The Fonda de la Marina on the seashore is a large and quite civilised inn, with whitewashed corridors and rows of numbered deal doors; it is a very marine fonda indeed, being situated actually on the water’s edge, so that our driver before putting us down takes a short turn in the sea to wash his cart wheels. Fishing-smacks lie under our windows, and Francisca the general servant—in whose absence everything is at a standstill and who is being perpetually screeched for from the front door—comes up hurriedly in a small boat from the mole where she has been buying fish for our dinner.
Our host informed us that two visitors were already installed in the house, but when we inquired their names and nationality he was hopelessly vague. To the Majorcan innkeeper foreigners are foreigners, and as such will naturally know all other foreigners; and he describes bygone guests by their appearance, age, and such traits as he has observed in them, confident that they will be at once recognised by the person to whom he speaks. To his disappointment, however, we entirely failed—in spite of his most graphic description—to identify our fellow guests, and it was not till we were sitting at table that evening, over our raisins and cabbages, our lobster salad and cutlets, that we saw two strangers enter whom we perceived to be English. They told us they had been here more than a week, and had thoroughly enjoyed their stay.
Very peaceful is the great bay of Alcúdia, with its sand dunes and pine woods, its reedy marshes, and its sickle-curve of dazzling white sand encircling the deep blue water. One may wander for miles along the lonely shore, watching the ways of the burying-beetles that live in large colonies among the bee orchises and cistus bushes above high-water mark, or searching for shells and fragments of coral among the seaweed rissoles of the Poseidonia oceanica that bestrew the beach in countless numbers.
“Very peaceful is the bay of Alcúdia with its sickle curve of snow-white sand encircling the turquoise-blue water.”
(page [96])
“... one of the norias introduced by the Moors, and still used in Majorca for raising water from wells.”