We had one joy at Jijona—there were no mosquitoes, and the nights were deliciously cool. Our windows were far enough from the ground to allow the most timid of Spanish women to sleep secure from robbers. The sun streaming in at our windows awoke us before six—we dressed and breakfasted, looking down on the town, which still lay in the shadow. Immediately beneath our windows were two hundred yards of stony hillside; then began the houses, small and closely crowded as though they feared the rough arid expanse of the towering hills of rock. We looked down upon an almost Moorish succession of flat roofs, plunging downhill into the valley. The surrounding country was like a rough sea suddenly frozen, in front of us the mountains seemed almost to curl over. A violet smoke was rising from Jijona chimneys, a smoke which drifted a sweet scent to our nostrils, a scent of sage and of fir. From the middle of the village the church tower covered with blue and white tiles suddenly chimed the hour with discordant bells.
Mrs. Vinegar was to take me the round of the shops. She had previously tried to impress me with the dreadful price of provisions in Jijona, and this time she prevented me from buying eggs. The greengrocer's shop, kept by a gay woman named Concha, was only an entrada filled with baskets. Mrs. Vinegar had refused to change a note of 100 pesetas for me, and we discovered later that notes of any magnitude greater than twenty-five pesetas are difficult to change in villages. But Concha changed the money cheerfully and earned my gratitude. Opposite Concha's shop, frowning on the main street with grated windows, was the prison, of which somebody said:
"Heavens! The Jijona men are so good that there hasn't been a soul in the prison for the last five years. It is full of chickens and rabbits."
We bought a frying-pan, having to choose between one very small and one very large. The latter was thick in rust, and must have been I don't know how many years on the shelves of the shop. We chose it on condition that the shop man could get it clean, and he at once put the whole of his family to work on it, including a prospective daughter-in-law, a French-African girl just arrived from Morocco. The customers were whispering one to another, and at last one more bold than the others addressed me:
"I saw you yesterday go down amongst the bulls. Were you not terribly frightened? I thought that my heart was going to stop."
We went to buy drinking glasses. The china shop was deserted and we had to shout loudly before we could get anybody to serve us. The woman did not know the price of the glasses.
"But no matter," she said, "you can pay any time you like. And weren't you terribly frightened yesterday, going down into the bulls? I couldn't draw my breath when I saw you jump on to the wall."
There were children crowded at the shop door. As we came out I heard murmurs, which gradually we made out as: