Our advisers ran after us with a warning to avoid the rough cobbles of Bailen by taking the ronda which skirts the town on its left. So slowly, in dusk that blossomed blue as the myrtle flower, we passed round outside the town, regained the high road, leaping at speed into a world of wide, silvery spaces and mystery of violet hollows, diving into the deep valley of the swollen river, and rejoicing in a hard surface of good macadam for fifteen miles or more.
Thus we arrived at Andujar, the lights of our great acetylene lamps (lit before the sky turned from opal to amethyst) prying into dark doorways and windows as Röntgen rays pry through flesh to bone.
In the white glare, pretty girls in doorways looked like actresses in a costume play, waiting in the wings to “go on.” But no yells of a stage mob ever were so realistic as those of the unrehearsed band who howled over my poor Gloria as she deposited her passengers at the fonda; and Ropes and I pushed her through a wall of human beings to a stable-garage, where her [pg 198]flywheel gushed a protest of fiery sparks on the high stone step of entrance.
The fonda was passable; but Carmona and his party were not there; neither were they anywhere else in Andujar, as we made it our business to discover; and we guessed that the grey car must after all have ventured to Linares.
As it had vanished, we were free to start when we chose next morning. So we chose an early hour, flying over good roads through a land embroidered with the scarlet of poppies, the blue of gentian, the pink of clover, and gold of buttercups, stitched in with the silver of little running streams.
“ ‘Give us bread and give us bulls,’ is the cry of this country,” said the Cherub, greeting with joyous glances each feature of his loved Andalucia.
“It sounds like a beef sandwich,” Dick reflected aloud; but Pilar reproached him for flippancy. “You mustn't make jokes about bread in Andalucia!” she exclaimed. “And it's called a sin ever to throw away a crumb. Because it's the gift of Heaven, if you drop a bit you must pick it up and apologize by kissing it.”
“Why not eat it instead?” asked Dick.
“You can do that afterwards. And if bread's made with holes in it, you must stand the holey side up, because the spirit of God enters through the holes to bless you.”
“I thought only olives were sacred in Andalucia,” said Dick, staring away over enormous tracts of the silver-grey trees growing out of copper soil, waving as far as the eye could follow, to the floating line of ethereal blue mountains.