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hardly dark before we were asleep.
    The cowboy wakened us with the first light, and insect-bitten, with raw skin and feet bandaged in our shoes, we set out on the last miles of the long trudge with the towers of Zaragoza, strangely Muscovite at that distance, finally jutting out of the horizon. Slowly the last of the hamlets fell behind and shrank in the distance. In their isolation they had remained part of the Spain of the past, dignified in their poverty and uneasy with progress. But as we had found, they were full of style, and we saw them as the successful human furniture of these sun-drenched plains backed by the distant sierras.

CHAPTER 4
    O LD SPAIN WAS A COUNTRY of white cities, but Zaragoza’s outline was dark. For five days we had drawn the purest of air into our lungs, but even with three miles to go before we faced its suburbs we sniffed a sharp industrial scent. There was something about the intertwining syllables of this city’s name that Eugene found oriental. And by what manoeuvre, we asked ourselves, could it be in this time of national crisis that the only travellers to the capital by train would be those boarding in Zaragoza?
    We were now faced with a new experience, for this was one of Spain’s leading industrial towns, priding itself in a modernity of outlook and style not to be outclassed anywhere in the country. We reached the first of the suburbs by the early afternoon, and were shortly passing the first of its many factories. We had walked a hundred-odd miles through landscapes scented by pastures, rivers, and even mists. Zaragoza, we were to decide, smelt of electricity.
    We had been warned that we would find the town expensive and therefore set out to choose our lodgings with caution. By this time we had learned, too, that cheap accommodation was to be found on the outskirts of most Spanish towns—the furthest out from the centre being the cheapest—and here we contracted ourselves for a single night in the first hotel to come into sight. What was unusual about this particular hotel was that it did business under four different names: the Granadina, Oriente, Pilar and La Perla. It was Granadina over the door, Oriente on the form the porter handed me to fill in, the notices in the rooms referred to it as El Pilar, and the luncheon menu bore the name La Perla, while the crockery in use in the evening meal carried yet another name.
    The Hotel Granadina bore evidence of having once been fashionable, but never was the approach of dissolution more evident. A whiff of change and decay lingered in all the public rooms. Chipped spittoons alternated with drooping palms along untrodden corridors. Our only fellow diner was a priest whose leanness, deeply melancholic eyes and choice of hotel marked him out as unsuccessful in his calling.
    Zaragoza was a communist stronghold, which possibly was justifiable since I could not remember ever visiting a town in which poverty presented itself in so stark a contrast with wealth. The number of Rolls-Royces in its streets could only have been exceeded by those in the West End of London. The poor were engaged in such operations as sifting through rubbish bins and dumps, and in the worst possible cases even guarding the sewer mouths for the nameless garbage vomited at intervals into the river. Communist propaganda posters were abundantly on display.
    Being a Party member Eugene considered it something of a duty to pay a call at the headquarters of the class struggle in such a politically-minded city, and we obtained the necessary address from the first person we stopped in the street and went there without delay. We were received by a charming lady secretary dressed in a garment suggesting a compromise between fashion and politics, and having registered his presence in the city Eugene took me aside to raise a question. Surely, he suggested, the moment had arrived for me to sign the book? I felt obliged to explain that I was not religious.
    ‘Nor am I,’ he said.