The monotony wearies. The abject barrenness of Estremadura, its lifelessness, is actually worse, more pronounced and depressing, than we had anticipated. Now the far horizon on the north bristles with battlements, towers, and spires--that is Trujillo, an old-world fortress of the Caesars, crowning a granite koppie in yon everlasting plain. The ten leagues that yet intervene recall, in colour and contour, a mid-Northumbrian moor, wild and bleak--here the home of bustards, stone-curlew, sand-grouse, ... and of locusts.
From the topmost turrets of Trujillo let us take one more survey of this Estremenian wilderness ere yet we pronounce a final judgment.
Ascend the belfry of Santa Maria la Mayor and you command an unrivalled view. Spread out beneath your gaze stretch away tawny expanses of waste and veld to a radius averaging forty miles, and everywhere girt-in by encircling mountains. To the north Grédos' snowy peaks pierce the clouds, 100 kilometres away, with the Sierra de Gata on their left, Bejar on the right. To the eastward the Sierra de Guadalupe,[36] far-famed for its shrine to Our Lady of that ilk, closes that horizon; while to westward the ranges of Sta. Cruz and Montánches shut in the frontier of Portugal. What a panorama--a circle eighty miles across!
Yet in all that expanse you can detect no more evidence of human presence than you would see in equatorial Africa--surveying, let us say, the well-known Athi Plains from the adjoining heights of Lukénia.
We are aware that already, in describing La Mancha, we have employed an African simile; but here, in Estremadura, the comparison is yet more apposite and forceful than in the wildest of Don Quixote's country. We will vary it by likening Estremadura rather to the highlands of Transvaal--the land of the back-veld Boer--than to Equatoria. Here, as there, rocky koppies stud the wastes, and (differing from La Mancha) water-courses traverse them, with intermittent pools surviving even in June, stagnant and pestilent. Such in Africa would be jungle-fringed--worth trying for a lion! Here their naked banks scarce provide covert for a hare.
An index of the poverty-stricken condition of Estremadura is afforded by the comparative absence of the birds-of-prey. Never do the soaring vultures--elsewhere so characteristic of Spanish skies--catch one's eye, and very rarely an eagle or buzzard. A province that cannot support scavengers promises ill for mankind.