ut serious mishap, we should save a day; for
there was no train to Granada until morning, and Dick was as keen on the
adventure, for the adventure's sake, as I was for another reason.

After all, we reminded each other, it was a journey of only a hundred and
twenty miles. With no traffic to interfere, the Gloria ought to fly over
the distance in four hours; and what if everyone did try to discourage us?
We had experienced that sort of thing in Biarritz, and the dangers had
resolved themselves into chimeras. Nothing in Spain was as troublesome
nowadays as the busybodies would have one believe--not even the beggars.

My big searchlights cast a flashing ring on the road, which the car seemed
to push swiftly before it as it ran.

Dick peered through the uncertain light for the hill town of Teba, from
which the Empress Eugenie took her title, but my eyes were glued to the
road.

To think, if we had known at Jerez that Granada was the lodestar, we could
have reached Ronda in a run of four hours day before yesterday! But it was
useless to repine, and fate had given us Ronda.

By the time we had passed through the straggling village of Campillos the
moon was up, a great white, incandescent globe of light, so brilliant that
instead of draining colour from rock, and grass, and flower, it gave new
and almost supernatural values to all.

We had the world to ourselves, a wonderful world like a vast silver bowl
half full of jewels. Over the tops of mountains cut jaggedly of steel,
strange figures seemed to run along the horizon. Bathed in unearthly
radiance lay fields of poppies like deep lakes of blood filling the
valleys between little rolling hills, and here and there a miniature
mountain of pink or glittering grey, rose out of the plain like a fairy
palace which would be invisible in daylight. Olive trees stretching away
in straight lines on either side of endless avenues, fountained silver
under the moon, each avenue swept by a wave of poppies. It was an
Aladdin's Cave landscape made out of rare metals and precious stones that
imitated trees and flowers.

Antiquera on its wild crags, was a ragged black hole in the silver sky,
until we shot into the town under the dominating castle of crimson
memories.

There, was life and music still; guitars tinkled, children who should have
been in bed frolicked in the streets with lambs that followed them like
dogs, while everyone, old and young, laughed and hooted at the Gloria as
s