The Orchards Filled The Level Foregrounds
And The Hilly Backgrounds To The Vanishing-Points Of The Mountainous
Perspectives; But When
I say this I mean the reader to allow for wide
expanses of pasturage, where lordly bulls were hoarding themselves
For
the feasts throughout Spain which the bulls of Andalusia are happy
beyond others in supplying. With their devoted families they paraded the
meadows, black against the green, or stood in sharp arrest, the most
characteristic accent of the scene. In the farther rather than the
nearer distance there were towns, very white, very African, keeping
jealously away from the stations, as the custom of most towns is in
Spain, beyond the wheat-lands which disputed the landscape with the
olive orchards.
One of these towns lay white at the base of a hill topped by a yellow
Moorish castle against the blue sky, like a subject waiting for its
painter and conscious of its wonderful adaptation to water-color. The
railroad-banks were hedged with Spanish bayonet, and in places with
cactus grown into trees, all knees and elbows, and of a diabolical
uncouthness. The air was fresh and springlike, and under the bright sun,
which we had already felt hot, men were plowing the gray fields for
wheat. Other men were beginning their noonday lunch, which, with the
long nap to follow, would last till three o'clock, and perhaps be rashly
accounted to them for sloth by the industrious tourist who did not know
that their work had begun at dawn and would not end till dusk.
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