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
experienced a moment of perfect reconciliation to the landscape as
really wearing the face of that La Mancha familiar to my boyish vision.
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