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Badajoz still lay forty miles to the north. In a hot bus that talked back to itself I was plodding through the vast region called Extremadura, that empty, rocky section of Spain lying southwest from Madrid along the Portuguese border. It was a day of intense heat, with the thermometer well above a hundred and ten. For as far as I could see there were no towns, no villages, only the brassy, shimmering heat rising up from the plains and the implacable sky without even a wisp of cloud. When dust rose, it hung in the motionless air and required minutes to fall back to the caked and burning earth. I saw no animals, no birds, no men, for they refused to venture forth in this remorseless heat.

In fact, the only thing in nature that moved was the sun, terrible and metallic as it inched its way across that indifferent sky. I was relieved therefore when the bus descended a long hill and we came to a meadowland filled with trees, but such trees I had not seen before. They were not tall like elms, nor copious like maples. They were low, extremely sturdy, with dark gray trunks and gnarled branches that reached wide, so that each tree was given a considerable area to itself. The meadowland in between was filled with small yellow flowers, as if it were a carpet of gold, accented here and there with concentrations of white daisies and punctuated by the massive trees with their dark crowns.

I had barely inspected this pleasing landscape when the trees changed radically. Their trunks, up to a height of perhaps ten feet, turned suddenly bright orange, as if they had been painted that morning. And before I could adjust to orange-colored trees they were replaced by trunks of angry russet, then by trunks of a dark and heavy brown, and finally by trees whose trunks were the original gray I had seen at first; but all the trees, whether orange or gray, sent their limbs twisting and turning in the hot air as if they were gasping for breath.

“What is it?” I asked the driver.

“Cork forest. The bright orange means a tree that was stripped of its cork a few days ago. Enough time and the bark grows gray again.” We saw a low shed back among the spacious trees but no sign of life. “The cork harvesters are taking a siesta,” the driver explained.

We next came to a grove with quite different trees; the trunks were badly shattered, as if the trees were dying; in some there were holes through which I could see; the branches were low and carried delicate leaves that were dark on top, silvery gray on bottom, with clusters of small black fruit. “Olive grove,” the driver said. “When the breeze comes through, the leaves flutter. Beautiful.” But this day there was no breeze.

Most of the land was barren, with no trees at all. The soil was rocky and red from decomposing ferrous elements. At times a stream-bed, empty of water for the past five months, crawled like a wounded snake across the plain, but often there was not even this to watch. I longed for at least a buzzard to mark that merciless sky, but none appeared. “Sleeping,” the driver said. “Everything is sleeping.”

We came to a village, a truly miserable collection of adobe huts clustered about an unpaved square. One bar was open, apparently, for its doors were not closed, but no men were visible behind the strands of beads that served as a curtain for keeping out the flies. Farther on there was a town, and since it was now nearly five in the afternoon people were beginning to move about, but the heat was so intense that no work was being done. It was a town that had little to commend it except its longevity; Roman legions had known this town, and when their expeditions had ended in the years before the birth of Christ, Caesar Augustus had allowed the oldest veterans to take up land here. Over the ravine at the edge of town ran a stone bridge that had been used in its present form for more than two thousand years.

“You want to stop for a drink?” the driver asked.

“Not in this town,” and we pushed on.

We came now to fields that looked as if they might have been cultivated and to a series of oak and olive forests that were well tended. “We’re getting close to Badajoz,” he said, pronouncing the word with respect. As evening approached, the heat grew more bearable and in one river valley we actually felt a breeze. We climbed a hill, turned west and saw below us the Río Guadiana, which farther on would form the border between Portugal and Spain, and in its valley stood a city without a single distinction: no towers, no ancient walls, no exciting prospects. The eastern half looked old and unrepaired; the western half, new and unrelated to the rest; and there was no apparent reason why a man in good sense would descend the hill to enter that particular city, for this was Badajoz, the nothing-city of the west. “Precisely what I wanted,” I said.

In America when I had explained to my friends that I was heading for Badajoz, they had shrugged their shoulders because they had never heard of it, and when I told my Spanish friends they grimaced because they had. “For the love of Jesus, why Badajoz? It has absolutely nothing.” In Spanish this last phrase sounds quite final: “Absolutamente nada,” with the six syllables of the first word strung out in emphasis. They tried to dissuade me from going, explaining that Badajoz was a mere depot town along the border, that it was lost in the emptiness of Extremadura, and that if I was determined to visit a remote town, why not a beauty like Murcia near the Mediterranean, or Jaen in the mountains, or Oviedo, where the relics of Christ were kept? “Why Badajoz?”

Why indeed? I had not tried to explain, but there was an explanation and a good one. When I heard the word Spain, I visualized not kings and priests, nor painters and hidalgos, nor Madrid and Sevilla, but the vast reaches of emptiness, lonely uplands occupied by the solitary shepherd, the hard land of Spain stretching off to interminable distances and populated by tough, weatherbeaten men with never a ruffle at their throats nor a caparisoned hose beneath them. In short, when I thought of Spain, I thought primarily of Extrema-dura, the brutal region in the west, of which Badajoz was the principal city.

There was a reason. Apart from my first brief visit to Castellon de la Plana and Teruel as a student, my introduction to Spain had come in the American southwest, in the empty areas of New Mexico, Arizona, Texas and California, where the Spanish impact had been great. To me, a Spaniard was a man like Coronado, who had ventured into Kansas in 1541. Hernando de Soto and Cabeza de Vaca were my Spaniards and the unknown men who settled Santa Fe and Taos. The Spain I had known in western United States was a heroic Spain, the Spanish landscape with which I was familiar reached at least four hundred miles in any given direction over largely empty land. To have been a Spaniard in those early days in New Mexico and Arizona signified, and the closest approach to that Spain in the home country was Extremadura.

My second contact with Spain was different. I had spent considerable time in Mexico and at one period or another had lived in all but two of its states, always seeing Mexico as a land that had been discovered, occupied, developed and ruined by Spaniards. I knew well the routes traveled by Hernan Cortes in his conquest of the Aztecs, and I had studied those haunting plateresque churches built by his followers in towns where silver was mined. There were few Spanish buildings in Mexico that I had not explored, and some of the happiest days of my youth were those spent in drifting across the plateaus of Chihuahua or exploring the jungles west of Vera Cruz. But whenever I looked at Mexico, I saw Spain. Mexican culture was meaningful only as an extension of Spanish culture, and the cyclones of Mexican political history were merely a reflection of the home country.

Early in my study I discovered that most of the Spanish heroes who had operated in the Americas had come from Extremadura. The New World was won for Spain not by gentlemen from Toledo and Sevilla but by a group of uneducated village louts who, realizing that they had no future in their hard homeland, had volunteered for service overseas, where their Extremaduran courage proved the most valuable commodity carried westward by the Spanish galleons.

Extremadura was my Spain, and no one who had missed my experiences in New Mexico and Old could appreciate what Badajoz meant to me, but when I saw this unlovely, battered town, called Pax Augusta by the Romans, and when I saw about me the suspicious, dour Extremadurans, whose ancestors had conquered not cities but whole nations and continents, I felt that I had come back to my own land.