eyes in scarlet blankets, were crossing on silent white legs.
“Adonde?” said the boy.
But Kate went to see her big luggage taken out. It was all there.
“Orilla Hotel,” said Kate.
The boy said they must go in the tram-car, so in the tram-car they went. The driver whipped his mules, they rolled in the still, heavy morning light away down an uneven, cobbled road with holes in it, between walls with falling mortar and low, black adobe houses, in the peculiar vacuous depression of a helpless little Mexican town, towards the plaza. The strange emptiness, everything empty of life!
Occasional men on horseback clattered suddenly by, occasional big men in scarlet sarapes went noiselessly on their own way, under the big hats. A boy on a high mule was delivering milk from red globe-shaped jars slung on either side his mount. The street was stony, uneven, vacuous, sterile. The stones seemed dead, the town seemed made of dead stone. The human life came with a slow, sterile unwillingness, in spite of the low-hung power of the sun.
At length they were in the plaza, where brilliant trees flowered in a blaze of pure scarlet, and some in pure lavender, around the basins of milky-looking water. Milky-dim the water bubbled up in the basins, and women, bleary with sleep, uncombed, came from under the delapidated arches of the portales, and across the broken pavement, to fill their water-jars.
The tram stopped and they got down. The boy got down with the bags, and told them they must go to the river to take a boat.
They followed obediently down the smashed pavements, where every moment you might twist your ankle or break your leg. Everywhere