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Updated: July 15, 2025
After a short conversation, of which, being in their own language, I could only guess the purport, the two caciques turned back and accompanied us to the village. Save that there was no sign of a church, it differed little from many other villages which I had met with in my travels. There were huts, mere roofs on stilts, cottages of wattle and dab, and flat-roofed houses built of sun-dried bricks.
There seems to be hardly a village in the plain; and the only buildings we see for miles are the herdsmen's houses of stone, flat-roofed, dark inside, and uninviting in their appearance, and the great cattle-pens, the corrals, which seem absurdly too large for the herds that we have yet seen; but in two or three months there will be rain, the ground will be covered with rank grass, the corrals will be crowded with cattle every evening; the mirage will depart when real water comes, dust and sand-pillars will be no longer to be seen, and all the nine horses and mules of the diligence-team, floundering, splashing, and kicking, will hardly keep the heavy coach from settling down inextricably in the mire.
The white, flat-roofed, terraced houses each one in its flowery court and the domes and spires of the Missions, with their gilded crosses, had a mirage-like beauty in the rare, soft atmosphere, as if a dream of Old Spain had been materialized in a wilderness of the New World. But human life in all its essentials was in San Antonio, as it was and has been in all other cities since the world began.
Its tiny, square, flat-roofed mud-houses are not, with few exceptions, higher than six feet, and there is nothing else save them and their dreary, yellow-brown, muddy monotony in the whole village: not a palm, not a flower, not one blade of grass, simply a collection of low mud-houses, with trampled mud-paths between, and here and there an open, brown, dusty square.
I enquired my way to the university. "Up on the hill." I veered off from the main street of the town ... a length of marching telegraph poles and flat-roofed Western houses. I struck across lots in the cold and dark. I floundered through half-hardened puddles of mud, over vacant lots that afterward seemed to have been conjured up for my impediment by some devil of piquaresque romance....
At the sight of its flat-roofed houses of sun-dried brick, set upon the side of the opposing hill, and dominated by a huge circular building of dark stone, the caravan raised a great shout of joy. It shouted in several tongues, in the tongues of Phoenicia, of Egypt, of the Hebrews, of Arabia, and of the coasts of Africa, for all these peoples were represented amongst its numbers.
In the last-named direction, where, over doors and archways, there are countless little images of San Gennaro, with this Canute's hand stretched out, to check the fury of the burning Mountain, we are carried pleasantly, by a railroad on the beautiful Sea Beach, past the town of Torre del Greco, built upon the ashes of the former town destroyed by an eruption of Vesuvius, within a hundred years; and past the flat-roofed houses, granaries, and maccaroni manufacturies; to Castellamare, with its ruined castle, now inhabited by fishermen, standing in the sea upon a heap of rocks.
There he is! On the roof there!" Jimmie Dale started on the run along the roof. The houses, built wall to wall, flat-roofed, seemed to offer an open course ahead of him until a lane or an intersecting street should bar his way! But they were not quite all on the same level, though the wall of the next house rose suddenly breast high in front of him.
This impression was occasionally deepened by the appearance, on the long eminence of which I speak, of a village, a church, or a chateau, which seemed to look down at the plain from over the ruined wall. The perpetual vines, the bright-faced flat-roofed houses, covered with tiles, the softness and sweetness of the light and air, recalled the prosier portions of the Lombard plain.
They strike terror among the widely-scattered inhabitants of the borders; but there is no doubt, if they were bravely and systematically opposed, they would be very quickly driven away, or compelled to have recourse to more peaceable occupations for their support Durango is a pretty little town, with white-washed, flat-roofed houses, standing on a plain surrounded by high rugged hills, a remarkable feature being the number and size of the American aloes which grow in the neighbourhood.
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