.s.senger who wanted to get down. "Man alive! By the staff of Santiago! By your mother's head! By the Virgin of the Pillar!" Whether the malcontent had taken too much wine, whether he was under legal arrest, whether it was merely a crossing of whims, we could not learn from any of the impa.s.sioned actors in the drama; but, apparently, he found his opportunity to slip unnoticed off the coach. For suddenly the driver screamed to his horses, and, like a bolt from the blue, a handsome, athletic fellow leapt to the ground and rushed back along the dusty road, brandis.h.i.+ng clenched fists and stamping his feet in frenzy. In mid-career he paused, struck a stage att.i.tude, tore open his pink s.h.i.+rt, gasped, and shook with rage. "Irving isn't in it," quoth the Englishman. Then appeared, lurking by the roadside, a slouchy youth, on whom our tragic hero sprang like a tiger, threw him down, and stood panting over him with a gesture as if to stab. An instant later he had seized his victim by the collar, dragged him up, and was running him back to the coach. "You hurt me," wailed the truant, "and I don't want to go." But go he must, being bundled back in short order on the roof, where harmony seemed to be immediately restored. While the men were struggling, a lordly old peasant, stalking by, surveyed them with a peasant's high disdain. We had already noted the Irish look of the Galicians, but this magnificent patriarch, with dark green waistcoat over a light green s.h.i.+rt, old gold knickerbockers and crushed strawberry hose, had as Welsh a face, dark and clean-cut, as Snowdon ever saw.

Long sunset shadows lay across the hills; we had shared with our companions our slight stores of sweet chocolate, bread, and wine, and still we were not halfway to Santiago. It was nine o'clock before our groaning equipage drew up at a wretched little inn, incredibly foul, where it was necessary to bait the exhausted horses. Mine host welcomed the party with pensive dignity, and served us, in the midst of all that squalor, with the manners of a melancholy count. Shutting eyes and noses as far as we could, and blessing eggs for sh.e.l.ls and fruit for rind, we ate and gathered strength to bear what St. James might yet have in store for us.

The diligence had resumed its weary jog; we were all more or less asleep, unconsciously using, in our crowded estate, one another as pillows, when an uproar from the box and a wild lurch of the coach brought us promptly to our waking senses. One of the wheel horses was down, and the others, frightened by the dragging harness, were rearing and plunging. Out we tumbled into the misty night, wondering if we were destined, after all, to foot it to Compostela in proper pilgrim fas.h.i.+on. The poor beast was mad with terror, and his struggles soon brought his mate to the ground beside him. The coachman, so pompous and dictatorial at the outset, stood helplessly in the road, at a safe distance, wringing his hands and crying like a baby: "Alas, poor me!

Poor little me! O holy Virgin! Santiago!" The top fares, who had made good speed to _terra firma_, were wailing in unison and shrieking senseless counsels. "Kill thou the horse! Kill thou the horse!" one of them chanted like a Keltic dirge. The coachman supplied the antiphon: "Kill not my horse! Kill not my horse! _Ave Maria!_ Poor little me!"

"Fools! Sit on his head," vociferated the Englishman in his vain vernacular. The horses seemed to have as many legs as centipedes, kicking all at once. The coach was toppling, the luggage pitching, and catastrophe appeared inevitable, when Santiago, such an excellent horseman himself, inspired one of the roof pa.s.sengers to unbuckle a few straps. The effect was magical. First one nag, and then the other, struggled to its feet; the coachman sobbed anew, this time for joy; the Spanish gentlemen, who had been watching the scene with imperturbable pa.s.sivity, crawled back into the diligence, the silent wife followed with the heavy bag which her husband had let her carry all the way, and the Anglo-Saxon contingent walked on ahead for half an hour to give the spent horses what little relief we might.

The clocks were striking two when we reached the gates of the sacred city, where fresh hindrance met us. The customs officials were on the alert. Who were we that would creep into Compostela de Santiago under cover of night, in an irregular conveyance piled high with trunks and boxes? Smugglers, beyond a doubt! But they would teach us a thing or two. We might wait outside till morning.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MAIDS OF HONOR]

Delighted boys from a peasant camp beyond the walls ran up to jeer at our predicament. Our coachman, reverting to his dolorous chant, appealed to all the saints. The top fares shrilled in on the chorus; the Spanish gentlemen lighted cigarettes, and after some twenty minutes of dramatic altercation, a soldier sprang on our top step and mounted guard, while the coach rattled through the gates and on to the _aduana_. Here we were deposited, bag and baggage, on the pavement, and a drowsy, half-clad old dignitary was brought forth to look at us. The coachman, all his social graces restored, imaginatively presented the three Anglo-Saxons as a French party travelling for pleasure. "But what am I to do with them?" groaned the dignitary, and went back to bed. An appalling group of _serenos_, in slouch hats and long black capes, with lanterns and with staffs topped by steel axes, escorted us into a sort of luggage room, and told us to sit down on benches. We sat on them for half an hour, which seemed to satisfy the ends of justice, for then the _serenos_ gave place to porters, who said they would bring us our property, which n.o.body had examined or noticed in the slightest, after daybreak, and would now show us the way to our hotel. Our farewell to the coachman, who came beaming up to shake hands and receive thanks, was cold.

We had engaged rooms by letter a week in advance, but they had been surrendered to earlier arrivals, and we were conducted to a private house next door to the hotel. After the delays incident to waking an entire family, we were taken into a large, untidy room, furnished with dining table, sewing machine, and a half dozen decrepit chairs. There was no water and no sign of toilet apparatus, but in an adjoining dark closet were two narrow cots, from which the four daughters of the house had just been routed. Of those beds which these sleepy children were then, with unruffled sweetness and cheeriness, making ready for us, the less said the better. Our indoor hours in Compostela, an incessant battle against dirt, bad smells, and a most instructive variety of vermin, were a penance that must have met all pilgrim requirements. And yet these people spared no pains to make us comfortable, so far as they understood comfort. At our slightest call, were it only for a match, in would troop the mother, four daughters, maid, dog, and cat, with any of the neighbors who might be visiting, all eager to be of service. The girls were little models of sunny courtesy, and would have been as pretty of face as they were charming in manner, had not skin diseases and eye diseases told the tale of the hideously unsanitary conditions in which their young lives had been pa.s.sed.

But we had come to the festival of Santiago, and it was worth its price.

XXV

THE BUILDING OF A SHRINE

(A historical chapter, which should be skipped.)

That most Spanish of Spaniards, Alarcon, is pleased in one of his roguish sketches to depict the waywardness of a certain poetaster.

"Alonso Alonso was happy because he was thinking of many sad things,--of the past centuries, vanished like smoke, ... of the little span of life and of the absurdities with which it is filled, of the folly of wisdom, of the nothingness of ambition, of all this comedy, in short, which is played upon the earth."

Alonso Alonso would be in his very element in Santiago de Compostela.

The "unsubstantial pageant faded" of the mediaeval world is more than memory there. It is a ghost that walks at certain seasons, notably from the twentieth to the twenty-eighth of July. The story of the birth, growth, and pa.s.sing of that once so potent shrine, the Jerusalem of the West, is too significant for oblivion.

The corner-stone of the strange history is priestly legend. The Apostle James the Greater, so runs the tale, after preaching in Damascus and along the Mediterranean coast, came in a Greek s.h.i.+p to Galicia, then under Roman rule, and proclaimed the gospel in its capital city, Iria-Flavia. Here the Virgin appeared to him, veiled, like the mother of aeneas, in a cloud, and bade him build a church.

This he did, putting a bishop in charge, and then pursued his mission, not only in the remote parts of Galicia, but in Aragon, Castile, and Andalusia. At Saragossa the Virgin again flashed upon his sight. She was poised, this time, on a marble pillar, which she left behind her to become, what it is to-day, the most sacred object in all Spain. A chip of this _columna immobilis_ is one of the treasures of Toledo.

The cathedral of the _Virgen del Pilar_,--affectionately known as Pilarica,--which James then founded at Saragossa, is still a popular goal of pilgrimage, the marble of the holy column being hollowed, at one uns.h.i.+elded spot, by countless millions of kisses. The Apostle, on his return to Jerusalem after seven years in Spain, was beheaded by Herod. Loyal disciples recovered the body and set sail with it for the Spanish coast. Off Portugal occurred the pointless "miracle of the sh.e.l.ls." A gentleman was riding on the sh.o.r.e, when all at once his horse, refusing to obey the bit, leapt into the sea, walking on the crests of the waves toward the boat. Steed and rider suddenly sank, but promptly rose again, all crusted over with sh.e.l.ls, which have been ever since regarded as the emblem of St. James in particular, and of pilgrim folk in general.

"How should I your true love know From another one?

By his c.o.c.kle hat and staff And his sandal shoon."

The Santiago "c.o.c.kle," which thus, as a general pilgrim symbol, outstripped the keys of Rome and the cross of Jerusalem, is otherwise accounted for by a story that the body of St. James was borne overseas to Galicia in a sh.e.l.l of miraculous size, but this is not the version that was told us at the shrine.

The two disciples, Theodore and Athanasius, temporarily interred their master in Padron, two leagues from Iria, until they should have obtained permission from the Roman dame who governed that region to allow St. James the choice of a resting-place. Her pagan heart was moved to graciousness, and she lent the disciples an ox-cart, in which they placed the body, leaving the beasts free to take the Apostle's course. It is hardly miraculous that, under the circ.u.mstances, Lady Lupa's oxen plodded straight back to Iria and came to a stop before her summer villa. Since this was so clearly indicated as the choice of the saint, she could do no less than put her house at his disposal. In the villa was a chapel to the war-G.o.d Ja.n.u.s, but when the body of Santiago was brought within the doors, this heathen image fell with a crash into a hundred fragments. Here the saint abode, guarded by his faithful disciples, until, in process of time, they slept beside him.

The villa had been transformed into a little church, so little that, when the Imperial persecutions stormed over the Spanish provinces, the wors.h.i.+ppers hid it under heaps of turf and tangles of brier bushes.

Those early Christians of Iria were slain or scattered, and the burial place of St. James was forgotten of all the world.

In the seventh century, a rumor went abroad that the Apostle James had preached the gospel in Spain. The legend grew until, in the year 813, a Galician anchorite beheld from the mouth of his cavern a brilliant star, which shone persistently above a certain bramble-wood in the outskirts of Iria. Moving lights, as of processional tapers, twinkled through the matted screen of shrubbery, and solemn chants arose from the very heart of the boscage. Word of this mystery came to the bishop, who saw with his own eyes "the glow of many candles through the shadows of the night." After three days of fasting, he led all the villagers in procession to the thicket which had grown up, a protecting hedge, about the ruins of the holy house. The three graves were found intact, and on opening the chief of these the bishop looked upon the body of St. James, as was proven not only by severed head and pilgrim staff, but by a Latin scroll. The swiftest hors.e.m.e.n of Galicia bore the glorious tidings to the court of the king, that most Christian monarch, Alfonso II, "very Catholic, a great almsgiver, defender of the Faith." So loved of heaven was this pious king, that once, when he had collected a treasure of gold and precious stones for the making of a cross, two angels, disguised as pilgrims, undertook the work. When, after a few hours, Alfonso came softly to the forge to make sure of their honesty and skill, no artisans were there, but from an exquisitely fas.h.i.+oned cross streamed a celestial glory. So devout a king, on hearing the great tidings from Galicia, lost no time in despatching couriers to his bishops and grandees, and all the pomp and pride of Spain, headed by majesty itself, flocked to the far-off hamlet beyond the Asturian mountains to adore the relics of Santiago.

Now began grand doings in Iria, known henceforth as the Field of the Star, _Campus Stellae_, or Compostela. Alfonso had a church of stone and clay built above the sepulchre, and endowed it with an estate of three square miles. The Pope announced the discovery to Christendom. A community of twelve monks, with a presiding abbot, was installed at Compostela to say ma.s.ses before the shrine. For these beginnings of homage the Apostle made a munificent return. A wild people, living in a wild land at a wild time, these Spaniards of the Middle Ages were shaped and swayed by two sovereign impulses, piety and patriotism.

These two were practically one, for patriotism meant the expulsion of the Moor, and piety, Cross above Koran. It was a life-and-death struggle. The dispossessed Christians, beaten back from Andalusia and Castile to the fastnesses of the northern mountains, were fighting against fearful odds. They felt sore need of a leader, for although, when their ranks were wavering, the Virgin had sometimes appeared to cheer them on, hers, after all, was but a woman's arm. It was in the battle of Clavijo, 846, that Santiago first flashed into view, an invincible champion of the cross.

Rameiro, successor to Alfonso II, had taken the field against the terrible Abderrahman of Cordova, who had already overrun Valencia and Barcelona and was demanding from Galicia a yearly tribute of one hundred maidens. This exceedingly Moorish tax, which now amuses Madrid as a rattling farce in the summer theatre of the _Buen Retiro_, was no jesting matter then. Not only the most famous warriors of the realm, Bernardo del Carpio in their van, but shepherds and ploughmen, priests, monks, even bishops, flocked to the royal standard.

"A cry went through the mountains when the proud Moor drew near, And trooping to Rameiro came every Christian spear; The blessed Saint Iago, they called upon his name:-- That day began our freedom, and wiped away our shame."

The hosts of Cross and Crescent met in battle-shock near Logrono. Only nightfall saved the Christians from utter rout, but in those dark hours of their respite the apparition of Santiago bent above their sleeping king. "Fear not, Rameiro," said the august lips. "The enemy, master of the field, hems you in on every side, but G.o.d fights in your ranks." At sunrise, in the very moment when the Moslem host was bowed in prayer, the Christians, scandalized at the spectacle, charged in orthodox fury. Their onset was led by an unknown knight, gleaming in splendid panoply of war. Far in advance, his left hand waving a snowy banner stamped with a crimson cross, he spurred his fierce white horse full on the infidel army. His brandished sword "hurled lightning against the half-moon." At his every sweeping stroke, turbaned heads rolled off by scores to be trampled, as turbaned heads deserve, under the hoofs of that snorting steed. The Son of Thunder had found his function, which was nothing less than to inspirit the Reconquest.

Henceforth he could always be counted on to lead a desperate a.s.sault, and "_Santiago y Cierra Espana!_" was the battle-cry of every hard-fought field. So late as 1212, at the crucial contest of Las Navas de Tolosa, the "Captain of the Spaniards" saved the day.