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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
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