louder; an illumination of unseasonable fireflies danced past, and
strange whispers came out of the dark without meaning or excuse.

Without amazement Tansey took note of these phenomena. He was on
some new plane of understanding, though his mind seemed to him clear
and, indeed, happily tranquil.

A desire for movement and exploration seized him: he rose and turned
into the black gash of street to his right. For a time the high
wall formed one of its boundaries; but further on, two rows of
black-windowed houses closed it in.

Here was the city's quarter once given over to the Spaniard. Here
were still his forbidding abodes of concrete and adobe, standing
cold and indomitable against the century. From the murky fissure,
the eye saw, flung against the sky, the tangled filigree of
his Moorish balconies. Through stone archways breaths of dead,
vault-chilled air coughed upon him; his feet struck jingling
iron rings in staples stone-buried for half a cycle. Along these
paltry avenues had swaggered the arrogant Don, had caracoled and
serenaded and blustered while the tomahawk and the pioneer's rifle
were already uplifted to expel him from a continent. And Tansey,
stumbling through this old-world dust, looked up, dark as it was,
and saw Andalusian beauties glimmering on the balconies. Some of
them were laughing and listening to the goblin music that still
followed; others harked fearfully through the night, trying to catch
the hoof beats of caballeros whose last echoes from those stones had
died away a century ago. Those women were silent, but Tansey heard
the jangle of horseless bridle-bits, the whirr of riderless rowels,
and, now and then, a muttered malediction in a foreign tongue. But