Delectations

Old Castile

A ruins on a high knoll: stones and tombstones, and a litter of decayed skulls and bleached femurs and salt-pitted pelvic bones from graves so ancient their occupants were forgotten a thousand years ago. To the north, visible, white-maned, the warlocks of the Cantabrian brood on every tide, the tempests they hatch sudden and much feared. They have their rivals. Fifty leagues to the south, high over foothills, hangs a forbidding rampart, the bare granite Peaks of Europe. These are a westerly prolongation of the Pyrenees, and their most spectacular crags, a collision of cliffs and gorges, a geological cataclysm of narrow deep canyons. Here, in the heart of Old Castile, Spain held out, breeding a proud curmudgeonly race of warriors—hidalgos—who wrested the land back from Islam. In those fortress depths terrestrial storms are engendered, erupting over the rampart and rumbling northward to the sea, where, meanwhile, an opposing gale may have been generated. When such are the conditions, the two storms clash above the ruins in an ear-splitting rage of wind, thunder and lightning.

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F. Reid Buckley

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Old Castile

A ruins on a high knoll: stones and tombstones, and a litter of decayed skulls and bleached femurs and salt-pitted pelvic bones from graves so ancient their occupants were forgotten a thousand years ago. To the north, visible, white-maned, the warlocks of the Cantabrian brood on every tide, the tempests they hatch sudden and much feared. They have their rivals. Fifty leagues to the south, high over foothills, hangs a forbidding rampart, the bare granite Peaks of Europe. These are a westerly prolongation of the Pyrenees, and their most spectacular crags, a collision of cliffs and gorges, a geological cataclysm of narrow deep canyons. Here, in the heart of Old Castile, Spain held out, breeding a proud curmudgeonly race of warriors—hidalgos—who wrested the land back from Islam. In those fortress depths terrestrial storms are engendered, erupting over the rampart and rumbling northward to the sea, where, meanwhile, an opposing gale may have been generated. When such are the conditions, the two storms clash above the ruins in an ear-splitting rage of wind, thunder and lightning.