s of six sweating men stood
poised at the entrance to the plaza where all the girls wore jessamine
flowers in the blackness of their hair, all waved their hats and cried,
"_!Viva la Virgen de las Angustias!_" And the Virgin and San Miguel
both had to bow their heads to get in the church door, and the people
followed them into the church crying "_!Viva!_" so that the old vaults
shivered in the tremulous candlelight and the shouting. Some people
cried for water, as rain was about due and everything was very dry, and
when they came out of the church they saw a thin cloud like a mantilla
of white lace over the moon, so they went home happy.

Wherever they went through the narrow well-swept streets, lit by an
occasional path of orange light from a window, the women left behind
them long trails of fragrance from the jessamine flowers in their hair.

Don Diego and I walked a long while on the seashore talking of America
and the Virgin and a certain soup called _ajo blanco_ and Don Quixote
and _lo flamenco_. We were trying to decide what was the peculiar
quality of the life of the people in that rich plain (_vega_ they
call it) between the mountains of the sea. Walking about the country
elevated on the small grass-grown levees of irrigation ditches, the
owners of the fields we crossed used, simply because we were strangers,
to offer us a glass of wine or a slice of watermelon. I had explained
to my friend that in his modern world of America these same people
would come out after us with shotguns loaded with rock salt. He
answered that even so, the old order was changing, and that as there
was nothing else but to follow the procession of industrialism it
behooved Spaniards to see that their country forged ahead instead of
being, as heretofore, dragged at the tail of the parade.

"And do you think it's leading anywhere, this endless complicating of
life?"

"Of course," he answered.

"Where?"

"Where does anything lead? At least it leads further than _lo
flamenco_."

"But couldn't the point be to make the way significant?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "Work," he said.

We had come to a little nook in the cliffs where fishing boats were
drawn up with folded wings like ducks asleep. We climbed a winding path
up the cliff. Pebbles scuttled underfoot; our hands were torn by thorny
aromatic shrubs. Then we came out in a glen that cut far into the
mountains, full of the laughter of falling water and the rustle of
sappy foliag