nea del Toboso, to the great scandal of
Sancho Panza riding away to give his letter to the lady, but unable to
bear the sight of the knight skipping on the rocks in a single garment.

III

In the forests about befell all those adventures with the mad Cardenio
and the wronged Dorothea, both self-banished to the wilderness through
the perfidy of the same false friend and faithless lover. The episodes
which end so well, and which form, I think, the heart of the wonderful
romance, have, from the car windows, the fittest possible setting;
but suddenly the scene changes, and you are among aspects of nature as
savagely wild as any in that new western land where the countrymen of
Cervantes found a New Spain, just as the countrymen of Shakespeare found
a New England. Suddenly, or if not suddenly, then startlingly, we were
in a pass of the Sierra called (for some reason which I will leave
picturesquely unexplained) the Precipice of Dogs, where bare sharp peaks
and spears of rock started into the air, and the faces of the cliffs
glared down upon us like the faces of Indian warriors painted yellow and
orange and crimson, and every other warlike color. With my poor scruples
of moderation I cannot give a just notion of the wild aspects; I must
leave it to the reader, with the assurance that he cannot exaggerate
it, while I employ myself in noting that already on this awful summit we
began to feel ourselves in the south, in Andalusia. Along the mountain
stream that slipped silverly away in the valley below, there were
oleanders in bloom, such as we had left in Bermuda the April before.
Already, north of the Sierra the country had been gentling. The upturned
soil had warmed from gray to red; elsewhere the fields were green with
sprouting wheat; and there were wide spaces of those purple flowers,
like crocuses, which women were gathering in large baskets. Probably
they were not crocuses; but there could be no doubt of the vineyards
increasing in their acreage; and the farmhouses which had been without
windows in their outer walls, now sometimes opened as many as two to
the passing train. Flocks of black sheep and goats, through the optical
illusion frequent in the Spanish air, looked large as cattle in the
offing. Only in one place had we seen the tumbled boulders of Old
Castile, and there had been really no greater objection to La Mancha
than that it was flat, stale, and unprofitable and wholly unimaginable
as the scene of even