"You'd better not. I've never set up for being obtrusively honest."
"Oh, go to Aden."
"But really, I'd take it as a favour if you would come."
"Well, if you make a point of it, I suppose I must, though I fail to see the necessity for a pair of us making ourselves uncomfortable. Look out of window. The sky's Prussian blue, and there isn't a breath of wind. It's going to be a broiling day. However, dear boy, at your behest I'll make a martyr of myself; and if transport is to be procured on tick, I'll overhaul you. Only understand clearly that neither for you nor any one else can I do a physical impossibility. It is absolutely out of the question for me to walk."
That was all I could get out of him, and so I set off, very uncertain as to whether or no he would follow.
I walked out through the clean uneven streets just as the townspeople were beginning to stir, passed under the massive towered gateway in the old walls, and got on to the level road which reaches half-way across the island. The waking hour was earlier here. The hawks and eagles were patrolling the morning air with diligent sweeps. The country-folk were bringing in loads of farm-produce on big brown donkeys and little gray donkeys. These last all gave a courteous "Bon di tenga,"[1 ] and I noticed that most of them stared at me somewhat curiously. It was not my dress that they looked at—it was my face that drew their stares; and after a mile or so's pacing it was borne in upon me that anxious thoughts had caused my forehead to knit and my mouth to pucker. I made the discovery with some contempt. Haigh had told me more than once that I should never make a gambler, and he was right. In principle I accepted the theory that "what was written was written," but in practice I couldn't help imagining that a ready-penned Fate might be partly erased by much rubbing.
I refilled my pipe and looked around me. Old Lully had shown some nous in choosing a country to carry his secret. There is small fear of Minorca's population ever growing excessive. Not even Connemara can show such stone heaps. The walls which divide up the tiny fields are often ten feet thick; there are rubble cairns on all the many outcrops of rock; there are boulder-girdles round the trees; and yet, despite these collections, the corn and the beans and the grass grow more in stone than soil. One almost wonders that the Minorcan does not build up stone circles round the cows' legs whilst they are grazing. Perhaps the Doctor Illuminatus might have hesitated if his prophetic eye had seen an invasion of British; for the Briton is a destructive animal with pig-like instincts of rootling up everything. But the foreigner's tenure of the soil (and stones) was not a long one, and I fancy that the country's face, save for some of the better roads that seam it, is much the same as it was in the year of our Lord thirteen hundred and nothing.
Now, the Minorcan is not possessed of the slenderest reverence for the prehistoric monuments that spot his island, and if he wanted them for domestic purposes, he would not hesitate to take the top from a duolithic stone altar, or the roofing flags from a subterranean gallery. And he would quarry from the pyramids to find the wherewithal for his pig-yard gateposts without the smallest flush of shame, for vandalism is a word that has no Minorquin equivalent. But the abundance of stone elsewhere has saved the fashioned stone that those dead races piled up when this world was young, and the gray Talayots squat upon their old sites in undiminished numbers. Indeed, in a way, one might say that there are more of them now than there were in the venerable alchemist's time, for spurious Talayots may be seen in every direction. These latter-day edifices have one advantage over the hoary prototypes. Their purpose is clearly defined. We know that they were not intended for the burial-places of kings, or for temples to conceal sacerdotal rights, or for observatories, or even for granaries. They were simply run up by men who wanted to build shelters for cattle or pigs or sheep on some plan which would expend a maximum of material on a minimum of basement. They simply represent an incident in the perpetual war against the stones, and show the way in which crude minds attain their ends. If Minorca had been peopled by Americans (as once, indeed, nearly happened), light tramways would be laid down in every direction, and the stones carted to the edges of the island, and there tipped into the sea; and then the ground would be free, the farmer rich and unhappy. But as matters are ordered at present, these things are beyond the man of the soil's grasp; and so he remains poor and hard-working and contented.
The broad road led on past whitewashed farm-houses and pink-flowered almond gardens, past peasants and mule-teams scratching up the rocky soil with primitive one-handled ploughs, past patches of brown vine-stumps and gnarled olive-trees squirming out from among the boulders; and close on either hand ran the low wooded hills, with their burden of ilexes still filmy with the morning mists. The road was a road a London suburb might have felt pride in, so smart was the engineering that made cuttings and embankments to reduce the gradients, and culverts to carry off the side-water, and dressed freestone bridges to cross the many streamlets. But at the eighth kilometre post (I think it was the eighth) this road showed itself worthy of the sunny government of Spain by ending abruptly in a fence of wheelbarrows and gang-planks. The continuation was to be gone on with, mañana; meanwhile young wheat had sprouted eight green inches in the track.
At this point the diligence course to Ciudadella branches off to the northward, turning again after a while due west on to General Stanhope's road. But that was nothing to me then. Turning my back upon it, I took another path, in woeful disrepair, which led me down by many windings between high stone walls and straggling clumps of prickly pear. There were few houses to stop the view—only some two or three farm buildings. Cottages can scarcely be said to exist. The labourer either lives in the towns, or else he lodges under his master's roof. But the high walls and the hummocks shut one in, and I was perpetually having to climb one or the other to make sure of my whereabouts, for my sailing directions to the Talayot had been rather vague ones.