“Master,” Morano said, “there are men like those vile sin-mongers, who have taken delight in peace.  It may be that peace has been brought upon the world by one of these lousy likings.”

“The delight of peace,” said Rodriguez, “is in its contrast to war.  If war were banished this delight were gone.  And man lost none of his delights in any chapter I read.”

The word and the meaning of contrast were such as is understood by reflective minds, the product of education.  Morano felt rather than reflected; and the word contrast meant nothing to him.  This ended their conversation.  And the songs of the donkey-drivers, light though they were, being too heavy to be carried farther by the idle air of Spring, Morano ceased cursing their sins.

And now the mountains rose up taller, seeming to stretch themselves and raise their heads.  In a while they seemed to be peering over the plain.  They that were as pale ghosts, far off, dim like Fate, in the early part of the morning, now appeared darker, more furrowed, more sinister, more careworn; more immediately concerned with the affairs of Earth, and so more menacing to earthly things.

Still they went on and still the mountains grew.  And noon came, when Spain sleeps.

And now the plain was altering, as though cool winds from the mountains brought other growths to birth, so that they met with bushes straggling wild; free, careless and mysterious, as they do, where there is none to teach great Nature how to be tidy.

The wanderers chose a clump of these that were gathered near the way, like gypsies camped awhile midway on a wonderful journey, who at dawn will rise and go, leaving but a bare trace of their resting and no guess of their destiny; so fairy-like, so free, so phantasmal those dark shrubs seemed.

Morano lay down on the very edge of the shade of one, and Rodriguez lay fair in the midst of the shade of another, whereby anyone passing that way would have known which was the older traveller.  Morano, according to his custom, was asleep almost immediately; but Rodriguez, with wonder and speculation each toying with novelty and pulling it different ways between them, stayed awhile wakeful.  Then he too slept, and a bird thought it safe to return to an azalea of its own; which it lately fled from troubled by the arrival of these two.

And Rodriguez the last to sleep was the first awake, for the shade of the shrub left him, and he awoke in the blaze of the sun to see Morano still sheltered, well in the middle now of the shadow he chose.  The gross sleep of Morano I will not describe to you, reader.  I have chosen a pleasant tale for you in a happy land, in the fairest time of year, in a golden age:  I have youth to show you and an ancient sword, birds, flowers and sunlight, in a plain unharmed by any dream of commerce:  why should I show you the sleep of that inelegant man whose bulk lay cumbering the earth like a low, unseemly mountain?