In the atmosphere of insularity the few Spanish guests were
scarcely distinguishable from Anglo-Saxons, though a group of
magnificent girls at a middle table, quelled by the duenna-like
correctness of their mother, looked with their exaggerated hair and eyes
like Spanish ladies made up for English parts in a play.
We had our breakfast in the reading-room where all the rest were
breakfasting and trying not to see that they were keeping one another
from the fire. It was very cold, for Ronda is high in the mountains
which hem it round and tower far above it. We had already had our first
glimpse of their summits from our own windows, but it was from the
terrace outside the reading-room that we felt their grandeur most after
we had drunk our coffee: we could scarcely have borne it before. In
their presence, we could not realize at once that Ronda itself was a
mountain, a mere mighty mass of rock, cleft in twain, with chasmal
depths where we saw pygmy men and mules creeping out upon the valley
that stretched upward to the foot of the Sierra. Why there should ever
have been a town built there in the prehistoric beginning, except that
the rock was so impossible to take, and why it should have therefore
been taken by that series of invaders who pervaded all Spain--by the
Phoenicians, by the Carthaginians, by the Romans, by the Goths, by the
Moors, by the Christians, and after many centuries by the French, and
finally by the Spaniards again--it would not be easy to say.
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