SALAMANCA
BY ROGER FRY
PEOPLE, i. e. people without motors, do not, I believe, go very frequently to Salamanca. Even commercial travellers, so one of them told me, funked it because of the quite peculiar cussedness of its railway communications. Still every other day a goods train condescends to trail behind it a few decrepit carriages from Medina del Campo which is the general junction for Spain west of Madrid. It attaches such importance to this feat that it starts to time whatever may have happened to the Madrid-Paris express. On the day I tried the connexion the express engine had broken down so hopelessly on the inclines of the Guadarrama pass that it only arrived in time for a very hurried scramble into the goods train. But having once started punctually the train gives up any further effort and only just manages an average of ten miles an hour across the absolutely bare waste of slightly undulating plain which stretches over this part of Castile. One small cluster of Mediterranean pines raises its long bare trunks out of the baked yellow earth at the station of Caspio and for the rest nothing; nothing to break the evenness of the surface and no apparent reason why there should be stations or villages and nothing to show how any one supports life there. A sort of cart track of indefinite outline and great width wanders vaguely across the plain and now and then the train overtakes—it does overtake, but not with éclat—the ubiquitous Spanish donkey trotting steadily along beneath a load as big as itself, its two saddle baskets on either side and a huge peasant behind on its haunches. Where they can be going and why, seems in this wilderness utterly unimaginable. And so it goes on hour after hour for four hours; it is only forty miles even then, but it seems much longer. The long monotony of those hours have their effect and their recompense when behind a final undulation of the brown soil there suddenly appears the vision of Salamanca, a whole row of towers and domes for as yet the houses are hidden. It is like a more grandiose Oxford—curiously like in the proportion of dome to tower—only all dark umber-coloured stone rising against the
