irit that we feel in El
Greco, that we felt in my generation when I was young, that I see
occasionally in the young men of your time, has become conscious only
because it is about to be smothered in the great advancing waves of
European banality. I was thinking the other day that perhaps states of
life only became conscious once their intensity was waning."

"But most of the intellectuals I met in Madrid," put in Telemachus,
"seemed enormously anxious for subways and mechanical progress, seemed
to think that existence could be made perfect by slot-machines."

"They are anxious to hold stock in the subway and slot-machine
enterprises that they may have more money to unSpanish themselves in
Paris ... but let us not talk of that. From the next turn in the road,
round that little hill, we shall see Toledo."

Don Alonso jumped on his horse, and Lyaeus and Telemachus doubled the
speed of their stride.

First above the bulge of reddish saffron striped with dark of a plowed
field they saw a weathercock, then under it the slate cap of a tower.
"The Alcazar," said Don Alonso. The road turned away and olive trees
hid the weathercock. At the next bend the towers were four, strongly
buttressing a square building where on the western windows glinted
reflections of sunset. As they walked more towers, dust colored, and
domes and the spire of a cathedral, greenish, spiky like the tail of a
pickerel, jutted to the right of the citadel. The road dipped again,
passed some white houses where children sat in the doorways; from the
inner rooms came a sound of frying oil and a pungence of cistus-twigs
burning. Starting up the next rise that skirted a slope planted with
almond trees they caught sight of a castle, rounded towers, built of
rough grey stone, joined by crenellated walls that appeared
occasionally behind the erratic lacework of angular twigs on which here
and there a cluster of pink flowers had already come into bloom. At the
summit was a wineshop with mules tethered against the walls, and below
the Tagus and the great bridge, and Toledo.

Against the grey and ochre-streaked theatre of the Cigarrales were
piled masses of buttressed wall that caught the orange sunset light on
many tall plane surfaces rising into crenellations and square towers
and domes and slate-capped spires above a litter of yellowish tile
roofs that fell away in terraces from the highest points and sloped
outside the walls towards the river and the piers fro