most
part invisible.

Two women came out on the roof; they were both young, and after glancing
for a moment at the inquisitive fellow in the hotel window, turned their
gaze in a different direction, as if they had not noticed him. To
Aguirre these Aboab daughters were not very impressive, and he wondered
whether the much vaunted beauty of Jewesses was but another of the many
lies admitted by custom, consecrated by time and accepted without
investigation. They had large eyes, of bovine beauty; moist and dilated,
but with the addition of thick, prominent eyebrows, as black and
continuous as daubs of ink. Their nostrils were wide and the beginnings
of obesity already threatened to submerge their youthful slenderness in
corpulence.

They were followed by another woman, doubtless the mother, who was so
fat that her flesh shook as she moved. Her eyes, too, were attractive,
but were spoiled by the ugly eyebrows. Her nose, her lower lip and the
flesh of her neck hung loosely; in her there was already completed the
fatal maturity which was beginning to appear in her daughters. All three
possessed the yellowish pallor characteristic of Oriental races. Their
thick lips, faintly blue, revealed something of the African element
grafted upon their Asiatic origin.

"Hola! What's this!" murmured Aguirre with a start.

A fourth woman had come out from the depths of the tabernacle. She must
be English; the Spaniard was certain of this. Yes, she was an English
brunette, with a bluish cast to her dark skin and a slim, athletic
figure whose every movement was graceful. A creole from the colonies,
perhaps, born of some Oriental beauty and a British soldier.

She looked without any bashfulness toward the window of the hotel,
examining the Spaniard with the leisurely glance of a bold boy, meeting
the shock of his eyes without flinching. Then she wheeled about on her
heel as if beginning a dancing figure, turned her back to the Spaniard
and leaned against the shoulders of the two other young ladies,
thrusting them aside and taking pleasure, to the accompaniment of loud
outbursts of laughter, in pushing their unwieldy persons with her
vigorous, boyish arms.

When all the women returned to the interior of the tabernacle, Aguirre
abandoned his lookout, more and more convinced of the exactness of his
observations. Decidedly, she was not a Jewess. And the better to
convince himself, he talked at the door with the manager of the hotel,
who kne