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My wound began to pain me afresh, and the hot sun, and the dust, and the thirst, with the miserable accommodations of New Mexican posadas, vexed me to an excess of endurance. On the fifth day after leaving Santa Fe, we entered the wretched little pueblo of Parida.
"A plague of all this finery!" growled Dawson. "How long may it be, think you, Señor, ere we can quit this palace and get to one of those posadas you promised us?" Don Sanchez hunched his shoulders for all reply and turned away to hide his mortification.
Destitution prevailed throughout the solitudes of Castile as well as in those poor posadas, bare as an Asiatic caravanserai.
Persons visiting Matanzas must make up their minds to be content with indifferent hotel accommodations. In fact there are no really good hotels in Cuba; those which exist are poor and expensive. On the inland routes away from the cities there are none, and the humble hostelries, or posadas, as they are called, are so indifferent in point of comforts as not to deserve the name of inns.
But I knew him, and I was surprised, and glad; he watched me, unsuspected by my father, from whom he always hides himself when he crosses my path on the road, or in the posadas where we halt; and, as I know what he is, and reflect that for love of me he makes this journey on foot in all this hardship, I am ready to die of sorrow; and where he sets foot there I set my eyes.
Sometimes they travelled alone, sometimes jogged along with parties whom they overtook by the way, or who had slept in the same posadas or inns at which they had put up for the night. Most of these inns were very rough, and, to Geoffrey, astonishingly dirty.
If Borrow described the tinker family as wretched, and their donkey as miserable, he added, "though life, seemingly so wretched, has its charms for these outcasts, who live without care and anxiety, without a thought beyond the present hour, and who sleep as sound in ruined posadas and ventas, or in ravines amongst rocks and pines, as the proudest grandee in his palace at Seville or Madrid."
Should we cross the Pyrenees and traverse Spain, visiting Madrid and the Escurial en route to Seville, and thence through Andalusia and Granada, and home by Valencia, Malaga, and Barcelona? "No, I don't think Spain will do," remarked my wife, slowly. "I fear Spanish hotels posadas, don't they call them? are not very comfortable." "You are right," was my reply.
As it chanced, they only just accomplished the feat in time, for as Stukely reached the pavement on the right side of the railing, footsteps were heard approaching, and Phil scarcely had time to don his priest's habit, draw the hood well over his head, and conceal his bar and pruning knife in the ample folds of the garment when a belated frequenter of one of the numerous posadas of the city staggered past, humming in maudlin tones the refrain of a bacchanalian song which he cut short when he realised that the two dark figures which he jostled were, as he supposed, connected with the dread institution which lay back there frowning in the distance.
They had much to tell each other. They had traveled by the same road, one by night, the other by day Sam passing the days sleeping in the woods, his master traveling by day and at night sleeping in wretched village posadas.
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