The Yellow Torrent Swept Through A Deep Gorge Of Red
Earth, Which On The Farther Side Climbed In Precipitous Banks, Cleft By
Enormous Fissures, Or Chasms Rather, To The Wide Plateau Where The Gray
City Stood.
The roofs of mellow tiles formed a succession of levels from
which the irregular towers and pinnacles of the churches stamped
themselves against a sky now filled with clouds, but in an air so clear
that their beautiful irregularities and differences showed to one very
noble effect.
The city still looked the ancient capital of the two
hundred thousand souls it once embraced, and in its stony repair there
was no hint of decay.
On our right, the road mounted through country wild enough at times, but
for the most part comparatively friendly, with moments of being almost
homelike. There were slopes which, if massive always, were sometimes
mild and were gray with immemorial olives. In certain orchard nooks
there were apricot trees, yellowing to the autumn, with red-brown
withered grasses tangling under them. Men were gathering the fruit of
the abounding cactuses in places, and in one place a peasant was bearing
an arm-load of them to a wide stone pen in the midst of which stood a
lordly black pig, with head lifted and staring, indifferent to cactuses,
toward Toledo. His statuesque pose was of a fine hauteur, and a more
imaginative tourist than I might have fancied him lost in a dream of the
past, piercing beyond the time of the Iberian autochtons to those
prehistoric ages
When wild in woods the noble savage ran,
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