The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway [36]
We each had an aguardiente and paid forty centimes for the two drinks. I gave the woman fifty centimes to make a tip, and she gave me back the copper piece, thinking I had misunderstood the price.
Two of our Basques came in and insisted on buying a drink. So they bought a drink and then we bought a drink, and then they slapped us on the back and bought another drink. Then we bought, and then we all went out into the sunlight and the heat, and climbed back on top of the bus. There was plenty of room now for every one to sit on the seat, and the Basque who had been lying on the tin roof now sat between us. The woman who had been serving drinks came out wiping her hands on her apron and talked to somebody inside the bus. Then the driver came out swinging two flat leather mailpouches and climbed up, and everybody waving we started off.
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