330 WILD SPAIN. 



with their packs on mules, equipped with jingling 

 bells, jog leisurely along the mountain roads; groups of 

 buxom women, with bright-coloured kerchiefs tied over 

 unkempt tresses, and bare brown legs, dexterously de- 

 tach the bunches and fill them into baskets, the men 

 meanwhile lazily smoking under the shade of some olive- 

 tree till their burdens are ready. Along the mountain- 

 paths file strings of sturdy Gallegans,* each bearing 

 upon his shoulders a huge basket (jigo), crammed with 

 grapes. The jigo weighs nearly a hundredweight, and the 

 shoulders of the bearer are protected by a woolly sheep- 

 skin. These burdens they bear to the lagans, where, when 

 the great stone trough is filled, a gang of men step in and 

 commence a sort of devil's dance, treading out the rich 

 juice, which, after many hours' fermentation, pours in 

 purple streams to the touch below. 



Within the sombre shade of the lagares that strange 

 dance proceeds, at first briskly, amid laughter and song, 

 to the squeaking notes of fiddle and guitar, the rattle 

 of drum, and the chaff of the women who gather round the 

 open verandas ; but as the hours roll by and the air grows 

 heavy with the exhalations of fermenting " must," the 

 work begins to tell, and the treaders, all bespattered 

 with purple juice, move slowly and listlessly. In vain 

 the fiddle strikes up anew, the fife squeaks, the guitar 

 tinkles, and overseers upbraid. After some eighteen hours 

 of this tread-mill exercise in an atmosphere charged with 

 soporific influences, music has lost its charm, and 

 authority its terror. The men, by this time almost dead- 

 beat, languidly raise first one purple leg and then the 

 other, working on far into the watches of the night. Thus 

 has wine been made since before Homeric times. 



* Except at vintage-times the Alto Douro is almost uninhabited. 

 Hence in early autumn, when work is plentiful, there occurs an 

 extraordinary influx of labourers — men and women — many from con- 

 siderable distances, and especially from the Spanish province of 

 Galicia, nocking into the Alto Douro as the hop-pickers in September 

 pour into Kent from the arcana of London, or as the Irish harvesters 

 at that season flood the Midlands and North of England. 



