Of
Course We Were Eager For It, And When We Came Into The First Wide
Street, There At The Principal
Corner three women were standing, just as
advertised, with black skirts caught up from their waists over their
heads and
Held before their faces so that only one eye could look out at
the strangers. It was like the women's costtime at Chiozza on the
Venetian lagoon, but there it is not claimed for Moorish and here it was
authenticated by being black. "Moorish ladies," our guide proudly
proclaimed them in his scanty English, but I suspect they were Spanish;
if they were really Orientals, they followed us with those eyes single
as daringly as if they had been of our own Christian Occident.
The event was so perfect in its way that it seemed as if our guiding
policeman might have especially ordered it; but this could not have
really been, and was no such effect of his office as the immunity from
beggars which we enjoyed in his charge. The worst boy in Tarifa (we did
not identify him) dared not approach for a big-dog or a little, and we
were safe from the boldest blind man, the hardiest hag, however
pockmarked. The lanes and the streets and the plazas were clean as
though our guide had them newly swept for us, and the plaza of the
principal church (no guide-book remembers its name) is perhaps the
cleanest in all Spain.
VI
The church itself we found very clean, and of an interest quite beyond
the promise of the rather bare outside.
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