The sun is hidden from this dawn. The snow range is a crest to the south and east. Air, pouring over, cold and hard like pearls, is the dawn upon Spain. Tidy huertas are green crystals in the dawn. Villages, orange-marged, make a pied flash in it. Fig and olive march in armies up the slopes of the Sierra, toward snow, toward dawn. When the sun stands at last in the ridge, the day is hot.
This is the south. After Guadix, toward the eastern sea, the human world grows dim. The carretera, at the entrance of a town, slides in a slough of mud. Rain is rare and violent; it becomes a torrent from the impervious mountain. Dark men in black grimed capes walk beside laden donkeys. Women herd goats; the tuberous udders sticking on the mud. Children are rhythms in a maze of rags. The eyes of humans are like the eyes of burros.
The Sierras have disappeared behind the depopulous hills. The verdant valleys of Granada are folded back. Villages here are hard like the parched clay. The carretera is a swathe of dust, glittering in the sun. The land is sere as if a flame dwelt on it. The eyes of humans are velvet dark, like the eyes of a dream.
Murcia, now. Even the sparse irrigated huertas disappear. The barbarous abruptness of the soil turns to desert. Villages are a single eyeless street of houses, abject under the eye of the sun. The world is a turmoil of yellow waste. The villages are splinters of the waste. Only, to break the yellow, walls of cactus—a Maya-like green sculpture matching its lush planes with the harsh planes of the clay. Goats, dusty and crabbed, crop an invisible herb. The Barbary fig is the olive and the grape of this land. Villages grow lower, sparser—merge with the desert. Villages disappear.
Under the sky huge mounds of sterile hill rise now; and on their slopes, red and advancing with the mirrored sun, are serried shadows. Caves. Villages of caves. This is below Phœnicia in time. This is Iberia. A Spanish folk still dwells here.
The hills are steep. There is a row of caves, horizontally curved. Above each cave is a tiny aperture for smoke. Then comes another row. In the foreground, the cactus is cultivated for its fruit. There is a hooded well.
It is not yet noon. But the summer sun has turned the heaven into irradiant steel. Light and heat strike like solids on the solid soil, on the intricate levels of the hills. In their rebound, light and heat become polyphonous, weaving the world into their image.
The sun, rising, faints into its own immensity of heat. And the cave villages grow larger. Between them, the sterile hills leap in a monotone against the day’s pressure. A cave town flings sheer to the ridge of a pyramidal mountain. A hundred threads of smoke thresh the air like filaments of wire. Caves are dark eyes that hide from the steel heaven. The eyes of the dwellers are caves.
Shadow is cold. Here is a town with houses. Where the sun strikes the street, horses, donkeys, moving forms of people gyre and funnel and become a fume in the sun. Signs on shops, blue shutters, yellow parasols of women tremble and swerve as if they were in flame. But shadow is cold.
Outside, there is desert and the sky has melted. All the steel strokes of the sun, beating down, beating up, are melted: heaven has fallen into waves. Villages live in this fierce element. Men and women, donkeys and goats live in this radiant sea.