ll, is very hard and can travel very fast. Players have curved
baskets attached to their right wrists, and they must scoop up or catch
the ball in these baskets and immediately throw it and try to hit a
certain spot marked off on the wall. If it doesn't hit the right spot,
the opposing team scores a point. If it hits the right spot, the other
team must try to scoop it up before it bounces and send it back, hitting
a certain spot on the other side of the court.

You can see that it can be a very fast and complicated game. You could
see jai alai played in specially built concrete courts in many cities in
Spain, also in the state of Florida, right here in our own country. A
jai alai court is called a "fronton." But in the Basque country you'd
see all the men and boys in the village playing jai alai back of the
church, using the high stone wall as their court. Girls don't play it
very often, but when they do it is a very pretty sight, because they
wear wide skirts of blue or red with many white petticoats underneath.
When they run and turn to hit the ball, their skirts swing around wildly
and make them look like spinning tops.

Completely different from the Basque country and all other regions is
the central part of Spain. It is a high plateau bordered by still higher
rugged rocky mountains. The weather is very hot in summer and very cold
in winter, with scorching or icy winds blasting across the land because
there are no forests to break their force. Great gray boulders thrust
out of purple-green hillsides, and rivers cut deep gorges in the gray
soil. This central part is made up of two regions, Old and New Castile.
Old Castile is to the north, and cattle are raised in the green fields
fed by mountain streams.

Castile means "land of castles," and both Old and New Castile have
cities built around castles and cathedrals, sometimes surrounded by
walls built during the years of warfare. One of these cities in Castile
is Avila, which has high stone walls so thick that four or five soldiers
could march side by side on top all the way around the city. There are
88 round towers rising from these walls, where sentries and lookouts
were posted, but only 16 ways to get in and out, so that the city could
be guarded more easily.

[Illustration]

Not far from Avila is the famous palace of El Escorial, where most of
the kings and queens of Spain are buried. Castile isn't the only part of
Spain with castles, of course. If you were v