“Once upon a time there was a man who was called Maquetas, a great wayfarer, and he walked for days and days journeying to a castle....” And Maquetas repeated to himself again and again and again and again the story of that other Maquetas, and he continues repeating it and so he will go on repeating it as long as the waters of the invisible torrent go on singing, and the waters will sing for ever, ever, ever, without a yesterday and without a to-morrow, for ever, ever, ever.... THE TOWER OF MONTERREY It is freezing. A biting north wind cuts short the breath. From the steely blue a pale sun sheds a glittering light that cuts out the shadows and models the landscape into a kind of architectural relief. For this crystal-clear light, bright as frost, without haze, appears not so much to illumine as to civilize Nature; it makes it civil, which means that it makes it more than human. To humanize is much, but to civilize is more. To civilize, to make civil--or, if you like, to citizenize--is to superhumanize. Humanity seems to us, so far as man is concerned, to be everything; but civility embraces more than humanity; it is more than all, for it is the future in never-ending process of realization--it is the ideal. The all is that which is and that which is permanent; but the more than all is that which, over and above all that has been and is, will be. The all is the past that is condensed in the present; the more than all is the eternity that embraces the past, the present and the future. The all is the universe and the more than all is thought. For thought exceeds all that has been thought and all that is thinkable and goes beyond them. The city also is Nature. Its streets and its squares and its erect pillared towers also are landscape. And its lines are like the lines of the country. Baroque lines they are said to be. But not all. The escarpments which slope down from the vast tableland of La Armuña to the banks of the Tormes are like the buttresses of a gigantic cathedral; they are architectonic. There are villages which seem as if they were sculptured out of the earth of the bleak upland plains, out of the rock itself. And if you look long enough at some dark poplar standing near the spire of a village church, you begin to wonder which is the tree and which the spire. And the skeleton trees, all swart naked bone, look like the pillars of a ruined temple the roof of which has fallen in. In travelling through this barren rocky Iberian land, have you never sometimes fancied that you discerned in some distant craggy hill the outline of a Baroque cathedral? And conversely, here in the city, one might imagine oneself to be in the midst of some vast geological formation. Men, like coral insects, have built up these masses of grey and golden coral, gleaming in the naked winter sun.