The road was frosty and crunched silkily underfoot.

Lyaeus walked along shouting lines from the poem of Jorge Manrique.

'Como se pasa la vida
Como se viene la muerte
Tan callando:
Cuan presto se va el placer
Como despues de acordado
Da dolor,
Como a nuestro parecer
Cualquier tiempo pasado
Fue mejor.'

"I bet you, Tel, they have good wine in Toledo."

The road hunched over a hill. They turned and saw Madrid cut out of
darkness against the starlight. Before them sown plains, gulches full
of mist, and the tremulous lights on many carts that jogged along, each
behind three jingling slow mules. A cock crowed. All at once a voice
burst suddenly in swaggering tremolo out of the darkness of the road
beneath them, rising, rising, then fading off, then flaring up hotly
like a red scarf waved on a windy day, like the swoop of a hawk, like a
rocket intruding among the stars.

"Butterfly net, you old fool!" Lyaeus's laughter volleyed across the
frozen fields.

Telemachus answered in a low voice:

"Let's walk faster."

He walked with his eyes on the road. He could see in the darkness,
Pastora, wrapped in the yellow shawl with the splotch of maroon-colored
embroidery moulding one breast, stand tremulous with foreboding before
the footlights, suddenly draw in her breath, and turn with a great
exultant gesture back into the rhythm of her dance. Only the victorious
culminating instant of the gesture was blurred to him. He walked with
long strides along the crackling road, his muscles aching for memory of
it.

_II: The Donkey Boy_

_Where the husbandman's toil and strife_
_Little varies to strife and toil:_
_But the milky kernel of life,_
_With her numbered: corn, wine, fruit, oil!_

The path zigzagged down through the olive trees between thin chortling
glitter of irrigation ditches that occasionally widened into green
pools, reed-fringed, froggy, about which bristled scrub oleanders.
Through the shimmer of olive leaves all about I could see the great
ruddy heave of the mountains streaked with the emerald of
millet-fields, and above, snowy shoulders against a vault of indigo,
patches of wood cut out hard as metal in the streaming noon light.
Tinkle of a donkey-bell below me, then at the turn of a path the
donkey's hindquarters, mauve-grey, neatly clipped in a pattern of
diamonds and lozenges, and a tail meditatively swishing as he picked
his way among th