When they woke up it was dark. They were cold. Their legs were stiff. They lay each along one edge of a tremendously wide bed, between them a tangle of narrow sheets and blankets. Telemachus raised himself to a sitting position and put his feet, that were still swollen, gingerly to the floor. He drew them up again with a jerk and sat with his teeth chattering hunched on the edge of the bed. Lyaeus burrowed into the blankets and went back to sleep. For a long while Telemachus could not thaw his frozen wits enough to discover what noise had waked him up. Then it came upon him suddenly that huge rhythms were pounding about him, sounds of shaken tambourines and castanettes and beaten dish-pans and roaring voices. Someone was singing in shrill tremolo above the din a song of which each verse seemed to end with the phrase, "y mañana Carnaval."
"To-morrow's Carnival. Wake up," he cried out to Lyaeus, and pulled on his trousers.
Lyaeus sat up and rubbed his eyes.
"I smell wine," he said.
Telemachus, through hunger and stiffness and aching feet and the thought of what his mother Penelope would say about these goings on, if they ever came to her ears, felt a tremendous elation flare through him.
"Come on, they're dancing," he cried dragging Lyaeus out on the gallery that overhung the end of the court.
"Don't forget the butterfly net, Tel."
"What for?"
"To catch your gesture, what do you think?"
Telemachus caught Lyaeus by the shoulders and shook him. As they wrestled they caught glimpses of the courtyard full of couples bobbing up and down in a jota. In the doorway stood two guitar players and beside them a table with pitchers and glasses and a glint of spilt wine. Feeble light came from an occasional little constellation of olive-oil lamps. When the two of them pitched down stairs together and shot out reeling among the dancers everybody cried out: "Hola," and shouted that the foreigners must sing a song.