e correctness of the Englishwomen; old
Jewesses from Morocco, obese, puffed out, with a many-colored kerchief
knotted about their temples; black cassocks of Catholic priests, tight
frocks of Protestant priests, loose gowns of venerable rabbis, bent,
with flowing beards, exuding grime and sacred wisdom... And all this
multifarious world was enclosed in the limits of a fortified town,
speaking many tongues at the same time, passing without any transition
in the course of the conversation from English to a Spanish pronounced
with the strong Andalusian accent.

Aguirre wondered at the moving spectacle of Royal Street; at the
continuously renewed variety of its multitude. On the great boulevards
of Paris, after sitting in the same cafe for six days in succession, he
knew the majority of those who passed by on the sidewalk. They were
always the same. In Gibraltar, without leaving the restricted area of
its central street, he experienced surprises every day. The whole
country seemed to file by between its two rows of houses. Soon the
street was filled with bearskin caps worn by ruddy, green-eyed,
flat-nosed persons. It was a Russian invasion. There had just anchored
in the harbor a transatlantic liner that was bearing this cargo of human
flesh to America. They scattered throughout the place; they crowded the
cafes and the shops, and under their invading wave they blotted out the
normal population of Gibraltar. At two o'clock it had resumed its
regular aspect and there reappeared the helmets of the police, the
sailors' caps, the turbans of the Moors, the Jews and the Christians.
The liner was already at sea after having taken on its supply of coal;
and thus, in the course of a single day, there succeeded one another the
rapid and uproarious invasions of all the races of the continent, in
this city that might be called the gateway of Europe, by the inevitable
passage through which one part of the world communicates with the Orient
and the other with the Occident.

As the sun disappeared, the flash of a discharge gleamed from the top of
the mountain, and the boom of the sunset gun warned strangers without a
residence permit that it was time to leave the city. The evening patrol
paraded through the streets, with its military music of fifes and drums
grouped about the beloved national instrument of the English, the bass
drum, which was being pounded with both hands by a perspiring athlete,
whose rolled-up sleeves revealed powerful