They were
latest from Malaga, and now they were going northward. It was our last
meeting, but better friends I could not hope to meet again, whether in
the Old World or the New, or that Other World which we hope will somehow
be the summation of all that is best in both.
XI
TO AND IN GRANADA
The train which leaves Seville at ten of a sunny morning is supposed to
arrive in Granada at seven of a moonlight evening. This is a mistake;
the moonlight is on time, but the train arrives at a quarter of nine.
Still, if the day has been sunny the whole way and the moonlight is
there at the end, no harm has really been done; and measurably the
promise of the train has been kept.
I
There was not a moment of the long journey over the levels of Andahisia
which was not charming; when it began to be over the uplands of the last
Moorish kingdom, it was richly impressive. The only thing that I can
remember against the landscape is the prevalence of olive orchards. I
hailed as a relief the stubble-fields immeasurably spread at times, and
I did not always resent the roadside planting of some sort of tall
hedges which now and then hid the olives. But olive orchards may vary
their monotony by the spectacle of peasants on ladders gathering their
fruit into wide-mouthed sacks, and occasionally their ranks of
symmetrical green may be broken by the yellow and red of poplars and
pomegranates around the pleasant farmsteads. The nearer we drew to
Granada the pleasanter these grew, till in the famous Vega they thickly
dotted the landscape with their brown roofs and white walls.
We had not this effect till we had climbed the first barrier of hills
and began to descend on the thither side; but we had incident enough to
keep us engaged without the picturesqueness. The beggars alone, who did
not fail us at any station, were enough; for what could the most
exacting tourist ask more than to be eating his luncheon under the eyes
of the children who besieged his car windows and protested their famine
in accents which would have melted a heart of stone or of anything less
obdurate than travel? We had always our brace of Civil Guards, who
preserved us from bandits, but they left the beggars unmolested by
getting out on the train next the station and pacing the platform, while
the rabble of hunger thronged us on the other side. There was especially
a hoy who, after being compassionated in money for his misfortune,
continued to fling his wooden leg into the air and wave it at our window
by some masterly gymnastics; and there was another boy who kept
lamenting that he had no mother, till, having duly feed and fed him, I
suggested, "But you have a father?" Then, as if he had never seen the
case in that light before, he was silent, and presently went away
without further insistence on his bereavement.
