On our right, the road mounted through country wild enough at times, but
for the most part comparatively friendly, with moments of being almost
homelike. There were slopes which, if massive always, were sometimes
mild and were gray with immemorial olives. In certain orchard nooks
there were apricot trees, yellowing to the autumn, with red-brown
withered grasses tangling under them. Men were gathering the fruit of
the abounding cactuses in places, and in one place a peasant was bearing
an arm-load of them to a wide stone pen in the midst of which stood a
lordly black pig, with head lifted and staring, indifferent to cactuses,
toward Toledo. His statuesque pose was of a fine hauteur, and a more
imaginative tourist than I might have fancied him lost in a dream of the
past, piercing beyond the time of the Iberian autochtons to those
prehistoric ages
When wild in woods the noble savage ran,
pursuing or pursued by his tusked and bristled ancestor, and then slowly
reverting through the different invasions and civilizations to that
signal moment when, after three hundred Moslem years, Toledo became
Christian again forever, and pork resumed its primacy at the table.
Pages:
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204