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The Moor was rich and powerful, But not of lineage high, His wealth outweighed with one light maid Three years of constancy. Touched to the heart, on hearing this, He stood in arms arrayed, Nor strange that he, disarmed by love, 'Gainst love should draw his blade. And Venus, on the horizon, Had shown her earliest ray When he Sidonia left, and straight To Jerez took his way.
We had been showed dances in Concepcion and Isabella, but here in Cuba, in this inland town, Jerez and Luis and I were given to see a great and formal dance, arranged all in honor of us, gods descended for our own reasons to mix with men!
Then suddenly, when we were, we thought, six leagues at least from the ships, the way turning and entering a small green dell, we came upon three Indians seated resting, their backs to palm trees. We halted, they raised their eyes. They stared, they rose in amazement at the sight of those gods, Roderigo Jerez, Luis Torres and Juan Lepe. They stood like statues with great eyes and parted lips.
The air is impregnated with a rich smell. The sun shines down on Jerez; and its cleanliness, its prosperity, are a rebuke to harsh-voiced contemners of the grape. You pass bodega after bodega, cask-factories, bottle-factories.
I see the crowds going to the bull-fight, intensely living, many-coloured. And a thousand scents are wafted across my memory; I remember the cloudless nights, the silence of sleeping towns, and the silence of desert country; I remember old whitewashed taverns, and the perfumed wines of Malaga, of Jerez, and of Manzanilla.
At Jerez de la Frontera, a sunny town in Andalusia where everybody works at growing grapes and making them into a famous wine called sherry, the harvest festival comes just before the grapes are ready to be harvested, in September.
Lusitania had a Viriatus, Rome a Caesar, Carthage a Hannibal, Greece an Alexander, Castile a Count Fernan Gonzalez, Valencia a Cid, Andalusia a Gonzalo Fernandez, Estremadura a Diego Garcia de Paredes, Jerez a Garci Perez de Vargas, Toledo a Garcilaso, Seville a Don Manuel de Leon, to read of whose valiant deeds will entertain and instruct the loftiest minds and fill them with delight and wonder.
We walked through the deserted streets, I and the woman dressed in white, side by side silently; our footsteps made no sound upon the stones. And Jerez was wrapped in a ghostly shroud. Ah, the beautiful things I have seen which other men have not!
But I liked Jerez best towards evening, when the sun had set and the twilight glided through the tortuous alleys like a woman dressed in white. Then, as I walked in the silent streets, narrow and steep, with their cobble-paving, the white houses gained a new aspect.
The remainder of the day we rested, and on Monday early Roderigo Jerez, Luis Torres and Juan Lepe with Diego Colon and two Cuba men made departure, We had a pack of presents and a letter from the Admiral. For we might meet some administrator or commandant or other, from Quinsai or Zaiton or we knew not where.
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