The house, like nearly all Moorish houses of this class, was simply one large and lofty room, with a domed ceiling built of very thick masonry, to resist the heat of the sun.  There was neither window nor chimney, the door serving to admit light and air, and let out the smoke if a fire were lighted within.  One half of this chamber was dug out to a depth of a couple of feet, for the accommodation of cattle (the litter being thrown into the hollow as it is needed, and nought removed till it reaches the level of the other floor), and above this, about eight feet from the ground and four from the roof, was a kind of shelf (the breadth and length of that half), for the storage of fodder and a sleeping-place for the inhabitants, with no kind of partition, or any issue for the foul air from the cattle below.

“Are we to live a year in this hutch?” asks Moll, in affright.

“Have done with your chatter, Moll!” answers Jack, testily.  “Don’t you see I’m a-thinking?  Heaven knows there’s enough to swallow without any bugbears of your raising.”

With that, having finished his inspection of the interior, he goes out and looks at it outside.

“Well,” says Don Sanchez, “what think you of the house?”

“Why, Senor, ’tis no worse as I can see than any other in these parts, and hath this advantage, which they have not, of being in a sweet air.  With a bit of contrivance we could make a shift to live here well enough.  We should not do amiss neither for furniture, seeing that ’tis the custom of the country to eat off the floor and sit upon nothing.  A pot to cook victuals in is about all we need in that way.  But how we are to get anything to cook in it is one mystery, and” (clacking his tongue) “what we are going to drink is another, neither of which I can fathom.  For, look you, Senor, if one may judge of men’s characters by their faces or of their means by their habitations, we may dance our legs off ere ever these Moors will bestow a penny piece upon us, and as for their sour milk, I’d as lief drink hemlock, and liefer.  Now, if this town had been as we counted on, like Barcelona, all had gone as merry as a marriage bell, for then might we have gained enough to keep us in jollity as long as you please; but here, if we die not of the colicks in a week, ’twill be to perish of starvation in a fortnight.  What say you, Kit?”

I was forced to admit that I had never seen a town less likely to afford a subsistence than this.

Then Don Sanchez, having heard us with great patience, and waited a minute to see if we could raise any further objections, answers us in measured tones.