XXVII
AT SAN ANTONIO
It was Monday morning, and when the Man went out in search of a subject to sketch, I lured him along by my favourite watercourses.
The sun beat warmly on the limpid water, in which the swarms of little fish, looking like vivified marks of exclamation, were ceaselessly flashing about. And on the surface herbage countless glistening frogs, green, golden, bronze, and chocolate, were perched, like little kings, each on his floating throne. It was with lamentable lack of monarchical dignity that each in turn, as he got hint of our approach, took an agile header into the water and disappeared.
Going on past the tall whitewashed gates that seemed to have so scant reason for existence, we reached the San Antonio road, and there in the shadow of a wall at the side of a bean-field the Man sat down to paint.
Against the cloudless sky the Cathedral-crowned town rose grandly. From where we sat the encircling ramparts appeared as complete and impregnable as they did in the time of the Roman occupation.
From our point of view, which afforded no glimpse of the newer houses sheltered close between the ancient gate and the harbour, the city looked much as it must have done in those bygone days when the ground on which the lower portion of the town is built was still lapped by the salt water of the bay.
While the Man painted I sat by, well content. The bean blossoms made sweet savour in our nostrils, and the gentle swish of falling water from the noria in an adjacent field gave a refreshing suggestion of coolness. And as we sat near the roadside quaint figures passed by in slow succession. Perched sideways on their panniered mules came broad-hatted women. The local convention that proscribes hats for Sunday female wear permits them on weekdays; and so, set jauntily on top of the sober handkerchief that covered the head, most of the peasant women wore a wide white hat, bound with black, and encircled with a black ribbon that hung in long ends behind—women whose grave sun-browned faces argued that the day for protecting the complexion was surely past.
Leaving the Man at work, I crossed to where in the raised noria, a dozen yards beyond the white highroad, a blindfold mule was patiently at work. All alone there by the creaking old Moorish well he was walking round and round the path, already worn to dust by the passage of his willing feet.
But if one chanced to be born a mule and had to draw water for a living, a pleasanter place in which to carry out one's vocation could hardly be imagined. For close about the stone-sided platform that surrounded the well grew two immense fig-trees and a large pomegranate; and for many months of the year the noria must have been an oasis of leafy shade in the midst of sun-baked fields.