_The shut town is expanding. The sun is still outside; streets twist to avoid it. But the sun works. The city expands. Men and women are a melting on the street. Men and women are motes of life within the melting city...._ * * * * * _Badajoz is behind. The sun is high, and here the pasture plains. The Guadiana treeless wanders to the south. It is a thirsty river. It is a river homesick for the hills of its youth; moved by a dream of coolness southward, languidly stirred to win this dream in the south. Cities have no sky. Beyond the walls of Pax Augusta which centuries have mellowed from the Roman Camp holding harsh soldiers to this Badajoz ... now the sky of Spain...._ _I have never seen a sky so far from my head: I have never seen a world so sharp in my eye. The sky lifts me to a realm of visions. And as I pass into its moveless search, still I stand fixed within this graphic world.... Sheep bleat in a wave of dust.... The dust is dense. Curling, swirling, puffing, streaking down, the dust is clear as glass. The sheep are solid masses of tempestuous wool; each sheep is a writhe about four feet, about stalks of sinewed bone jerking it on. Here’s a man. A solid body. Hands crustaceous; face crisp skin drawn on a gaping skull: and over the skin porous as soapstone, bristles of separate hair, sweat, huddles of dust. The smoke from the cigarette cuts rising through the air. Over his shoulder, miles and miles away, a ruined village rests on the hump of a hill. Barbary figs stand at the walls of a splintered chapel. Solid Spain! The earth is clotted, corrugation, furrow. In a red gulch a blackish water drips. And there are flowers, purple like shreds of morning._ _Everywhere sky. So far away, and everywhere. Its apartness is a force lifting the broken things of Spain as in a great dance Godward. Dust and sheep-hoof, ash of cigarette, pound of the shepherd’s staff on the earth, swish of his chaps, the dog’s soft pads against stone ... rise all in this various clarity, as in a dance, to the sky._ * * * * * _I have a vision which has not left me. I shall love this people and this world. For in my vision I have been born as they.... There is a Funnel. Its walls are the round, white sky. It is thewed together by the rays of the sun. And at the Funnel’s mouth is the mouth of God, speaking the words which are the things of earth. Down this Funnel as in birth, we fall. Until we strike upon the land of Spain._ _PART ONE_ _Spain_ _CHAPTER I_ _HINTERLAND IN AFRICA_ _a. Oasis_ _b. Moghreb_ _c. Ishmael and Israel_ _a. Oasis_ In the desert, night is reason; the day is magic and madness. This is a law of the desert, and of the desert dwellers.