cia, when he was
nearing Finisterra, the men of the cabin where he rested took him for a
Catalan, and "he favoured their mistake and began with a harsh Catalan
accent to talk of the fish of Galicia, and the high duties on salt." When
at this same cabin he found there was no bed, he went up into the loft
and lay down on the boards' without complaint. So in the prison at
Madrid he got on so well with the prisoners that on the third day he
spoke their language as if he were "a son of the prison." At Gibraltar
he talked to the man of Mogador in Arabic and was taken for "a holy man
from the kingdoms of the East," especially when he produced the shekel
which had been given him by Hasfeldt: a Jew there believed him to be a
Salamancan Jew. At Villafranca a woman mistook his voice in the dark for
that of "the German clockmaker from Pontevedra." For some time in 1839
he went among the villages dressed in a peasant's leather helmet, jacket
and trousers, and resembling "a person between sixty and seventy years of
age," so that people addressed him as Uncle, and bought his Testaments,
though the Bible Society, on hearing it, "began to inquire whether, if
the old man were laid up in prison, they could very conveniently apply
for his release in the proper quarter." {173}

He saw men and places, and with his pen he created a land as distinct, as
wild, as vast, and as wonderful as the Spain of Cervantes. He did this
with no conscious preconceived design. His creation was the effect of a
multitude of impressions, all contributory because all genuine and true
to the depth of Borrow's own nature. He had seen and felt Spain, and
"The Bible in Spain" shows how; nor probably could he have shown it in
any other way. Not but what he could speak of Spain as the land of old
renown, and of himself--in a letter to the Bible Society in 1837--as an
errant knight, and of his servant Francisco as his squire. He did not
see himself as he was, or he would have seen both Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza in one, now riding a black Andalusian stallion, now driving an ass
before him.

Only a power as great as Borrow's own could show how this wild Spain was
built up. For it was not done by this and that, but by a great man and a
noble country in a state of accord continually vibrating.

Thus he drew near to Finisterra with his wild Gallegan guide:

"It was a beautiful autumnal morning when we left the choza and pursued
our way to Corcuvion. I satis