2. Hors d'oeuvre, olives (cured in anis and mint), pink tomatoes (a Jijona speciality), cucumber, and orange-coloured sausage.
4. A stew of chicken, potatoes and garbanzos. (Garbanzos, or chick-peas, look something like dried nasturtium seeds. They are cooked like haricot beans, and taste like a blend of haricot bean and lentil. They are a very favourite Spanish vegetable.)
5. Cold fish and mayonnaise. (The mayonnaise was made from almond oil, lemon juice and hard-boiled egg, and was extremely delicate in flavour.)
8. Yellow melon and muscatel grapes. Brandy.
9. Iced coffee (brought in by a boy from the Casino).
The doctor's wife asked me if it were true that English people did not like questions. I said personally we did not mind questions, but that in England direct intimate questions were generally avoided.
"But," said the doctor's wife in amazement, "if you wish to find out something about anybody, how do you do so? And how do you carry on conversations?"
The meal over, we toiled slowly up again to El Torre, taking the hill in as leisurely a manner as we could. Tia Roger's daughter was sitting on our doorstep eating grapes. As we passed she held the bunch out to us.
Before their gateway, the two aged men and the one old woman sat, as they did from morning till night, plaiting an everlasting rope of esparto grass.
We had acquired the siesta habit, so lay down until four o'clock. Then, as the dinner had rather disorganized our desire to paint, Jan and I went for a walk. We clambered down through the town, passed out by the southern entrance, across the bridge, and clambered up the hill opposite. At a long open washing-place, women were on their knees beating and scrubbing clothes with the Spanish soap which will not lather; amongst them, working as hard as the rest, was a child of five years old.
We skirted the line between the mountains, and the flat and plain for about two miles, then Jan took a path leading away from the mountains. We came out into the most fantastic scenery of its kind I have ever seen. In the winter the torrential rains burst on the mountains and the water rushing down had scooped deep clefts in the earth of the plain. The ground itself appeared to be in layers of various colours, and these layers falling in one above the other had striped the sides of the deep canyon purple, blue, white, orange and red. The water had cut out of the clayey earth a hundred fantastic shapes--I have seen photographs of the Grand Canyon of Colorado, this was like them on a small scale; at one place the clay was harder and the water dripping down had carved the cliff-side like great organ pipes or like the columns of an Egyptian temple. In the deep bottoms of the canyon were vine terraces; and further down flat, irrigated fields of tomatoes, of herbage or of vegetables. Little farm-houses sheltered under the mud cliffs, and on the circular threshing floors almonds and red peppers were spread out to dry in the sun. In one place a man had scooped his dwelling out of the cliff-side. These cave dwellings are common enough. At Verdolay was a whole colony of them, and the cavemen were reputed to be thieves and vagabonds, and the members were despised by the peasants proper. At the end of the ravine or barranca we came to a many-arched bridge which towered high above our heads, and clambering up by a zigzag track found ourselves on the Alicante road.