amazement.

"Heavens! Then what in the devil do they teach your in school?..."

Upon passing near the citizens of Valencia seated on the wharves,
fishing rod in hand, he would shoot a glance of commiseration toward
their empty baskets. Over there by his house on the coast, before the
sun would be up, he would already have covered the bottom of his boat
with enough to eat for a week. The misery of the cities!

Standing on the last points of the rocky ledge, his glance would sweep
the immense plain, describing to his nephew the mysteries hidden beyond
the horizon. At their left, beyond the blue mountains of Oropesa, which
bound the Valencian gulf, he could see in imagination Barcelona, where
he had numerous friends, Marseilles, that prolongation of the Orient
fastened on the European coast, and Genoa with its terraced palaces on
hills covered with gardens. Then his vision would lose itself on the
horizon stretching out in front of him. That was the road of his happy
youth.

Straight ahead in a direct line was Naples with its smoking mountain,
its music and its swarthy dancing girls with hoop earrings; further on,
the Isles of Greece; at the foot of an Aquatic Street, Constantinople;
and still beyond, bordering the great liquid court of the Black Sea, a
series of ports where the Argonauts--sunk in a seething mass of races,
fondled by the felinism of slaves, the voluptuosity of the Orientals,
and the avarice of the Jews--were fast forgetting their origin.

At their right was Africa; the Egyptian ports with their traditional
corruption that at sunset was beginning to tremble and steam like a