Returned to the casa de huéspedes, the student and I were given adjoining rooms and saw much of Valladolid together before I took train the second morning after to Burgos. There, were regulation "sights" in abundance; on every hand memories of the Cid Campeador, even the spot where stood his dwelling--all as authentic as the popular landmarks of Jerusalem. Two miles or more out along the shallow mill-race that Burgos calls a river I visited the nunnery of Las Huelgas, which claims for its distinction never in its centuries of existence to have admitted to the veil less than a daughter of the nobility. The stroll is pleasant, but the place, noble though it be, unexciting--at least outwardly. Of the cathedral, the finest in Spain, much might be said--that has been often said before.
It was in Burgos that I saw for the first time what I might have seen earlier and frequently had my tastes run that way,--a Spanish cemetery. More exactly it was a corpse-file, a perpendicular hillside in which hundreds of bodies had been pigeon-holed for future reference, with the name and a charitably indulgent characterization of the deceased on the end of his coffin. The Spaniard, with his superstitions, prefers this style of tomb for much the same reason, it seems, that the Arab seals his graves with cement,--that the emissaries from the less popular regions may not bear away the departed before the agents of the better and hence slower realm put in an appearance.
The greatest experience of my day in Burgos was the view from the summit of the hot, dry Cerro de San Miguel. Not merely does it offer a mighty and comprehensive vista of half the stony-bare face of Castilla Vieja, but a bird's-eye view as it were of all Spain and her history. Of the city spread out at one's feet fully three-fourths the space is taken up by cathedral, churches, convents, monasteries, casas de misericordia, the vast bulk of the castle, the barracks, the bullring,--all the countless buildings of non-producers; while between them in the nooks and corners wherever a crack offers are packed and huddled the hovels of the mere inhabitants. There, in plain sight, is Spain's malady. She is a land of non-producers. Ecclesiastics, soldiers, useless octroi guards, beggars rotten with the notion fostered by the omnivorous priesthood that mendicancy is an honorable profession, make up almost the bulk of her population of productive age. Not without reason does nomadic Borrow lift up his clench-fisted wail against "Batuschca."