From Vigo to this day of forested slopes and brawling streams,
steadily worsening road, ruder dwellings, more primitive, impoverished
folk, rolled a time of difficulties small and great, like the mountain
pebbles for number. It took will and wit at strain to dissolve them
all, and so make way out of Spain into France--through France--to
Paris, where were friends.
Spanish travel was difficult at best--Spanish travel with scarcely any
gold to travel on found the "best" quite winnowed out. Slow at all
times, it grew, lacking money, to be like one of those dreams of
retardation. Ian gathered and blew upon his philosophy, and took
matters at last with some amusement, at times, even, with a sense of
the enjoyable.
He was not quite penniless. Those who had helped in his escape from
Edinburgh had provided him gold. But, his voyage paid for, he must buy
at Vigo fresh apparel and a horse. When at last he rode eastward and
northward he was poor enough! Food and lodging must be bought for
himself and his steed. Inns and innkeepers, chance folk applied to for
guidance, petty officials in perennially suspicious towns--twenty
people a day stood ready to present a spectral aspect of leech and
gold-sucker! He was expert in traveling, but usually he had borne a
purse quite like that of Fortunatus. Now he must consider that he
might presently have to sell his horse--and it was not a steed of
Roland's, to bring a great price! He might be compelled to go afoot
into France.
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