Over All Was Spread A Quiet And
Quieting British Influence; Outside Of The Office The Nature Of The
Service Was
Spanish, but the character of it was English; the Spanish
waiters spoke English, and they looked English in dress and
Manner;
superficially the chambermaid was as English as one could have found her
in the United Kingdom, but at heart you could see she was as absolutely
and instinctively a Spanish _camerera_ as any in a hotel of Madrid or
Seville. In the atmosphere of insularity the few Spanish guests were
scarcely distinguishable from Anglo-Saxons, though a group of
magnificent girls at a middle table, quelled by the duenna-like
correctness of their mother, looked with their exaggerated hair and eyes
like Spanish ladies made up for English parts in a play.
We had our breakfast in the reading-room where all the rest were
breakfasting and trying not to see that they were keeping one another
from the fire. It was very cold, for Ronda is high in the mountains
which hem it round and tower far above it. We had already had our first
glimpse of their summits from our own windows, but it was from the
terrace outside the reading-room that we felt their grandeur most after
we had drunk our coffee: we could scarcely have borne it before. In
their presence, we could not realize at once that Ronda itself was a
mountain, a mere mighty mass of rock, cleft in twain, with chasmal
depths where we saw pygmy men and mules creeping out upon the valley
that stretched upward to the foot of the Sierra.
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