e. Seven stilted arches of an aqueduct showed white through
the canebrakes inland. Fragrances thronged about us; the smell of dry
thyme-grown uplands, of rich wet fields, of goats, and jessamine and
heliotrope, and of water cold from the snowfields running fast in
ditches. Somewhere far off a donkey was braying. Then, as the last
groan of the donkey faded, a man's voice rose suddenly out of the dark
fields, soaring, yearning on taut throat-cords, then slipped down
through notes, like a small boat sliding sideways down a wave, then
unrolled a great slow scroll of rhythm on the night and ceased suddenly
in an upward cadence as a guttering candle flares to extinction.

"Something that's neither work nor getting ready to work," and I
thought of the _arriero_ on whose donkey I had forded the stream on the
way down from the Alpujarras, and his saying: "_Ca, en America no se
hose na'a que trabahar y de'cansar._"

I had left him at his home village, a little cluster of red and yellow
roofs about a fat tower the Moors had built and a gaunt church that
hunched by itself in a square of trampled dust. We had rested awhile
before going into town, under a fig tree, while he had put white canvas
shoes on his lean brown feet. The broad leaves had rustled in the wind,
and the smell of the fruit that hung purple bursting to crimson against
the intense sky had been like warm stroking velvet all about us. And
the _arriero_ had discoursed on the merits of his donkey and the joys
of going from town to town with merchandise, up into the mountains for
chestnuts and firewood, down to the sea for fish, to Malaga for
tinware, to Motril for sugar from the refineries. Nights of dancing and
guitar-playing at vintage-time, _fiestas_ of the Virgin, where older,
realer gods were worshipped than Jehovah and the dolorous Mother of the
pale Christ, the _toros_, blood and embroidered silks aflame in the
sunlight, words whispered through barred windows at night, long days of
travel on stony roads in the mountains.... And I had lain back with my
eyes closed and the hum of little fig-bees in my ears, and wished that
my life were his life. After a while we had jumped to our feet and I
had shouldered my knapsack with its books and pencils and silly pads of
paper and trudged off up an unshaded road, and had thought with a sort
of bitter merriment of that prig Christian and his damned burden.

"Something that is neither work nor getting ready to work, to make th