Still, if we won through without serious mishap, we should save a day; for there was no train to Granada until morning, and Dick was as keen on the adventure, for the adventure's sake, as I was for another reason.
After all, we reminded each other, it was a journey of only a hundred and twenty miles. With no traffic to interfere, the Gloria ought to fly over the distance in four hours; and what if everyone did try to discourage us? We had experienced that sort of thing in Biarritz, and the dangers had resolved themselves into chimeras. Nothing in Spain was as troublesome nowadays as the busybodies would have one believe—not even the beggars.
My big searchlights cast a flashing ring on the road, which the car seemed to push swiftly before it as it ran.
Dick peered through the uncertain light for the hill town of Teba, from which the Empress Eugenie took her title, but my eyes were glued to the road.
To think, if we had known at Jerez that Granada was the lodestar, we could have reached Ronda in a run of four hours day before yesterday! But it was useless to repine, and fate had given us Ronda.
By the time we had passed through the straggling village of Campillos the moon was up, a great white, incandescent globe of light, so brilliant that instead of draining colour from rock, and grass, and flower, it gave new and almost supernatural values to all.
We had the world to ourselves, a wonderful world like a vast silver bowl half full of jewels. Over the tops of mountains cut jaggedly of steel, strange figures seemed to run along the horizon. Bathed in unearthly radiance lay fields of poppies like deep lakes of blood filling the valleys between little rolling hills, and here and there a miniature mountain of pink or glittering grey, rose out of the plain like a fairy palace which would be invisible in daylight. Olive trees stretching away in straight lines on [pg 296]either side of endless avenues, fountained silver under the moon, each avenue swept by a wave of poppies. It was an Aladdin's Cave landscape made out of rare metals and precious stones that imitated trees and flowers.
Antiquera on its wild crags, was a ragged black hole in the silver sky, until we shot into the town under the dominating castle of crimson memories.
There, was life and music still; guitars tinkled, children who should have been in bed frolicked in the streets with lambs that followed them like dogs, while everyone, old and young, laughed and hooted at the Gloria as she shot by without stopping, on her way to Loja and Granada.
A sharp turn to the left swept us out of Antiquera, and so good was the road that Dick and I began to laugh at the gloomy prognostications which thus far had not been fulfilled.