Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/629

Rh glare of the horizon over the dark umber ridge of the land. The train creeps down a valley and one is in Salamanca or rather near it, for no Spanish train ever goes to the town indicated in the guide, but near enough for the ramshackle Hotel Omnibuses just to get to where the train stops in the outlying desert.

Salamanca is perhaps the most miraculous of these Castilian cities, its raison d'être seems entirely problematical. What natural and economic forces made this particular spot, where the barren, treeless plain slopes down to the bed of the Tormes, the centre of learning for Spain, the intermediary for all Europe of Arabic science and Western thought and a great, and in some ways sumptuous city? What products of the earth, got by what toil of man, where the earth seems completely barren and man completely idle, provided the money to build so extensively and so elaborately? For Salamanca is a city where Plateresque and Baroque fancy have impressed their wildest dreams on the rich surface of the stone.

Salamanca begins bravely enough at the top of its slope with the Calle de Zamora which sets out wide and regular in its lines toward the great central Plaza Mayor, but before it gets there it gives up in despair, divides into many small, winding, intricate lanes which finally trickle feebly under the colonnade of the square. The particular one I usually go down is all barbers' shops on one side, always empty and gaping for customers, and on the other a big blank wall of lovely stone and a dull Renaissance church door. This is the establishment of the Hijas de Jesus (Daughters of Jesus) of which every town seems to possess one. These particular Hijas seem to me to have a poor time of it. Their church is the only one in Salamanca that ever is open at any convenient hours and is always nearly full, but the Hijas don't go into it. They sit up somewhere behind a grille and drone out in their childish treble interminable bad hymn tunes—it must be a sort of perpetual Sunday afternoon of the old-fashioned kind in there.—Sunday indeed is the one day when they do appear in the streets walking with guttering candles behind a procession of the Host and listening to music as bad as their own, but played by a military band. I suppose the balance of things in Salamanca is trimmed by the Hijos de Trabajo (Sons of Labour) whose institute I saw, but never one of the actual sons to my knowledge, nor any one else recognizably related to "Labour."