“Do you two live here quite alone?”
“Sometimes our brother is with us, not always,” sighed Encarnacion. “I have been the portress of the Torre de la Vela since the night the tower was struck by lightning and our father and mother, now in glory, were killed.”
“Now in glory were killed!” echoed Maria.
“What a terrible thing! When did it happen?”
“Long and long ago,—the year Maria made her first communion. We were waked by a great crash. The tower shook, the bell rang as never before, there was a thick smoke. It was easy for us to escape, we slept below; our brother slept above, near our parents. He saved his life by clapping a towel over his mouth, and creeping down-stairs on his hands and knees.”
“On his knees,” Maria crossed herself. “Virgin mine! May the Lord receive them into Paradise in their shoes!”
“The bell gives the signal for opening the sluices,” Encarnacion went on; “it regulates the irrigation of the vega. Each piece of land has its hour for letting on the water. On still nights you can hear the bell thirty miles away.”
High up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains over Granada, the Darrow, a mountain torrent flowing down from the eternal snows on the summits, is caught, tamed, and led off into small channels that spread, like the veins of a man’s body, all over the vega. Moors’ work this; perhaps the greatest part of their legacy to Spain, for water
