Location: Avila Province, Spain
It is evening, I am today camped in a forest just north of the Somosierra pass, which we travelled through today. This morning we rose late and packed up our tent into a requisitioned wagon from a local farm. We are still a day or two ahead of the company however and so we can afford to travel at a slower pace than yesterday.
We travelled by wagon to a small village in the southern foothills of the Sierra de Guadarrama. We sold the cart to the villagers and continued our journey by horse along the banks of a shallow river, its banks as wide apart as any I have seen before. We rode for some time when suddenly the tropical storm that we had heard about whilst still in portugal struck, but we continued on and finally arrived at a small farming settlement utterly soaked. We bought ourselves a covered cart with the money from the previous one and continued on to a large town still occupied by a sluggish garrisson of Joseph Bony's Spanish minions.
I entered the town in the guise of a Moslem merchant, but it soon became apparant that the town was not very active in exercising their support for Bonaparte. We ate in a typical French inn before setting off for a last time, coming to rest in a clearing similar to the last one we had set up camp in.
I was only just in my tent when the storm again lashed out at us with all its fury.
No comments:
Post a Comment