When he awoke he felt the cold penetrating to his very marrow. Day was breaking and the rain had ceased; the sky, still dim, was strewn with greyish clouds. Above a hedge of shrubs shone a star in the middle of the horizon's pale band, and against this opaline glow stood out the intertwined branches of the trees, which were still without leaves.
The whistles of the locomotives could be heard from the nearby station; toward Carabanchel the lantern lights were paling in the dark fields, which could be glimpsed by the vague luminosity of nascent day.
Madrid, level, whitish, bathed in mist, rose out of the night with its many roofs, which cut the sky in a straight line; its turrets, its lofty factory chimneys; and amidst the silence of the dawn, the city and the landscape suggested the unreality and the motionlessness of a painting.
The sky became clearer, growing gradually blue. Now the new white houses stood out more sharply; the high partition-walls, pierced symmetrically by tiny windows; the roofs, the corners, the balustrades, the red towers of recent construction, the army of chimneys, all enveloped in the cold, sad, damp, atmosphere of morning, beneath a low zinc-hued sky.
Beyond the city proper, afar, rolled the Madrilenian plain in gentle undulations, toward the mists of dawn; the Manzanares meandered along, as narrow as a band of silver; it sought the Los Angeles hill, crossing barren fields and humble districts, finally to curve and lose itself in the grey horizon. Towering above Madrid the Guadarrama loomed like a lofty blue rampart, its summits capped with snow.
In the midst of this silence a church bell began its merry pealing, but the chimes were lost in the somnolent city.
Manuel felt very cold and commenced pacing back and forth, rubbing his shoulders and his legs. Absorbed in this operation, he did not see a man in a boina, with a lantern in his hand, who approached him and asked:
"What are you doing here?"
Without replying, Manuel broke into a run down the hill; shortly afterward the rest of the gang came scurrying down, awaked by the kicks of the man in the boina.
As they reached the Velasco Museum, El Mariané said: