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philosophical conceptions are full of synonyms for this loftiness of spirit, and slushy devotees of the culture are only too anxious to translate them— alma , for instance, which means more than merely soul, but is something almost anatomically detectable, or casticismo , which is more than just purism, but has come to stand for the very quality of Spanishness, the elusive but always pungent substance that floats around you the moment you cross the Spanish frontier.
    And this exalting influence of Spain is catching, and makes the visitor, too, feel his alma swelling, rather like the mumps. Nothing expresses the mescalin quality of this country better than the bull-fight, that lurid and often tawdry gladiatorial ritual, which generally repels the northerner in the theory, but often makes his blood race in the act. All kinds of unexpected instincts are revived by this Spanish spectacle. The trumpet sounds; the gate falls open; the bull storms stocky, puzzled, and filming into the arena; instantly the foreigner, overwhelmed by the glare, the colour, the mass emotion, the pageantry, and the heat of the moment, feels himself to be in some barbaric dissecting room, where all that is worst about Man is exposed to heartless floodlights. It is not at all a pleasant spectacle—not a sport at all. Blood runs, men are often wounded, poor padded blindfold horses are gored, the bull inevitably dies and is dragged out for beef. The crowd all around, that Greek chorus of the bull-ring, with its little cigars clenched between its teeth, its cardboard sun-visors on its foreheads, its one-peseta cushions plumped beneath its bottoms on the hard seats—the crowd all around seems animated, to the foreign eye,chiefly by a brutish lust for blood. ‘I would not have been displeased,’ wrote Nelson to his wife after watching a bull-fight, ‘to have seen the spectators tossed.’
    And yet, such is the contagion of Spain, if you sit it out for long enough you will probably succumb yourself to the savage magic of the corrida . As its ghastly parade continues, circus tinsel beside high tragedy, as death succeeds death and blood blood, as the young gods are cheered around the arena or hissed out of sight, as the silent old horses topple in and the tossing caparisoned mules drag the carcases out—as the band thumps away at its music and the evening shadow creeps across the ring, so you will feel yourself, hour by hour, fight by fight, half united with the fierce multitude at your side. The nobility of death, so the experts assure us, is the point of the bull-fight—the ultimate Moment of Truth that comes, in the end, to us all; and before very long you too may feel that, through the blood lust and the intolerance, something of grandeur emerges. If you are unlucky, your corrida will be one long inept butchery, odious to watch; but if you have chosen well you may see a kill by one of the masters, short, calm, elegant, almost sacerdotal. The beast, after one clean, almost imperceptible sword-thrust, sinks slowly to its knees. The matador, as proud and kind as any victorious Marquis reaches out a gentle hand, in a movement infinitely graceful and brotherly, to touch his dying adversary between the horns. It is a sentimental moment perhaps, possibly deceitful, certainly theatrical; but as that garlic crowd greets the gesture with a long deep sigh of admiration, so you may respond yourself to some inner pasodoble , and feel the old Spaniard stir in you.
    All this adds up to the specialness of Spain, but in some ways it is illusory. If you drive down to the Ebro from Pamplona, and turn eastward along the river, presently you will reach the island that Sancho Panza governed. It is not an island at all, as any local will hasten to tell you; but it is the original, so tradition tells us, of the Isle Barataria, which Sancho ruled with such sturdy success through nine chapters of Don Quixote . Here occurred the ultimate illusion of