The scene was as alien to any other known aspect of our comfortable
planet as if it were the landscape of some star condemned for the sins
of its extinct children to wander through space in unimaginable
desolation. It seldom happens in Spain that the scenery is the same on
both sides of the railroad track, but here it was malignly alike on one
hand and on the other, though we seemed to be running along the slope of
an upland, so that the left hand was higher and the right lower. It was
more as if we were crossing the face of some prodigious rapid, whose
surges were the measureless granite boulders tossing everywhere in
masses from the size of a man's fist to the size of a house. In a wild
chaos they wallowed against one another, the greater bearing on their
tops or between them on their shoulders smaller regular or irregular
masses of the same gray stone. Everywhere among their awful shallows
grew gray live-oaks, and in among the rocks and trees spread tufts of
gray shrub. Suddenly, over the frenzy of this mad world, a storm of cold
rain broke whirling, and cold gray mists drove, blinding the windows and
chilling us where we sat within. From time to time the storm lifted and
showed again this vision of nature hoary as if with immemorial eld; if
at times we seemed to have run away from it again it closed in upon us
and held us captive in its desolation.
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