[CHAPTER XIII]
AN EXCURSION
Murcia was very hot, very dusty and very sultry. We did not mind mere heat—though Spanish midsummer heat was not the best of pick-me-ups for the influenza—dust we could outlive, but the sultriness of the Murcian valley was beyond our physique. This flat valley, which is ten miles wide between abrupt mountains, is irrigated over the whole of its breadth and is one of the richest agricultural parts of Spain. The evaporation of the water makes the heat of Murcia damp; the summer in addition was cloudy, and the sun shining on to the clouds seemed to cook the air enclosed in the valley until the atmosphere resembled that of a glass-house for orchids. We wished to leave Murcia in spite of an affection which was growing in us for the town.
Luis met us at one o'clock on the terrace of the Reina Victoria. We had café au lait while waiting for the tartana. Luis said that the milk in the coffee was not good: he deduced preservatives. But the lean waiter stood loyally by his hotel.
"The milk is excellent, I assure you, Señor," he said. "My stomach is excessively delicate; the slightest thing and it is ... I assure you that I drink pints of this milk in this hotel. In fact my stomach is so delicado that I am a connoisseur in milk, es vero.[11] If the milk were bad this fatality would happen to me."
He gave a dumb-crambo exhibition of the results of bad milk on his delicate digestion; it needed no words.
With deference he then proposed a new café au lait, which Luis sipped with a judicial but unconvinced manner.
The tartana was a tight fit. It is about as large as a governess-cart inside, and we were six. Luis, Jan and myself, a monk in brown, a thin pale Señor who had long eyelashes and many rings, and another passenger, a world type, the result of overwork and underpay, neither smart nor slovenly, with a rough manner covering a kindly nature.