Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV THE BANKS OF THE GUADALQUIVIR GRANADA was sleeping a fitful Sunday siesta when I repacked my knapsack in the Casa Rob- ledo. In the streets were only the fruit-sellers from the surrounding country, still faintly chanting over the half-empty baskets on the backs of their lolling asses. I paused to spend two " perros gordos " for as many pounds of cherries — for he who has once tasted the cherries of Granada has no second choice — and trudged away through the northern suburb leaving a trail of pits behind me. The highway surmounted the last crest and swung down to the level of the plain. Like a sea of heat mist diked by the encircling mountains stretched the vega, looking across which one saw at a glance no fewer than a score of villages half concealed by an inundation of sunshine so physically visible that one observed with astonishment that the snow lay still unmelted on the peak of Mulhacen behind. Yet for all the heat I would not have been elsewhere nor doing else than striking across the steaming vega of Granada. In such situations, I confess, I like my own company best. With the finest companionin the world a ten-mile tramp through this heat and dust would have been a labor like the digging of a ditch. Alone, with the imagination free to take color from the landscape, each petty inconvenience seemed but to put me the more in touch with the real Spain. Just here lies the advantage of traveling in this half-tramp fashion. The " personally conducted " traveler, too, sees the Alhambra; yet how slight is that compared with sharing the actual life of the Spanish people, which the tourist catches if at all in vagrant, posing fragments? To move through a foreign country shut up in a moving room, carrying with one the modern luxuries of home, is not travel;... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.