Yet it is wrong to describe La Mancha as barren. Rather its central highlands present a monotony of endless uninteresting cultivation. League-long furrows traverse the landscape, running in parallel lines to utmost horizon, or weary the eye by radiating from the focal point as spokes in a wheel. But never a break or a bush relieves one's sight, never a hedge or a hill, not a pool, stream, or tree in a long day's journey. Oh, it is distressing, wherever seen--in Old World or New--that everlasting cultivation on the flat. True, it produces the necessary fruits of the earth--here (to wit) corn and wine.
Farther north, where the Toledan mountains loom blue over the western horizon, La Mancha refuses to produce anything.
The unsympathetic earth, for 100 miles a sterile hungry crust, stony and sun-scorched, obtrudes an almost hideous nakedness, its dry bones declining to be clad, save in flints or fragments of lava and splintered granite. Wherever nature is a trifle less austere, a low growth of dwarf broom and helianthemum at least serves to vary the dreariness of dry prairie-grass. There, beneath the foothills of the wild Montes de Toledo, stretch whole regions where thorn-scrub and broken belts of open wood vividly recall the scenery of equatorial Africa--we might be traversing the "Athi Plains" instead of European lands. Evergreen oak and wild-olive replace mimosa and thorny acacia--one almost expects to see the towering heads of giraffes projecting above the grey-green bush. In both cases there is driven home that living sense of arid sterility, the same sense of desolation--nay, here even more so--since there is lacking that wondrous wild fauna of the other. No troops of graceful gazelles bound aside before one's approach; no herds of zebra or antelope adorn the farther veld; no galloping files of shaggy gnus spurn the plain. A chance covey of redlegs, a hoopoe or two, the desert-loving wheatears--birds whose presence ever attests sterility--a company of azure-winged magpies chattering among the stunted ilex, or a woodchat--that is all one may see in a long day's ride.
[Illustration: WOODCHAT SHRIKE AND ITS "SHAMBLES" (Sketched in La Mancha)]
Another feature common to both lands--and one abhorrent to northern eye--is the absence of water, stagnant or current. Never the glint of lake or lagoon, far less the joyous murmur of rippling burn, rejoice eye or ear in La Mancha.