Journey to Portugal by José Saramago

The traveller wakes up the next day and opens his bedroom window. He wants to be able to enjoy the freshness of the trees round the Mouchao, its tall poplars and green-and-white birches. Whoever transformed the sandbank that this was in the last century into this cool oasis also deserves a medal. As you can see, the traveller is in a mood to recompense everyone he thinks deserves it.

The monastery is at the top end of town, and must be visited. But the traveller devotes his first attention of the day to a close exmination of the water wheel that is so near at hand that passers-by usually ignore it, perhaps thinking it is merely decorative or is simply some children's plaything that has been set to one side. Yet as a piece of carpentry, it is one of the finest machines the traveller has seen. It is known as the "Moors' wheel", as is common in Portugal when we don't have any other explanation for something, but in fact experts say it dates from Roman times. The traveller does not know exactly when it was built, but finds it hard to credit that it has been a wheel since the fourth or fifth century. Far more important than determining whether it is Moorish or late Roman seems to him to be when it stopped functioning, and all the art and science of its use.