She is the pagan goddess, ample limbed, with hair in which brood darkness and the laugh of the sun. She leans over her Giralda. She stirs her head and her arms in a half somnolent, half ecstasied dance, seeking her own image in the water.... _e. The Gypsies Dance_ Below Al-Baicín the bodiless soul and Al-Hambra the soulless body, there is a gypsy town. The sparse waters of the Darro run at the level of the road. And on its other side the land mounts like a wall. Here, under the hill are caves, the dwellings of _gitanos_. Heavy women, their bare arms clinking with metal and stone ornaments, their breasts slung in crass colors, call out for gain. The eyes are shallow and sly; the mouth that smiles is like the straining of an unsmiling substance; the oily hair throws off the glance of the sun. Men are rigid and yet slender; they lack the easy harshness of the women. Their bodies have melancholy and fatigue; as if an endless joust of appetite and song had worn them. The cave becomes, inside, an ample room, narrow, cool, long. Walls are white plaster. Floors are fine-beaten clay. Chairs, tables, lamps, make this modern ease fantastic against the crude stone mouth of a cave within a hill. Men take tambours and sing; women dance. It is a cave of storms. The blasts of many roads, the seas and forests of untempered passions shriek in this music. Tambour, castanet, foot stamp, hand-clap, raise the world in a maelstrom. And the Spanish cadence gleams like a strip of sun upon the barbarous clouds. The _gitano_ music is impure, and heavy. It has crude curves and broken surfaces. Its timbre is inexact, its form aimless. “Time” is the best of it as if this race had its true ritual in the beat of feet upon the endless highway. Time becomes a hurrying _crescendo_ that splits, turns back, gallops against itself so that it never really moves. The women have an easy grace upon the easy floor. Full bodies swing and swerve in a sensuous complacence. They step to the singing men. And the song of the men swirls like a colored smoke about their hair, about the eyes of the women. Foot-beat under song ribs it, volumes it, controls its wild delight: holds the _gitanos_ together: is their soul. But this softness and spirit of the music is within; it speaks soothing to the _gitanos_, making their faces good. The outside of the music is coarse and motley. We ... all the world ... know but the wrong side of the weave. _f. Spain Dances_