Elsewhere within the town the eyes wander away to the enclosing mountains. The wonder is not that her inhabitants are dreamy-eyed; rather that they succeed at intervals in shaking off the spell of nature's setting to play their rôles in life's prosaic drama. As for myself, I rambled through her piping streets for half the afternoon because she is Spanish, and because my supply of currency was falling low. Ronda boasts no bank. Her chief dry-goods merchant, however--by what right my informant could not guess--boasts himself a banker. I found the amateur financier at home, which chanced to be distant the height of one short stairway from his place of business. When I had chatted an hour or two with his clerks, the good man himself appeared, rosy with the exertions of the siesta, and examined the ten-dollar check with many expressions of gratitude for the opportunity.
"We shall take pleasure," he said, "in liquidating this obligation. You will, of course, bring persons of my acquaintance to establish your identity, como es costumbre in large financial transactions?"
I had never so fully realized how convincing was my command of Spanish as when I had succeeded within an hour in convincing this bond-slave of "costumbre" that express-checks are designed to avoid just this difficulty. He expressed a desire to examine the document more thoroughly and retired with it to the depths of his establishment. Toward evening he returned with pen and ink-horn.
"I accept the obligation," he announced, "and shall pay you fifty-seven pesetas, according to yesterday's quotation on the Borsa. But I find I have such a sum on hand only in coppers."
"Which would weigh," I murmured, after the necessary calculation, "something over thirty pounds. You will permit me, señor, to express my deep gratitude--and to worry along for the time being with the money in pocket."
Travelers who arraign Honda for lack of creature comforts can never have been assigned the quarters a peseta won me for the night in the "Parador de Vista Hermosa." The room was a house in itself, peculiarly clean and home-like, and furnished not only with the necessities of bed, chairs, and taper-lighted effigy of the Virgin, but with table, washstand, and even a bar of soap, the first I had seen in the land except that in my own knapsack. When the sun had fallen powerless behind the sierra, I drew the green reed shade and found before my window a little rejaed balcony hanging so directly over the Tajo that the butt of a cigarette fell whirling down, down to the very bottom of the gorge. I dragged a chair out into the dusk and sat smoking beneath the star-sprinkled sky long past a pedestrian's bedtime, the unbroken music of the Guadalvin far below ascending to mingle with the murmur of the strolling city.
To the north of Ronda begins a highway that goes down through a country as arid and rock-strewn as the anti-Lebanon. Here, too, is much of the Arab's contempt for roads. Donkeys bearing singing men tripped by along hard-beaten paths just far enough off the public way to be no part of it. Now and again donkey and trail rambled away independently over the thirsty hills, perhaps to return an hour beyond, more often to be swallowed up in the unknown. The untraveled carretera lay inches deep in fine white dust. Far and near the landscape was touched only with a few slight patches of viridity. The solitary tree under which I tossed through an hour of siesta cast the stringy, wavering shade of a bean-pole.
Sharp-eyed with appetite, I came near, nevertheless, to passing unseen early in the afternoon a village hidden in plain sight along the flank of a reddish, barren hill. In this, too, Andalusia resembles Asia Minor; her hamlets are so often of the same colored or colorless rocks as the hills on which they are built as frequently to escape the eye. I forded a bone-dry brook and climbed into the tumbled pueblo. Toward the end of the principal lack of a street one of the crumbling hovel-fronts was scrawled in faded red, with the Spaniard's innocent indistinction between the second and twenty-second letters of the alphabet:
Aqui se bende bino