Navidad

UDDENLY over the dim city of flat roofs and gigantic palms the bells rang out far and near, silver and brazen, chiming solemnly, joyfully.

The pale light of earliest dawn began to melt through the white mists. A chill wind woke and stirred these into faint curling wreaths which at first floated close to earth, rising at last and dissolving away in the upper air like a prayer mounting into ecstasy.

Dim and silent as shadows, the devout gathered in all directions toward the church on the green plaza, whose chime of silver bells rang out its chord above the low rumbling of the organ, heralding the early Christmas mass.

The cold light gleamed on the trappings of many horses, reflected here from the gold mountingts of head-stall and reins, there from the silver lining of a red saddle whose snowy anquera descended half way to the ground. It brought out spots and dashes of brilliant color—a scarlet cloak, a green cloth flung over a bright bay horse, the canopy of a carreta, a great silken spread of blue, embroidered in purple flowers and edged with a deep gold fringe.

The townspeople, even the wealthiest families, came unostentatiously on foot And the women, doffing the silks and laces in which they had danced the night away, appeared clad religiously in black. They walked slowly, with quiet, composed faces, framed nun-like in the severe folds of black rebosos. Their downcast eyes, under whose black-fringed lids, heavy with sleep, a languid light lingered, were fixed on the silver rosaries which hung in their fingers. Their lips, curved for soft caresses, moved in soundless devotions. Demurely they passed on into the dark church.

The bells chimed out for the last time, calling those belated.

Into the sky, which had lightened from gray to pale violet, shot up broad streamers of pink, whose radiance transfigured magically everything on which it fell. The chorus of birds in the orange orchards, in the magnolia trees, in the blanches of the swaying eucalypti, became louder and more joyous; the horses lifted their heads and moved restlessly; the air grew softer, more divinely clear.

Inside the church, full of incense and the faint musky odor of women's perfumes, where the light penetrated dimly through colored windows, the priest's chanting voice rose and fell mystically; then came the murmured response and the dying notes of the organ.

In a burst of golden light the sun rode up majestically into the palpitant sky. A thousand colors, sights, scents, sounds, were born again with him. And a solitary cripple outside the door of the church, moved by some vague impulse, raised his arms in the old, the eternal gesture of adoration.