The other meals were excellently cooked and with four or five courses to each, but the diningroom bore on its walls a placard saying that owing to the rise of prices the management regretted that it was unable to provide wine at the _pension_. So there was an extraordinario after all--and a very good extraordinario it was too--red Rioja wine with the faint, strange exotic taste in it of the tar with which the wine barrels are caulked.
You know the queer old drawings one finds in ancient books: towns like bandboxes with the walls round a perfect circle, and peaked houses all comfortably packed inside, and soldiers' heads sticking out of the battlemented towers? Well, Avila is like that. You may stand on the opposite hillside and see the full circle of her walls with never a breach in it, with towers at every two hundred yards or so, and you can gaze down into her houses, fitted neatly within the bandbox, and wonder if the old manuscripts were quite as exaggerated as one often supposed. From this hillside one might imagine that Avila has never changed from the days when the monks drew their primitive pictures. The walls top the hill-side and one sees nothing of the modern Avila which has spread beyond those great frowning gateways facing the plaza, but even the modern part of Avila which has oozed out beyond the walls is not overwhelmingly modern. There are none of the exquisite specimens of Spanish bad taste like that we found in Irun. The plaza is surrounded by coloured houses and arcades much as is that of Medina; the sun-blinds of the two large cafés are tattered and weather-beaten; the peasants stare at strangers with an unspoilt curiosity.
The habit of rushing about towns, of penetrating into every gloomy interior, ecclesiastical or otherwise, which seems to be decently penetrable, is a modern convention to which we do not subscribe. There are two aspects to every place, the living and the dead, and we prefer the former. There is this advantage in our attitude, that one does not have to seek out the living, it flows quite easily and naturally by, and one does not remain an open-mouthed spectator with a jackdaw brain, but incorporates oneself with it. We did not go into the cathedral, nor into any convent, nor did we climb up the towers or into the walls: we sat at the café drinking in both coffee and Spain.