I'll have to think of it. Here is
Palos, and yonder the headland with La Rabida."
We entered the town. They would have had me go with
them wherever they must report themselves. But I said
that I could not then, and at the mouth of their street managed
to leave them. I passed through Palos and beyond its
western limit came again to that house of the poorest where
I had lodged six months before and waking all night had
heard the Tinto flowing by like the life of a man. Long ago
I had had some training in medicine, and in mind's medicine,
and three years past I had brought a young working man
living then in Marchena out of illness and melancholy. His
parents dwelled here in this house by the Tinto and they
gave me shelter.
CHAPTER IX
RISING at dawn, I walked to the sea and along it until
I came at last to those dunes beneath which I had
stretched myself that day of grayness. Now it was
deep summer, blue and gold, and the air all balm and caressing.
The evening before I had seen the three ships where
they rode in river mouth. They were caravels, and only the
_Santa Maria_, the largest, was fully decked. Small craft
with which to find India, over a road of a thousand leagues
--or no road, for road means that men have toiled there
and traveled there--no road, but a wilderness plain, a
water desert! The Arabians say that Jinn and Afrits live
in the desert away from the caravans.
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