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IX
A MORNING’S JOURNEY
VERY morning, at the first faint glow of dawn, I
was awakened by a deafening twitter. It burst
forth outside our bedroom window as unexpectedly as
the twittering of sparrows in the trees in Denmark, and
it was just as purposelessly boisterous; but it came up
from down below, not from the trees above. The bot-
tom of our little alley and the fronts of the house
would begin to bustle with life. Women and girls and
boys hung over the balconies or out of little observa-
tion windows or crawled along under the milk goats
and under the leather-clad shepherds. They emitted
strange sounds in the air, with no other purpose than
sheer joy in the use of their lungs. And from the
swarming level of the street, which reminded one with
its dirt, its semi-darkness, and its stench, of a great
sewer, there ascended something like a natural hymn to
the rising sun.
I shall tell you now of my customary morning walk.
It extended through the city and passed over the Vega
in a great curve to the foothills: then up the mountains
until I was far above the city on the other side, and
then again downward toward the city, through Alham-
bra or Albaicin. The whole trip could be taken in
three or four hours. I probably walked over this
course a hundred times and knew every step. I knew
precisely at what point I should meet this beggar or
that. I knew on what walls hung the most lizards. I
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