the French--armed men jingling over mountain roads.
Conquest has warped and sterilised our Iberian mind without changing an
atom of it. An example: we missed the Revolution and suffered from
Napoleon. We virtually had no Reformation, yet the Inquisition was
stronger with us than anywhere."

"Do you think it will have to be swept clean?" asked Telemachus.

"He does." Don Alonso pointed with a sweep of an arm towards a man
working in the field beside the road. It was a short man in a blouse;
he broke the clods the plow had left with a heavy triangular hoe.
Sometimes he raised it only a foot above the ground to poise for a
blow, sometimes he swung it from over his shoulder. Face, clothes,
hands, hoe were brown against the brown hillside where a purple shadow
mocked each heavy gesture with lank gesticulations. In the morning
silence the blows of the hoe beat upon the air with muffled insistence.

"And he is the man who will do the building," went on Don Alonso; "It
is only fair that we should clear the road."

"But you are the thinkers," said Telemachus; his mother Penelope's
maxims on the subject of constructive criticism popped up suddenly in
his mind like tickets from a cash register.

"Thought is the acid that destroys," answered Don Alonso.

Telemachus turned to look once more at the man working in the field.
The hoe rose and fell, rose and fell. At a moment on each stroke a
flash of sunlight came from it. Telemachus saw all at once the whole
earth, plowed fields full of earth-colored men, shoulders thrown back,
bent forward, muscles of arms swelling and slackening, hoes flashing at
the same moment against the sky, at the same moment buried with a thud
in clods. And he felt reassured as a traveller feels, hearing the
continuous hiss and squudge of well oiled engines out at sea.

_VII: Cordova no Longer of the Caliphs_

When we stepped out of the bookshop the narrow street steamed with the
dust of many carriages. Above the swiftly whirling wheels gaudily
dressed men and women sat motionless in attitudes. Over the backs of
the carriages brilliant shawls trailed, triangles of red and purple and
yellow.

"Bread and circuses," muttered the man who was with me, "but not enough
bread."

It was fair-time in Cordova; the carriages were coming back from the
_toros_. We turned into a narrow lane, where the dust was yellow
between high green and lavender-washed walls. From the street we had
left came a sound o