r to endure
contact with them... They all smelled of raw meat.

III

IT was a winter afternoon; the sky was overcast and the air was gray,
but it was not cold. Luna and the Spaniard were walking slowly along the
road that leads to Europa Point, which is the extreme end of the
peninsula of Gibraltar. They had left behind them the Alameda and the
banks of the Arsenal, passing through leafy gardens, along reddish
villas inhabited by officers of army and navy, huge hospitals resembling
small towns, and garrisons that seemed like convents, with numerous
galleries in which swarms of children were scurrying about; here, too,
clothes and tableware were being washed and cleaned by the soldiers'
wives--courageous wanderers over the globe, as much at home in the
garrisons of India as in those of Canada. The fog concealed from view
the coast of Africa, lending to the Strait the appearance of a shoreless
sea. Before the pair of lovers stretched the dark waters of the bay, and
the promontory of Tarifa revealed its black outline faintly in the fog,
resembling a fabulous rhinoceros bearing upon its snout, like a horn,
the tower of the lighthouse. Through the ashen-gray clouds there
penetrated a timid sunbeam,--a triangle of misty light, similar to the
luminous stream from a magic lantern,--which traced a large shaft of
pale gold across the green-black surface of the sea. In the center of
this circle of anemic light there floated, like a dying swan, the white
spot of a sailboat.

The two lovers were oblivious to their surroundings. They walked along,
engrossed in that amorous egotism which concentrates all life in a
glance, or in the delicate contact of the bodies meeting and grazing
each other at every step. Of all Nature there existed for them only the
dying light of the afternoon, which permitted them to behold each other,
and the rather warm breeze which, murmuring among the cacti and the
palms, seemed to serve as the musical accompaniment to their
conversation. At their right rumbled the far-off roar of the sea
striking against the rocks. On their left reigned pastoral peace,--the
melodious calm of the pines, broken from time to time only by the noise
of the carts, which, followed by a platoon of soldiers in their shirt
sleeves, wheeled up the roads of the mountain.

The two looked at each other with caressing eyes, smiling with the
automatism of love; but in reality they were sad, with that sweet
sadness which in itse