The effect of the costume is farce. It is elaborate, intricate, unmanly. The bulging drawers, the sash so fat about the buttocks exaggerate the shortness of the body. The man is lean, hard, small. And he drapes himself in clothes that are centrifugal and fussy. The sense of masquerade persists. This man is a stone--an atom of the horizons. With his assumption of a soul, his body has felt cold and he has elaborated this uncongenial mess of wool and leather. His head, however, is still too mineral to need a hat. His woman is not stone: rather she is the clayish soil that with the stone makes up the slopes and moorlands. She is the earth--dark brown and gray--from which the stone is hardened. She is the earth, the earth-bed of her man. She is silent: when she is young, she has the savage and swift mellowness of the mountain Springtime. Her dress is black. On feast days, the black becomes vermilion, deep blue, green. The thick, rough wool, dyed to one color, falls from below the armpits where it is caught in a tight bodice: falls widely, unheeding the waist, into a flaring skirt. It is a dress that has the dignity of the primeval Springs: its mood is fecund; it is not human enough to be aware of waist, of hips, of breast. Unluxuriant, unvaried, it has the bloom of wholeness. The women of these mountains are the loam on the wastes. Here is a better model for Adam and Eve, than the pretty Italians, the mystic lovely Byzantines: this rudimentary pair, the man decking his stone simplicity in a clownish gape of drawers and breeches, and the woman, earth-mooded, earth-whole, chording her man and bearing him along. They have left paradise, and now the world works on them. Christianity has come. They build monasteries--mountain fortresses for God. Strife has come: invasion or threat of invasion. And for these, chieftains, nobles have sprung up who are no longer content to shelter in the little villages of stone. Walled towns make their appearance: such towns as Jaca, pure Iberian name and indeed but a medieval structure for the Iberian blood. Jaca looks up the valley of the Aragon toward France. It sees the primordial hamlets clustered in the moors and on the heights. But Jaca itself crowds sophistications within its turreted walls. The walls themselves are the same gray granite and the streets, narrow and high, are stylizations of the passes northward. But Jaca belongs to history. These houses know of treaties and rebellions. Life has moved into Sobrarbe: now Sobrarbe moves. The mountain citadel is the sign of its moving. It will go south to the valley of the Ebro. It will flow with the Ebro and be part of Spain. It will challenge the world....