Segovia’s chaos disappears. Segovia becomes a drama rigorously styled. As the town bristles under the wind and the mountains, so has passion run riot in this town. Here lived Juan Bravo, leader of the _Communeros_ who arose through Spain, in tragic presentiment of disaster, to oppose the Austrian Karl who became Carlos the Great. Here lived the stubborn burghers who shut their gates against the young Queen Isabel. Segovia is crude, coarse, anarchic. But Spain’s unconscious art has made it perfect, weaving the elements of its cross-grained will into a living balance. This is the work of the Roman Water Bridge. Two thousand years ago, the Empire built it to carry from Fuenfría to a reservoir not far from La Granja. The distance was great, so the Aqueduct was long. No aspirance, here, no thinking about symbols. The pragmatic, confident Roman thought not of miracle: the passionate Segovian, building his chaos beneath these Roman arches, looked for miracle elsewhere. And the miracle is born of the unwitting marriage of these wills.... Roman aqueduct and Spanish town offset each other and create, once more, the complex unity of Spain. The Square is a boil of braying burros, muddy motor-buses, lottery vendors, beggars, drinkers. Above it and across it spans the double tier of arches. They are vast granite blocks, pieced without clamp or mortar into a soaring lacework. Hundreds of feet above, swings the upper rim. The town clambers after it on steps, becoming at the top level a hidden maze of low houses. The Bridge, dwarfed here, disappears into the wall of a convent. Its massive granite shelters a patio with a pump, grapevines, geese--and a young girl stringing red clothes on the branch of an encina. Upon the other height from the Plaza del Azoquejo, the Bridge grows gradually less steep as the town rises slowly. Rome’s cool stones run ever closer to the Spanish streets, singing against sordid wineshops, almost touching a schoolhouse dismal as death, skirting a square where boys play at _pelota_. Rome is now a single-tiered, a stolid marching music. It turns at right angles and runs along a road lined with indigent shops. A _bodega_ opens its dark fragrance as it passes: pigskins filled lifesize with wine sprawl like bloated corpses in the shadow of this march of Rome. The town is behind: the sedulous arched mass moves like a resistless army into the ground that rises toward La Granja.... The Aqueduct of Rome is Segovia’s youngest life. Its stones are immense, but its grace makes wings for them. Its tiers and terraces are an ordered song. Horatian is the balance of these pragmatic blocks. The mountains of Castile are old. The barren soil of Castile, stripped of its loam, is old. Segovia is old. It is a spilling of energy, a thing of chaos. Segovia comes to dark and tragic life within this Measure, sure and at ease, of the cool will of Rome. _d._ _The Miracle of El Greco_