It Seldom Happens In Spain That The Scenery Is The Same On
Both Sides Of The Railroad Track, But Here
It was malignly alike on one
hand and on the other, though we seemed to be running along the slope
Of
an upland, so that the left hand was higher and the right lower. It was
more as if we were crossing the face of some prodigious rapid, whose
surges were the measureless granite boulders tossing everywhere in
masses from the size of a man's fist to the size of a house. In a wild
chaos they wallowed against one another, the greater bearing on their
tops or between them on their shoulders smaller regular or irregular
masses of the same gray stone. Everywhere among their awful shallows
grew gray live-oaks, and in among the rocks and trees spread tufts of
gray shrub. Suddenly, over the frenzy of this mad world, a storm of cold
rain broke whirling, and cold gray mists drove, blinding the windows and
chilling us where we sat within. From time to time the storm lifted and
showed again this vision of nature hoary as if with immemorial eld; if
at times we seemed to have run away from it again it closed in upon us
and held us captive in its desolation.
With longer and longer intervals of relief it closed upon us for the
last time in the neighborhood of the gloomiest pile that ever a man
built for his life, his death and his prayer between; but before we came
to the palace-tomb of the Escorial, we had clear in the distance the
vision of the walls and roofs and towers of the medieval city of Avila.
It is said to be the perfectest relic of the Middle Ages after or
before Rothenburg, and we who had seen Rothenburg solemnly promised
ourselves to come back some day from Madrid and spend it in Avila.
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