to bed; the fecundated earth, calm at last,
nursing the emplanted germ of life, ruddy with the sunset, the horizons
purple, the small clamour of the day lapsing into quiet, the great,
still twilight, building itself, dome-like, toward the zenith. The barn
fowls were roosting in the trees near the stable, the horses crunching
their fodder in the stalls, the day's work ceasing by slow degrees; and
the priest, the Spanish churchman, Father Sarria, relic of a departed
regime, kindly, benign, believing in all goodness, a lover of his
fellows and of dumb animals, yet, for all that, hurrying away in
confusion and discomfiture, carrying in one hand the vessels of the Holy
Communion and in the other a basket of game cocks.

CHAPTER VI

It was high noon, and the rays of the sun, that hung poised directly
overhead in an intolerable white glory, fell straight as plummets upon
the roofs and streets of Guadalajara. The adobe walls and sparse brick
sidewalks of the drowsing town radiated the heat in an oily, quivering
shimmer. The leaves of the eucalyptus trees around the Plaza drooped
motionless, limp and relaxed under the scorching, searching blaze.
The shadows of these trees had shrunk to their smallest circumference,
contracting close about the trunks. The shade had dwindled to the
breadth of a mere line. The sun was everywhere. The heat exhaling
from brick and plaster and metal met the heat that steadily descended
blanketwise and smothering, from the pale, scorched sky. Only the
lizards--they lived in chinks of the crumbling adobe and in interstices
of the sidewalk--remained without, motionless, as if stuffed, their eyes
closed to mere slits, basking, stupefied with heat. At long intervals
the prolonged drone of an insect developed out of the silence, vibrated
a moment in a soothing, somnolent, long note, then trailed slowly into
the quiet again. Somewhere in the interior of one of the 'dobe houses a
guitar snored and hummed sleepily. On the roof of the hotel a group of
pigeons cooed incessantly with subdued, liquid murmurs, very plaintive;
a cat, perfectly white, with a pink nose and thin, pink lips, dozed
complacently on a fence rail, full in the sun. In a corner of the Plaza
three hens wallowed in the baking hot dust their wings fluttering,
clucking comfortably.

And this was all. A Sunday repose prevailed the whole moribund town,
peaceful, profound. A certain pleasing numbness, a sense of grateful
enervation exhal