At last the moment for the flamenco arrives. The leader begins to beat monotonously on the boards, just as our Indians do with their tomahawks, to set the rhythm; the guitars strike into their rising and falling melancholy strain. Two or three women chant a weird song, and all clap their hands in a peculiar measure, now louder, now fainter, and with pauses of varying length between the emphatic reports. The dancer has not yet risen from her seat; she seems to demand encouragement. The others call out, "Ollé!"—a gypsy word for "bravo!"—and smile and nod their heads at her to draw her on. All this excites in you a livelier curiosity, a sort of suspense. "What can be coming now?" you ask. Finally she gets up, smiling half scornfully; a light comes into her eyes; she throws her head back, and her face is suffused with an expression of daring, of energy, and strange pride. Perhaps it is only my fancy, but there seems to creep over the woman at that instant a reminiscence of far-off and mysterious things; her face, partially lifted, seems to catch the light of old traditions, and to be imbued with the spirit of something belonging to the past, which she is about to revive. Her arms are thrown upward, she snaps her fingers, and draws them down slowly close before her face as far as the waist, when, with an easy waving sideward, the "pass" is ended, and the arms go up again to repeat the movement. Her body too is in motion now, only slightly, with a kind of vibration; and her feet, unseen beneath the flowing skirt, have begun an easy, quiet, repressed rhythmical figure. So she advances, her face always forward, and goes swiftly around a circle, coming back to the point where she began, without appearing to step. The music goes on steadily, the cries of her companions become more animated, and she continues to execute that queer, aimless, yet dimly beckoning gesture with both arms—never remitting it nor the snapping of her fingers, in fact, until she has finished the whole affair. Her feet go a little faster; you can hear them tapping the floor as they weave upon it some more complicated measure; but there is not the slightest approach to a springing tendency. Her progress is sinuous; she glides and shuffles, her soles quitting the boards as little as possible—something between a clog dance and a walk, perfect in time, with a complexity in the exercise of the feet demanding much skill. She treats the performance with great dignity; the intensity of her absorption invests it with a something almost solemn.
Forward again! She gazes intently in front as she proceeds, and again as she floats backward, looking triumphant, perhaps with a spark of latent mischief in her eyes. She stamps harder upon the floor; the sounds follow like pistol reports. The regular clack, clack-clack of the smitten hands goes on about her, and the cries of the rest increase in zest and loudness.
"Ollé! ollé!"
"Bravo, my gracious one!"
"Muy bien! muy bien!"
"Hurrah! Live the queen of the ants!" shouts the leader. And the audience roars at his eccentric phrase.
The dancer becomes more impassioned, but in no way more violent. Her body does not move above the hips. It is only the legs that twist and turn and bend and stamp, as if one electric shock after another were being sent downward through them. Every few minutes her activity passes by some scarcely noted gradation into a subtly new phase, but all these phases are bound together by a certain uniformity of restraint and fixed law. Now she almost comes to a stand-still, and then we notice a quivering, snaky, shuddering motion, beginning at the shoulders and flowing down through her whole body, wave upon wave, the dress drawn tighter with one hand showing that this continues downward to her feet. Is she a Lamia in the act of undergoing metamorphosis, a serpent, or a woman? The next moment she is dancing, receding—this time with smiles, and with an indescribable air of invitation in the tossing of her arms. But the crowning achievement is when the hips begin to sway too, and, while she is going back and forward, execute a rotary movement like that of the bent part of an auger. In fact, you expect her to bore herself into the floor and disappear. Then all at once the stamping and clapping and the twanging strings are stopped, as she ceases her formal gyrations: she walks back to her seat like one liberated from a spell, and the whole thing is over.
Velveteen and I came to Malaga direct from the Alhambra. The transition was one from the land of the olive to that of the palm. When we left Granada, an hour after daybreak, the slopes of the Sierra Nevada below the snow-line were softly overspread with rose and gold upon the blue, and the unmatchably pale bright yellow-white of the grain fields along the valley was spotted with the dark clumps of olive-trees, at a distance no bigger than cabbages. The last thing we saw was a sturdy peasant in knee-breeches and laced legs, with a tattered cloak flung around his chest and brought over the left shoulder in stately folds, that gave him the mien of a Roman senator, and put to shame our vulgar railroad plans. As the day grew, the hills in shadow melted into a warm citron hue, and those lifting their faces to the light were white as chalk, with faint blue shadows down in the clefts.
It was in this same neighborhood that we saw peasant women in trousers doing harvest-work. To the enormity of donning the male garb they added the hardihood of choosing for the color of their trousers a bright sulphur-yellow. My friend the artist, I believe, secretly envied them this splendor denied to men; and in truth they would make spirited and effective material for a painter. Their yellow legs descended from a very short skirt of blue or vermilion, a mere concession to prejudice, for it was mostly caught up and pinned in folds to keep it out of the way. Above that the dress and figure were feminine; the colored kerchief around the throat, and the gay bandanna twisted around the dark loose hair under a big straw hat, finishing off the whole person as something dashing, free, novel, and yet quite natural and not unwomanly.