Here, in this heap of mountain stones, and led by this last of inventions, we heard at last the sound of music, and knew that we were near an inn.  The Moors called (and call) an inn Fundouk; the Spaniards call it Fonda.  To this Fonda, therefore, we went, and as we went the sound of music grew louder, till we came to a door of oak studded with gigantic nails and swung upon hinges which, by their careful workmanship and the nature of their grotesques, were certainly of the Renaissance.  Indeed, the whole of this strange hive of mountain men was a mixture—­ignorance, sharp modernity, utter reclusion:  barbaric, Christian; ruinous and enduring things.  The more recent houses had for the most part their dates marked above their doors.  There were some of the sixteenth century, and many of the seventeenth, but the rest were far older, and bore no marks at all.  There was but one house of our own time, and as for the church, it was fortified with narrow windows made for arrows.

Not only did the Moors call an inn a Fundouk, but also they lived (and live) not on the ground floor, but on the first floor of their houses:  so after them the Spaniards.  We came in from the street through those great oaken doors, not into a room, but into a sort of barn, with a floor of beaten earth; from this a stair (every banister of which was separately carved in a dark-wood) led up to the storey upon which the inn was held.  There was no hour for the meal.  Some were beginning to eat, some had ended.  When we asked for food it was prepared, but an hour was taken to prepare it, and it was very vile; the wine also was a wine that tasted as much of leather as of grapes, and reminded a man more of an old saddle than of vineyards.

The people who put this before us had in their faces courage, complete innocence, carelessness, and sleep.  They spoke to us in their language (I understood it very ill) of far countries, which they did not clearly know—­they hardly knew the French beyond the hills.  As no road led into their ageless village, so did no road lead out of it.  To reach the great cities in the plain, and the railway eighty miles away, why, there was the telephone.  They slept at such late hours as they chose; by midnight many were still clattering through the lane below.  No order and no law compelled them in anything.

The Two Men were asleep after this first astonishing glimpse of forgotten men and of a strange country.  In the stifling air outside there was a clattering of the hoofs of mules and an argument of drivers.  A long way off a man was playing a little stringed instrument, and there was also in the air a noise of insects buzzing in the night heat; when all of a sudden the whole place awoke to the noise of a piercing cry which but for its exquisite tone might have been the cry of pain, so shrill was it and so coercing to the ear.  It was maintained, and before it fell was followed by a succession of those quarter-tones which only the Arabs have, and which I had thought finally banished from Europe.  To this inhuman and appalling song were set loud open vowels rather than words.