The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway [35]
The road left the green valley at once, and we were up in the hills again. Bill and the wine-bottle Basque were having a conversation. A man leaned over from the other side of the seat and asked in English: "You're Americans?"
"Sure."
"I been there," he said. "Forty years ago."
He was an old man, as brown as the others, with the stubble of a white beard.
"How was it?"
"What you say?"
"How was America?"
"Oh, I was in California. It was fine."
"Why did you leave?"
"What you say?"
"Why did you come back here?"
"Oh! I come back to get married. I was going to go back but my wife she don't like to travel. Where you from?"
"Kansas City."
"I been there," he said. "I been in Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City."
He named them carefully.
"How long were you over?"
"Fifteen years. Then I come back and got married."
"Have a drink?"
"All right," he said. "You can't get this in America, eh?"
"There's plenty if you can pay for it."
"What you come over here for?"
"We're going to the fiesta at Pamplona."
"You like the bull-fights?"
"Sure. Don't you?"
"Yes," he said. "I guess I like them."
Then after a little:
"Where you go now?"
"Up to Burguete to fish."
"Well," he said, "I hope you catch something."
He shook hands and turned around to the back seat again. The other Basques had been impressed. He sat back comfortably and smiled at me when I turned around to look at the country. But the effort of talking American seemed to have tired him. He did not say anything after that.
The bus climbed steadily up the road. The country was barren and rocks stuck up through the clay. There was no grass beside the road. Looking back we could see the country spread out below. Far back the fields were squares of green and brown on the hillsides. Making the horizon were the brown mountains. They were strangely shaped. As we climbed higher the horizon kept changing. As the bus ground slowly up the road we could see other mountains coming up in the south. Then the road came over the crest, flattened out, and went into a forest. It was a forest of cork oaks, and the sun came through the trees in patches, and there were cattle grazing back in the trees. We went through the forest and the road came out and turned along a rise of land, and out ahead of us was a rolling green plain, with dark mountains beyond it. These were not like the brown, heat-baked mountains we had left behind. These were wooded and there were clouds coming down from them. The green plain stretched off. It was cut by fences and the white of the road showed through the trunks of a double line of trees that crossed the plain toward the north. As we came to the edge of the rise we saw the red roofs and white houses of Burguete ahead strung out on the plain, and away off on the shoulder of the first dark mountain was the gray metal-sheathed roof of the monastery of Roncesvalles.
"There's Roncevaux," I said.
"Where?"
"Way off there where the mountain starts."
"It's cold up here," Bill said.
"It's high," I said. "It must be twelve hundred metres."
"It's awful cold," Bill said.
The bus levelled down onto the straight line of road that ran to Burguete. We passed a crossroads and crossed a bridge over a stream. The houses of Burguete were along both sides of the road. There were no side-streets. We passed the church and the schoolyard, and the bus stopped. We got down and the driver handed down our bags and the rod-case. A carabineer in his cocked hat and yellow leather cross-straps came up.
"What's in there?" he pointed to the rod-case.
I opened it and showed him. He asked to see our fishing permits and I got them out. He looked at the date and then waved us on.
"Is that all right?" I asked.
"Yes. Of course."
We went up the street, past the whitewashed stone houses, families sitting in their doorways watching us, to the inn.
The fat woman who ran the inn came out from the kitchen and shook hands with us. She took off her spectacles, wiped them, and put them on again. It was cold in the inn and the wind was starting to blow outside. The woman sent a girl up-stairs with us to show the room. There were two beds, a washstand, a clothes-chest, and a big, framed steel-engraving of Nuestra Se