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168 DAYS IN THE SUN
us all that they had done. Some twenty years ago, the
heirs of a landed proprietor had sold these naked
mountain slopes and retained for themselves only the
fruitful Vega down below in the vale. The parish
had bought these rocks and parceled them out into
little areas to assign to the poor people of the village
for a small annual fee. Many persons applied for
such land for the sake of the unusual experience of
feeling that they were landed proprietors, but they
soon relinquished it again. But some hundreds, how-
ever, took the thing more seriously and began to slave
over their rocky freeholds. Wherever there was only
a little humus, they planted something. They blasted
away the surface of the rock, pounded it to pieces with
hammers and mixed the fragments with the faint
traces of humus that had been formed by the mosses
and brushwood in the course of ages. Or with the aid
of dams they gathered up weatherworn substances
which the rain water had washed down from the steep
rocks, and mixed them with the dirt they hauled from
distant places on the backs of donkeys. Now you have
field after field hanging between earth and sky at five
thousand feet above sea level, framed in sharp bluish-
red rocks. Half-grown fig trees, olive trees, almond
trees dot the hills and appear at many points to be
sucking their nutrition out of the bare rock.
“You see it is quite an expensive thing even to-day
to be a land-owning cottager in Spain,” said Don
Louis. “But once our party has won the victory, things
will change, and we shall introduce a law making all
those who really till the soil owners. I tell you at
present my tenants have a much better time than you
do ”
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