valley across sharp boulders such as mules go best on, and often along
the bed of a stream, until at nightfall--if one has started early and
has put energy into one's going, and if it is a long summer day--then at
nightfall one first sees cultivated fields--patches of oats not half an
acre large hanging upon the sides of the ravine wherever a little shelf
of soil has formed.

So went the Two Men upon an August evening, till they came in the
half-light upon something which might have been rocks or might have been
ruins--grey lumps against the moon: they were the houses of a little
town. A sort of gulf, winding like a river gorge, and narrower than a
column of men, was the street that brought us in. But just as we feared
that we should have to grope our way to find companionship we saw that
great surprise of modern mountain villages (but not of our own
England)--a little row of electric lamps hanging from walls of an
incalculable age.

Here, in this heap of mountain stones, and led by this last of
inventions, we heard at last the sound of music, and knew that we were
near an inn. The Moors called (and call) an inn Fundouk; the Spaniards
call it Fonda. To this Fonda, therefore, we went, and as we went the
sound of music grew louder, till we came to a door of oak studded with
gigantic nails and swung upon hinges which, by their careful workmanship
and the nature of their grotesques, were certainly of the Renaissance.
Indeed, the whole of this strange hive of mountain men was a
mixture--ignorance, sharp modernity, utter reclusion: barbaric,
Christian; ruinous and enduring things. The more recent houses had for
the most part their dates marked above their doors. There were some of
the sixteenth century, and many of the seventeenth, but the rest were
far older, and bore no marks at all. There was but one house of our own