d as a
king's highway in Ronda. The Moors stayed their time, and their hour
struck, and they went; the houses had fallen to decay and been more than
once rebuilt. The Christians returned and Mahomet fled before the
Saints; (it was no shame since they grossly out-numbered him;) the
mosque was made a church, and the houses as they fell were built again,
but on the same foundations and in the same way. The streets have
remained as the Moors left them, the houses still are built round little
courtyards--the _patio_--as the Moors built them; and the windows are
barred and latticed as of old, the better to protect beauty whose dark
eyes flash too meaningly at wandering strangers, whose red lips are over
ready to break into a smile for the peace of an absent husband.

* * *

After the busy clamour of Gibraltar, that ant-nest of a hundred
nationalities, Ronda impresses you by its peculiar silence. The lack of
sound is the more noticeable in the frosty clearness of the atmosphere,
and is only emphasised by an occasional cry that floats, from some vast
distance, along the air. The coldness, too, has pinched the features of
the people, and they seem to grow old even earlier than in the rest of
Andalusia. Strapping fellows of thirty with slim figures and a youthful
air have the faces of elderly men, and their skin is hard, stained and
furrowed. The women, ageing as rapidly, have no gaiety. If Spanish girls
have frequently a beautiful youth, their age too often is atrocious: it
is inconceivable that a handsome woman should become so fearful a hag;
the luxuriant hair is lost, and she takes no pains to conceal her grey
baldness, the eye loses its light, the enchanting down of the upper lip
turns to a bristly moustache; the features harden, grow coarse and
vulgar; and the countenance assumes a rapacious expression, so that she
appears a bird of prey; and her strident voice is like the shriek of
vultures. It is easily comprehensible that the Spanish stage should have
taken the old woman as one of its most constant, characteristic types.
But in Ronda even the girls have a weary look, as though life were not
so easy a matter as in warmer places, or as the good God intended; and
they seem to suffer from the brevity of youth, which is no sooner come
than gone. They walk inertly, clothed in sombre colours, their hair not
elaborately arranged as would have it the poorest cigarette-girl, but
merely knotted, without the flower which the Sevill