Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 17, 2025
When the breeze swept down from the snowy Guadarrama, it cut like a knife, but that was a condition of temperature which one could guard against, not an atmospheric impurity. If Madrid were surrounded by and ornamented with trees, like Wiesbaden or Baden-Baden, it might prove a favorable sanitary measure, besides adding so much to its beauty.
He was now eighteen, but looked older, and the grave expression on his brow and in his eyes, gave him the appearance of a man. He had rushed straight forward, without asking himself whither; now he reached a busy street and checked his career. Was he in Madrid? Yes, for there rose the blue peaks of the Guadarrama chain, which he knew well.
He tried to paint, and finding the attempt useless, gazed into the garden and at the distant chain of the Guadarrama mountains; but to-day he remained unmoved by the delicate violet-blue mist that floated around the bare, naked peaks of the chain. It was wrath and impatience, mingled with bitter disappointment, that roused the tumult in his soul, not merely the dread of torture and death.
They are thin, eager, sinewy in ap' pearance, though it is the spareness of the Turk, not of the American. It comes from tobacco and the Guadarrama winds. This still, fine, subtle air that blows from the craggy peaks over the treeless plateau seems to take all superfluous moisture out of the men of Madrid. But it is, like Benedick's wit, "a most manly air, it will not hurt a woman."
"Then come along." They left the tavern and went along a street between sides of sand cut straight down, and started up the Cerro del Pimiento. The soft, vague mist allowed the Guadarrama to stand out visible. "This landscape enchants me," said Caesar. "It seems hard and gloomy," responded Alzugaray. "Yes, that is true; hard and gloomy, but noble.
At Oropesa he heard from the barber-surgeon of the mysterious Guadarrama mountains, and of the valley that lay undiscovered and unknown for thousands of years until a hunter found there a tribe of people speaking a language unknown to anyone else and ignorant of the rest of men. Rough wild ways intersect the book. Thunder storms overhang it. Immense caverns echo beneath it.
The gang turned back, hurdled a wall that stood in their path and took refuge in the portico of the Observatory on the Atocha side. The wind was blowing from the Guadarrama range so that they were in the lee. For the afternoon and part of the evening the rain came pouring down; they passed the time chatting about women, thefts and crimes.
It lies in a desolate table-land in the windy waste of New Castile; on the north the snowy Guadarrama chills its breezes, and on every other side the tawny landscape stretches away in dwarfish hills and shallow ravines barren of shrub or tree, until distance fuses the vast steppes into one drab plain, which melts in the hazy verge of the warm horizon.
The first obstacle was the mountain-range of Guadarrama, which had to be crossed by the pass of Somosierra. This defile was found to be strongly guarded; there were not only infantry stationed on the heights, but artillery also, sixteen guns being below the turn of the pass in a most advantageous position.
It often happens that at the corner of some street the long arm of the icy "Guadarrama" reaches him; a sudden gust of wind plucks off his respirator, and the mischief is done. But should he reach the safe closeness of his own house, he has certainly done his level best to charge his lungs with unwholesome and contaminated air.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking