They were looking towards the Barranco, that bleak ravine, cut like a huge wound in the beautiful hills, on whose barren sides the gipsy dwellings were burrowed. Even with the soft moonlight sleeping over its sterility, the ravine had a miserable aspect, choked up with great, spectre-like aloes and coarse prickly pears—with a few dusty fig trees, and stunted vines trailing themselves along the meagre soil that just served to cover them with a sparse growth of leaves.
These unseemly objects were now blended into one mass of blackness in the depth of the ravine, giving lurid force to some dozen forges in full blast, that shot their weird fires from the open caves above.
This was no unusual thing. The gipsies all over the world have been workers of iron from the beginning, and those of Granada were ever most busy at their craft after sunset. But this evening the fires seemed to glow with unusual brilliancy. Long lines of light shot across the ravine. Men and women moved to and fro before the open caves. It was a scene that Dante would have loved.
“It is strange,” said the Englishman, musingly, “it is strange that any human being could select that miserable place to live in. There is something unearthly—fiendish in the choice.”
“Choice,” answered Aurora, sadly, “whoever allows choice to the Zincali? No, no, if there is one spot on earth more dreary than another, it is set aside for them.”
“And you, Aurora, so delicate, so full of imagination, how can you live there, burrowed up in the earth like some beautiful wild animal? Surely, surely any fate must be better than that!”
The young man looked at her earnestly. His words had not been addressed to her, but were an argument against his own conscience—a reply to some undercurrent of thought all the time going on in his mind. He was about to say something more, to utter the thought that was taking form in his own bosom, but she looked at him so earnestly—her large, fond eyes so full of innocent love-light sought his with so sweet a trust—he could not go on. The holy influence of true affections clung to his soul like fetters of gold. The evil spirit tempting him so powerfully was not strong enough to fling them off.
Her ignorance, her helplessness, what a defence it proved against all his knowledge—for young as he appeared, the stranger was an old man in experience! He had begun to live early. Youth had been swept from his path as if by a tornado. The wrong that he might do then could have none of the excuses which inexperience gives. He was no ordinary person, but had lived more in those brief years than many an old man.
She saw no second meaning in his words, but turning her eyes once more upon the Barranco, answered according to her own innocent interpretation of their import.
“It does seem dark to me now. I never felt it till lately, but the caves are very dismal, close, smoky; the air seems to smother me at night. Besides, I am afraid it is only in the old woods yonder, or up here, lifted half way into the sky, that I can breathe freely. You are looking at the ravine,” she added, “and I—now I can feel how coarse, how dark, how like a den for wild animals it seems to you—for within the last few weeks I have felt a strange love of beautiful things—for with them I can think of you.”