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WITH COTTAGERS IN MOUNTAINS 157
the opposite side of the mountains, from artificial
canals or broad river beds. The streams are carried
by means of a delicately distributed network of veins
over the mountain-tops till water reaches every single
fruit tree. Then it is gathered up again to. run on and
expand like a mirror over a leveled cornfield, after
which it floods another field at a slightly lower level,
and then again another—a great staircase of horizon-
tal plane mirrors, one after the other. At the very
bottom, the waste waters are again collected to drive
a stamp-mill, with another water-mill below it, and
after this it flows all around the mountain into a lower
valley still to begin its work over again. And wher-
ever this water flows, wealth springs from the ground.
The wealth flows into the pockets of the great real
estate owners who live in the cities. The people here
on the soil stay poor forever.
Almost all the land is in the hands of people who
spend their lives in the palaces of Madrid, Seville, or
Granada, often not even aware of where their prop-
erty lies or how it looks. Sometimes the soil is worked
with the aid of stewards and day-laborers, along
modern lines; but for the most part it has been par-
celed out as farms and houses which are rented to
tenants for a term of years. Many of these tenants
have never seen their landlords, only the land-agents.
The Andalusian absentee landlord, it is said, makes
more trips to Paris than to his estates.
The high rents, the oppressive taxes and the city
duties that are added to the cost of production, make
it impossible for these farm workers, in spite of
all their diligence, ever to rise—except in the rarest
cases—out of the stratum of the poor. Those workers
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