"What is so frightening?" I asked him.

Angel nodded toward a three-storied apartment complex across the street.

What I saw caused the fine hairs on the back of my neck to rise. There, standing defiantly on a second floor balcony was a masked soldier. His brown-fatigued legs were standing wide apart, and his thick arms cradled a long automatic rifle, its black muzzle pointing just above our heads.

Surely that soldier is a statue, not a real man, I thought. He looked so out of place in gentle, lovely south Spain. I stepped into the deserted street to get a closer look, and suddenly a deep voice from behind the complex's 10-foot-high barrier wall barked at me in threatening Spanish. From behind me, Angel's own thick arms yanked me back onto the curb, and he angrily pulled me around the corner of the nearest building, out of sight of the Guardia Civil post.

"Why all the caution?" I asked in a perturbed manner. After all, I explained to Angel, I'd visited dozens of Guardia Civil posts in my trek through Spain. Mostly I'd stopped at them to ask directions or to have the commanding officer stamp my log book. Never once had the national policemen given me any trouble. Indeed, I considered them to be some of the best policemen anywhere. They'd even brought me meals, and twice they'd put me up for the night in a prison cell when it was raining.

"Perhaps that is so," he cautioned me in Spanish, "but still you should not approach them so loudly this late at night." Then, waving a stern finger at me, he added, "In Franco's day you would have probably been shot trying to get close like that!"

In Franco's day....How many times had I heard those words here in Spain, especially from the young. And always, it seemed, the words were spoken with a tinge of hatred.

On the long walk back to Angel's sparsely-furnished apartment (which, like those of most young Spaniards, was but a few doors from his parents' apartment), I thought back to another time I'd heard Franco's name spoken in a bitter tone. It had been in Moia, in northern Spain, in the dining room of a 29-year-old biologist named Jordi. Tall, bearded, bespectacled, and soft-voiced, the English-speaking government scientist and his pregnant schoolteacher wife had asked me to stay overnight in their humble home. Over dinner he had recalled emotionally how he and his fellow students at the university in Barcelona had protested against Franco and had worked so hard to get a more democratic form of leadership for their beloved Spain.

"Oh how we danced in the streets and sang with joy, when we learned that Franco had finally died!" he had said to me. Franco's death in November 1975 had allowed them the democracy they had dreamed of for so long. But, almost as an afterthought, he had added in a low voice: "Now, however, many of my friends are having second thoughts about whether they really like a democracy form of government. " For one thing their role model, the United States, was involved in so many wars all over the world, he had explained.

"We are baffled why the United States thinks it must be a policeman for the whole world," he had sighed. "It's almost as if the United States is a modern-day Rome."

I could easily understand why Jordi and his former student friends thought the way they did. After all, I had been reading the same Spanish newspapers and watching the same national television news as they did every day of the year. And all I had seen or read of America was of its soldiers at war, or of violent crimes in its urban areas, or of its many racial problems. As reported in the media of other countries I had passed through, the United States hardly seemed a desirable place to live, much less a role model.

Jordi had also explained that many of his university friends had no jobs in which to use their education. That theme--too many educated, ambitious young minds in too small a job market--has been a theme in every nation, except perhaps the United States. Jordi himself had gone for two years with no work and had landed his present job only because he had made some lucky contacts in the "right places."

With so many restless young, could there ever be a revolution of some sort in Spain, I had asked Jordi. Could the country even turn communist? After all, the campaign posters of the Spanish Communist Party had been on buildings in ever village, town, and city I had walked through.

"No," he had replied at once. "Even though the Soviets may be closer geographically, in our hearts we Spaniards still feel closest to America. Change comes slowly, if ever, in European cultures. We are not like the South American countries."

And what of the possibility of another dictatorship, another Franco? For Spain did have a history of such kinds of leaders, and many of the older persons in Spain were already grumbling that the young had too much say and that the society was too unsafe anymore with its new laxness in the social mores.

Jordi had smiled. "As you Americans like to say, 'Don't count on it.' In Franco's day it was like there was a huge weight on our shoulders. At night there was so little of the laughter and happiness you now see all over Spain. We waited so long to be free...and every day we have more of a taste of it, the less likely we will ever give it up."

...I am now at the end of the Spain part of my world trek. In Spain I have walked from the Pyrenees in the north to Almeria on the south coast--43 days and 673 miles. The Spain I discovered was one of extremes: sometimes ugly, harsh, mean and other times kind, romantic, and beautiful. But, no matter which, it was always passionate.

Like Jordi and so many other Spaniards, I find myself hoping that Spain is always ruled by her kinder side. Spain is
definitely a world of its own--a world that everyone should have the chance to experience.

Now, at long last, it is Africa's turn to entertain or to frighten my senses. Will the beauty, the compassion, the enchantment of this journey continue? Many have told me it ends where Spain meets the Mediterranean. I don't think so. However, it's time to find out who is right...and who is wrong.

Steven