Sorolla was dying, another had gone mad. At last someone said, "It's
stifling here, let's walk. There is full moon to-night."

There was no sound in the streets but the irregular clatter of our
footsteps. The slanting moonlight cut the street into two triangular
sections, one enormously black, the other bright, engraved like a
silver plate with the lines of doors, roofs, windows, ornaments.
Overhead the sky was white and blue like buttermilk. Blackness cut
across our path, then there was dazzling light through an arch beyond.
Outside the gate we sat in a ring on square fresh-cut stones in which
you could still feel a trace of the warmth of the sun. To one side was
the lime-washed wall of a house, white fire, cut by a wide oaken door
where the moon gave a restless glitter to the spiked nails and the
knocker, and above the door red geraniums hanging out of a pot, their
color insanely bright in the silver-white glare. The other side a deep
glen, the shimmering tops of poplar trees and the sound of a stream. In
the dark above the arch of the gate a trembling oil flame showed up the
green feet of a painted Virgin. Everybody was talking about _El
Buscon_, a story of Quevedo's that takes place mostly in Segovia, a
wandering story of thieves and escapes by night through the back doors
of brothels, of rope ladders dangling from the windows of great ladies,
of secrets overheard in confessionals, and trysts under bridges, and
fingers touching significantly in the holy-water fonts of tall
cathedrals. A ghostlike wraith of dust blew through the gate. The man
next me shivered.

"The dead are stronger than the living," he said. "How little we have;
and they...."

In the quaver of his voice was a remembering of long muletrains
jingling through the gate, queens in litters hung with patchwork
curtains from Samarcand, gold brocades splashed with the clay of deep
roads, stained with the blood of ambuscades, bales of silks from
Valencia, travelling gangs of Moorish artisans, heavy armed Templars on
their way to the Sepulchre, wandering minstrels, sneakthieves, bawds,
rowdy strings of knights and foot-soldiers setting out with wine-skins
at their saddlebows to cross the passes towards the debatable lands of
Extremadura, where there were infidels to kill and cattle to drive off
and village girls to rape, all when the gate was as new and crisply cut
out of clean stone as the blocks we were sitting on. Down in the valley
a donkey brayed long