You Are Not Changing Your Earth Or Your Sky
Very Much, But It Is Not Long Before You Are Sensible Of A Change Of
Mind Which Insists More And More.
There is the same long ground-swell of
wheat-fields, but yesterday you were followed in vision by the
loveliness of the frugal and fertile Biscayan farms, and to-day this
vision has left you, and you are running farther and farther into the
economic and topographic waste of Castile.
Yesterday there were more or
less agreeable shepherdesses in pleasant plaids scattered over the
landscape; to-day there are only shepherds of three days' unshornness;
the plaids are ragged, and there is not sufficient compensation in the
cavalcades of both men and women riding donkeys in and out of the
horizons on the long roads that lose and find themselves there. Flocks
of brown and black goats, looking large as cows among the sparse
stubble, do little to relieve the scene from desolation; I am not sure
but goats, when brown and black, add to the horror of a desolate scene.
There are no longer any white farmsteads, or friendly villages gathering
about high-shouldered churches, but very far away to the eastward or
westward the dun expanse of the wheat-lands is roughed with something
which seems a cluster of muddy protuberances, so like the soil at first
it is not distinguishable from it, btit which as your train passes
nearer proves to be a town at the base of tablelands, without a tree or
a leaf or any spear of green to endear it to the eye as the abode of
living men.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 60 of 376
Words from 16196 to 16470
of 103320
