In 1934, Norman Lewis and his brother-in-law Eugene Corvaja travelled across the breadth of Spain on what turned out to be the eve of the murderous civil war. Commissioned by his Sicilian father-in-law to locate the tomb of the last Spanish Corvaja in the cathedral of Seville, when public transport came to a standstill, the two walked more than a hundred miles to Madrid, and were then forced via Portugal to Seville. Lewis makes light of being caught in the crossfire of a fractious country, sometimes literally, and glories in the beauty of nature and the common humanity of the Spaniards he meets on the way.