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Updated: June 21, 2025
With a couple of rials in your pocket, you feel as rich and independent as with an hundred pounds in your hand elsewhere." At this point Moll, who had hitherto listened in apathy to these eulogies, suddenly pushing back her chair, looks at us with a strange look in her eyes, and says under her breath, "Elche!"
And so very soberly we went out of the forest of Elche in the night on mules lent us by Sidi ben Ahmed, with a long cavalcade of mules charged with merchandise for embarking on board the pirates' vessel, and an escort of some half-dozen fierce-looking corsairs armed with long firelocks and a great store of awesome crooked knives stuck in their waist-cloths.
Orihuela, on the road from Carthagena to Alicante, still looks oriental with its palm-trees, square towers and domes, and Elche is just another such, with flat roofs and the orthodox kasbah, now a prison. The enormous number of palms which surround the town recall Marrákesh, but they are sadly neglected.
Then I persuaded Dawson to give up this horrid search, and return to our posada, when, if we found not Moll, we might more justly conclude she had gone to Elche, than put an end to her life; and though we could learn nothing of her at our inn, more than Dawson had already told me, yet our hopes were strengthened in the probability of finding her at Elche by recollecting her earnest, secret conversation with the Moors, who might certainly have returned to Elche in the night, they preferring that time for their journey, as we knew.
So we all return to Elche together, and none so downcast as I at the thought of losing my friend, and speculating on the mischances that might befall him; for I did now begin to regard him as an ill-fated man, whose best intentions brought him nothing but evil and misfortune. Being come to Elche, Don Sanchez presented himself to Mrs.
"We could never get her to play a mean part willingly; could we, Kit? She was for ever wanting the part of a queen writ for her." The next day about sundown, coming to a little eminence, Don Sanchez points out a dark patch of forest lying betwixt us and the mountains, and says: "That is Elche, the place where we are to stay some months."
Some Moors were seated there in their white clothes, with bundles of young palm leaves, plaited up in various forms of crowns, crosses, and the like, which the people of this country do carry to church to be blessed on Palm Sunday; and these Moors I knew came from Elche, because palms grow nowhere else in such abundance.
"Barcelony for my money," responds Dawson, whose memories of Elche were not so cheerful as of those parts where we had led a more vagabond life. "Elche!" repeats Moll, twining her fingers, and with a smile gleaming in her eyes. "Does it please you, chuck, to talk of these matters?" "Yes, yes!" returns she, eagerly. "Talk on."
Arriving at Elche, we made straight for the house of the merchant, Sidi ben Ahmed, with whose family Moll had been so intimate previously. Here we were met by Sidi himself, who, after laying his fingers across his lips, and setting his hand upon his heart, in token of recognition and respect, asked us very civilly our business, though without any show of surprise at seeing us.
But seeing two or three English ships in the port, the Don deemed it advisable that we should push on at once for Elche, and, to our great astonishment, Moll consented to our speedy going without demur, though why, we could not then discover, but did soon after, as I shall presently show. Of our first coming to Elche and the strangeness of that city.
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