"Then we will come to your concert," said they.
The road was indeed "indisposed." We rolled, rocked, and bumped along miles of dusty road, by the side of which the trees were so drenched in dust that they were but ghosts of themselves; the herbage below seeming like the delicate clay work of a magic potter, having no hint of green for the eye. Nor can empty barrels be considered good travelling companions. If the lorry were toiling uphill the barrels sidled down the floor with a seeming leer. One snatched one's toes out of the way without ceremony. On reaching the end of the lorry, the barrels spread themselves sideways, crushing the knees of the sitters. When the lorry reached the top of the hill and began to thunder down the new slope the barrels bounced and bumped to the other end of the lorry, bruising everybody in their passage. Finally the young soldier sat on one of the centre barrels and tried to quell their antics, without much success.
The lorry climbed into the mountains, round roads which curved like a whiplash. At one spot the young soldier remarked: "The motor-bus fell over here once; six of the passengers were killed."
The sun beat down on the canvas top of the lorry, and the large white porous water-jug hanging at the end was in constant demand. We halted at a small and lonely house where beer was for sale. The passengers also bought beans pickled in salt and handed them to each other.
The dusty miles rolled off, at one moment through grey cliffs which shone in the evening light, and another over deep water courses, along the bottom of which ran serried terraces of vines. Presently a pretty girl, whom we took to be the daughter of a wealthy farmer, and who had spent the better part of the journey flirting with the young soldier, exclaimed: "Mira! Shishona!"[20]
Through a cleft between two mountains we caught a glimpse of distant houses clustered up the side of a hill towards an old Saracen ruin which gleamed ochreous against the evening sky.
In spite of the presence of a couple of factories, the entrance of Jijona from the south is one of the most romantic sights we have seen in Spain. Ancient Spanish buildings sprang from the edge of a ravine covered with prickly pear, and faced a steep cliff, along the precipitous face of which ran water courses. Old houses stood step above step, on a hill so steep that the roadways were all staircases and the houses had two entrances, the front into the lowest story and the back into the upper, and often the back-yard was higher than the roof. A white stone bridge carried the road with a noble curve across the ravine, and round this curve we swung, the passengers waving hands and shouting greetings, into the town.