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UTES GYPSIES 225
instant we are the center of a host of begging women
and children. The women offer little brass souvenirs
at fabulous prices, and beg to be allowed to tell our
fortunes or dance for us. When nothing else avails
them, they slap their bellies with their hands and
whimper: “A little alms for the unborn child—how
about it? It has no father!” and all the women in the
crowd grin with delight. The children—little wretches
that they are—dance about us and shout that we are
the loveliest creatures they have ever seen. Some of
the children bear wounds on their faces and reach out
for our hands, which they press to their lips. An eight-
year-old boy has a naked child about nine months old
straddled over his shoulders. The little one, whose
short black shirt has wrinkled up all the way to his
neck, hangs like a withered weed over the boy’s
shoulders.
In one of the crevices of the mountain lie the caves,
their entrances close together and rising in almost con-
centric curves like the seats of an amphitheater.
Hanging paths, half supported by the powerful cactus,
intersect the mountain and communicate with all the
caves. Wrinkled old men and women, looking as if
they were smoked and cured, are seated at the en-
trance weaving willow baskets. A twelve-year-old girl
cowers on the threshold of a cave, nursing a baby.
She looks after us with childlike curiosity. On a knoll
sits a gypsy engaged in the task of imparting a lovely
mouse-gray tone to an old speckled gray donkey.
A few copper coins rid us of the most impudent, but
their places are taken again and again by new beggars.
And those we have disposed of will crawl off along an
upper path and come down to meet us a little further
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