The Courts of the Morning by John Buchan

Archie left Janet writing letters and started out next morning to explore the city. The first taste of a foreign town was always to him an intoxication, and, in the hot aromatic sunshine of that month which for Olifa is the sweet of the year, the place seemed a riot of coloured and exultant life. He descended the broad terraced road which by easy gradients led from the hotel to the twisted streets of the old city. Some of the calles were only narrow ravines of shade, where between high windowless walls country mule-carts struggled towards the marketplace. Others were unhappily provided with screeching electric tramways, so that the passerby on foot or on a horse had to mount high on the ill-paved sidewalk to avoid destruction. Presently he came into a hot marketplace, where around an old Spanish fountain were massed stalls laden with glowing flowers and fruit, and strange unwholesome fishes, and coarse pottery, and garish fabrics, and country-woven straw hats. Through this medley Archie limped happily, testing his Spanish on the vendors, or trying with most inadequate knowledge to disentangle the racial mixture. The town Oliferos were a small race, in which he thought there must be considerable negro blood, but the countryfolk were well-made and upstanding, often with a classic and melancholy dignity in their faces. There were lean, wild-looking people, too, whose speech was not any kind of Spanish, with an odd angle to their foreheads and the shyness of an animal in their small anxious eyes, who squatted in their dark ponchos beside their mules and spoke only to each other. An Indian breed, thought Archie -- perhaps from the foothills.

A maze of calles took him to the main Plaza, where a great baroque cathedral raised its sculptured front above a medley of beggars and vendors of holy medals. The square was shamefully paved, the facades of the old Spanish houses were often in disrepair, but the crumbling plaster and the blotched paint blended into something beautiful and haunting. Here it was very quiet, as if the city hushed itself in the environs of the house of God. To Archie it seemed that he was looking upon that ancient Olifa, before the hustling modern world was born, Olifa as it had appeared to the eyes of Captain Cook's sailors when they landed, a city which kept the manners and faith of sixteenth-century Spain. He entered the church, and found a vast, cavernous darkness like the inside of a mountain, candles twinkling like distant glowworms, echoes of muttered prayers and the heavy sweetness of incense. After it the Plaza seemed as bright as a mountain-top.