Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/635

Rh haps it was a right aesthetic instinct which made them go back to the circular arch which is no doubt a more agreeable shape and one that it is easier to harmonize with upright and horizontal lines, but I wish it had been tried once. These two churches come so near to that idea and both are such spacious and impressive interiors in spite of their bastard style that one longs to see what they would be without their ungainly admixture of late Gothic detail.

Behind the Cathedral a network of steep narrow lanes begins (one is the Calle del Silencio—nearly as good a name as the "Calle di Vida y Muerte"—the street of life and death). Through these one can thread a way to where the remains of the city wall front the Tormes. It is delightful down here, a few groups of poplars cluster on islets, and sheltering the mill houses and the Roman bridge stretches arch after arch interminably across the clear shallow waters and the wide expanses of shingle to the parched brown and yellow uplands which rise gently from the further bank. It is well to cross the bridge at evening, partly because the setting sun casts long shadows on the shingle and lights the orange stonework of the Cathedral tower; partly because from all the country round there straggle in thousands and thousands of sheep and goats, driven down to the water side to drink and there to spend the night in the dry river bed. The air is loud with the chorus of their innumerable bleatings. Herds of swine too come down and a stray pig will gallopade wildly about with the swineherds after him with long whips, his shrill squeals answering their gruff objurgations. A pleasant and lively place enough if a gusty wind doesn't bring clouds of dust in with the sheep from the bare uplands.

One may stroll up the river bank and recross by the blatant new bridge and so along to the Vega where a little Romanesque cloister lies securely imbedded in a great modern hospital or asylum amid market gardens and vague terrains, and so skirt the edge of the town, where sickly acacia trees are aligned in dust to make a new park, and where little new suburban houses wander aimlessly, the side streets leading nowhere as they do at Ealing or Acton, only here it is so much more definitely nowhere, since one knows that if one went on there would be forty miles of bare land before you got to Medina del Campo, and if you didn't hit that, for God knows how many more.