really it may be that country. The trouble probably is that one carries
out of one's reading an image which one had carried into it. When I read
_Don Quixote_ and read and read it again, I put La Mancha first into the
map of southern Ohio, and then into that, after an interval of seven or
eight years, of northern Ohio; and the scenes I arranged for his
adventures were landscapes composed from those about me in my earlier
and later boyhood. There was then always something soft and mild in the
_Don Quixote_ country, with a blue river and gentle uplands, and woods
where one could rest in the shade, and hide one's self if one wished,
after easily rescuing the oppressed. Now, instead, a treeless plain
unrolled itself from sky to sky, clean, dull, empty; and if some azure
tops dimmed the clear line of the western horizon, how could I have got
them into my early picture when I had never yet seen a mountain in my
life? I could not put the knight and his squire on those naked levels
where they should not have got a mile from home without discovery and
arrest. I tried to think of them jogging along in talk of the adventures
which the knight hoped for; but I could not make it work. I could have
done better before we got so far from Aranjuez; there were gardens and
orchards and a very suitable river there, and those elm trees
overhanging it; but the prospect in La Mancha had only here and there a
white-availed white farmhouse to vary its lonely simplicity, its desert
fertility; and I could do nothing with the strips and patches of
vineyard. It was all strangely African, strangely Mexican, and not at
all American, not Ohioan, enough to be anything like the real La Mancha
of my invention. To be sure, the doors and windows of the nearer houses
were visibly netted against mosquitoes and that was something, but even
that did not begin to be noticeable till we were drawing near the Sierra
Morena. Then, so long before we reached the mighty chain of mountains
which nature has stretched between the gravity of New Castile and the
gaiety of Andalusia, as if they could not bear immediate contact, I