The General’s quarters overlooked the town, and from them he could see Santa Engracia, in whose crypt repose the bodies of the martyrs in an atmosphere of ice, standing alone upon its little plaza, fringed by a belt of stunted and ill-grown acacia trees. The great cathedral, with its domes, in which the shrine of the tutelary Virgin of the Pilar, the Pilarica of the country folk, glittering with jewels and with silver plate, is venerated as befits the abiding place on earth of the miraculous figure sent direct from heaven, towered into the sky. Churches and towers and convents, old castellated houses with their overhanging eaves and coats-of-arms upon the doors, jewels of architecture, memorials of the past, formed as it were a jungle wrought in a warm brown stone. Beyond the city towered the mountains that hang over Huesca of the Bell. Through them the Aragon has cut its roaring passages towards Sobrarbe to the south. Northwards they circle Jaca, the virgin little city that beat off the Moors a thousand years ago, and still once every year commemorates her prowess outside the walls, where Moors and Christians fight again the unequal contest, into which St. James, mounted upon his milk-white charger, had plunged and thrown the weight of his right arm. The light was so intense and African that on the mountain sides each rock was visible, outlined as in a camera-lucida, and as the artillery played upon the tower the effects of every salvo showed up distinctly on the crumbling walls. All round the Government’s encampment stood groups of peasantry who had been impressed together with their animals to bring provisions. Wrapped in their brown and white checked blankets, dressed in tight knee-breeches, short jackets, and grey stockings, and shod with alpargatas—the canvas, hemp-soled sandals that are fastened round the ankles with blue cords—they stood and smoked, stolid as Moors, and as unfathomable as the deep mysterious corries of their hills. When the artillery thundered and the breaches in the walls grew daily more apparent and more ominous, the country people merely smiled, for they were sure the Pilarica would preserve the city; and even if she did not, all Governments, republican or clerical, were the same to them. All their ambition was to live quietly, each in his village, which to him was the hub round which the world revolved. So one would say, as they stood watching the progress of the siege: “Chiquio, the sciences advance a bestiality, the Government in the Madrids can hear each cannon-shot. The sound goes on those wires that stretch upon the posts we tie our donkeys to when we come into town. . . .” Little by little the forces of the Government advanced, crossing the Ebro at the bridge which spans it in the middle of the great double promenade called the Coso, and by degrees drew near the walls.