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The two gitanas, who had taken the precaution to come alone, immediately wheeled round, and soon arrived with him at their huts. Andrew entered one of them, which was the largest in the rancho, where he was forthwith assisted by ten or twelve gitanos, all handsome strapping young fellows, whom the old woman had previously informed respecting the new comrade who was about to join them.
Some months later Borrow wrote: "No work printed in Spain ever caused so great and so general a sensation, not so much amongst the Gypsies, that peculiar people for whom it was intended, as amongst the Spaniards themselves, who, though they look upon the Roma with some degree of contempt as a low and thievish race of outcasts, nevertheless take a strange interest in all that concerns them, it having been from time immemorial their practice, more especially of the dissolute young nobility, to cultivate the acquaintance of the Gitanos, as they are popularly called, probably attracted by the wild wit of the latter and the lascivious dances of the females.
They had got as far as the eighth chapter before the meetings ended. What was the moral effect of St Luke upon the minds of two gypsies? It is not strange that Borrow should be regarded with suspicion by the Spaniards on account of his association with the Gitanos. Sometimes there would be as many as seventeen gypsies gathered together at his lodgings in the Calle de Santiago.
Into this room, at a given signal, tripped the bride and bridegroom, dancing romalis, followed amain by all the Gitanos and Gitanas, dancing romalis. To convey a slight idea of the scene is almost beyond the power of words. In a few minutes the sweetmeats were reduced to a powder, or rather to a mud, the dancers were soiled to the knees with sugar, fruits, and yolks of eggs.
I should not have thought that there was e'er a Busno would know us in these parts, where Gitanos are never seen. Your worship is right, the sight of that horse made us believe we were at home again in the mercado of Granada; he is a countryman of ours, a real Andalou. Por dios, your worship, sell us that horse; we are poor Calore, but we can buy him."
"A band of accursed Gitanos, Caballero," replied the beggar, returning the title of courtesy, which I had bestowed upon him. "During more than a fortnight they have infested the roads on the frontier of Castile, and many have been the gentleman travellers like yourself whom they have robbed and murdered.
Thus, in every vocabulary which I have been able to consult, pani means water, manro means bread, mas stands for meat, and lon for salt. The nouns of number are almost the same in every case. The German dialect seems to me much purer than the Spanish, for it has preserved numbers of the primitive grammatical forms, whereas the Gitanos have adopted those of the Castilian tongue.
He was a man, furthermore, who called sorcery simply "a thing impossible," and thus addressed a writer on chiromancy: "We . . . believe that the lines of the hand have as little connection with the events of life as with the liver and stomach, notwithstanding Aristotle, who you forget was a heathen and cared as little for the Scriptures as the Gitanos, whether male or female."
It was at this town of Badajoz, the capital of Estremadura, that I first fell in with those singular people, the Zincali, Gitanos, or Spanish gypsies. It was here that I first preached the gospel to the gypsy people, and commenced that translation of the New Testament in the Spanish gypsy tongue, a portion of which I subsequently printed at Madrid.
One fact has always struck us with particular force in the history of these people, namely, that Gitanismo which means Gypsy villainy of every description flourished and knew nothing of decay so long as the laws recommended and enjoined measures the most harsh and severe for the suppression of the Gypsy sect; the palmy days of Gitanismo were those in which the caste was proscribed, and its members, in the event of renouncing their Gypsy habits, had nothing farther to expect than the occupation of tilling the earth, a dull hopeless toil; then it was that the Gitanos paid tribute to the inferior ministers of justice, and were engaged in illicit connection with those of higher station and by such means baffled the law, whose vengeance rarely fell upon their heads; and then it was that they bid it open defiance, retiring to the deserts and mountains, and living in wild independence by rapine and shedding of blood; for as the law then stood they would lose all by resigning their Gitanismo, whereas by clinging to it they lived either in the independence so dear to them, or beneath the protection of their confederates.
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