Through populous Madrid--a massive flesh--runs the artery of the calle de Toledo. The cobbled streets are moist with sweat of lives. The high walls rise, blind in a mood of siesta under the blazing sun. Winter presses like icy steel upon the open wound of Madrid’s poverty. But even in winter, the fever is there. It is damp in summer, in winter it is frozen. These streets have a cellar mood. Their stones seem porous with a fungus warmth or with a fungus odor. They are straight and steep--not gyring Moorish streets; they funnel the dark song of life, or let it escape like fume into the dry air of the meseta. Some of them are short: the leisurely streets of the old inns--posadas--of the stagecoach, of the itinerant milker with his flock of goats. Through a huge oak door, one passes into a patio. A fig tree, old as a satyr, thrusts its branches through the ancient iron balcony. Below is another patio with a pump, a rose-bush, a pile of manure, a flock of hens and a woman kneeling before a basin. Her hair and her gown are black, her lips are scarlet. Vice and compassion rise from the old close like perfumes; for this aged posada was once a convent, and bright fleshed maidens told their rosaries where now this woman looks into her mirror. All the people are emanations of the past. Girls in the street are lovely and rank, roses over-blown. Women walk like wafts of a hot night through the day. Men are lean, high-tensioned, and isolate as lusts. But though they tide the streets, though their deeds are a storm, this agitance and lushness of Madrid fades to mirage ... It has become a very modern city. Its boulevards are superb; it is full of smart shops and theaters; it has restaurants as expensive as the best of Paris. Its traffic is dense and efficiently controlled; its wealthy sections have the empty glitter of similar districts of Paris or New York. Madrid cannot overcome the spirit of its being, which is a spirit of stillness. Other towns in Spain grew from the needs of conquest, of commerce, of defense. God--or profit--gave them energy. But Madrid is of no such beginning: Madrid is of the _end_. It is a consummation. It stands for the Spain that has annulled its motions. Its greatness is but the stubborn Castilian will to remain and to hold all Spain in perfect equilibrium of forces. Madrid is the town of politicians, of social servants, of soldiers. It is a _conservative_ town. It wants things as they are. From here goes forth the will to repress Barcelona, to exploit the Basques, to muzzle Unamuno, to tax Andalusia, to play at empire in Morocco. A town of government--a parasite town, it is the converse of such towns as London or Paris. For in these, greatness came first, and made them govern. There is this subtle melancholy in Madrid, this silence under all its voices--of a life come to dark pause. And yet this same dark element is fecund. Like a culture-bed, it nurtures even with its rot.