Free Tomb in Seville by Norman Lewis

own creation designed to camouflage the staleness of the accompanying biscuit. A few more trams had appeared and we took one on which a line of evenly spaced bullet holes remained along a bench on which passengers would once have been seated. The latest plague was an invasion by starving, semi-wild dogs, and one had just been destroyed by a guard at the entrance to the Cuatro Caminos station. Here we had hoped for seats on a train to take us at least halfway on our journey to Camillas. We were advised by the stationmaster to return next day when it was hoped that an armed guard would be found to accompany us on the journey. We asked him who would provide the guard—the Gobernación, or the People’s Militia—and he replied that he hadn’t the faintest idea. Then, by the greatest of good luck, he remembered that a hearse would be calling to leave a coffin at the station, and the driver, when it arrived, was happy to give us a lift for a few miles on our way.
    Thereafter we were free of the city and on the open road lined with small villages in the process of becoming suburbs. They seemed to us to have retained a certain oriental flavour with the small windows of their houses deeply set in whitewashed walls and their robust chimneys—also whitewashed—projecting from flat roofs. To me it looked like Agadir, in South Morocco—particularly where goats were to be seen tethered on a roof. For me this was Islam.
    These people, said our driver, were the owners of a single cow, or even more often a single goat. There was an old law—called by the Spanish a fuera (meaning privilege)—by which the peasantry in some village communes were allowed to buy a quarter of a square mile of land from its feudal owner for an exceedingly low price. To qualify for this the peasant had to throw a lead ball, weighing ten kilograms, five metres.
    Travelling wizards visited these villages to deal with a variety of sicknesses, most reported as having a sexual origin. Other specialist healers paid regular calls to treat sore feet, eye troubles, and depression in general, and sometimes to save time and expenses the various healers travelled together in bands. Although primitive—as they admitted even to themselves—these communities lived, on the whole, satisfactory lives. All their recent problems were blamed on the present right-wing government which had allowed speculators to double prices, thus compelling these simple country folk to learn what communism was all about. Political agents from Camillas appeared on the scene to tell them that their first step was to fly the red flag on their roofs. This they did and the next day the Assault Guards arrived in an armoured car and shot the roof off wherever a red flag was to be seen.
    We arrived in Camillas in the early afternoon. What was remarkable about this small town was that back at the end of the nineteenth century the leading citizen was a villain who carried out a massive fraud by which most of its inhabitants were ruined. After this he escaped to Holland where he started a religious sect known as The Unseen Power. This was to become the most influential of many such movements in the Low Countries. Returning to Camillas some years later, he put things right with all his victims and left a memory of his presence in the shape of a nativity play. This, despite the disapproval of the Holy Church, continued to attract immense local audiences, and even foreign pilgrims, until its final suppression.
    Our arrival coincided with the day when the long-awaited advance of the ‘Red Army’ was to take place. The critics were already murmuring that this had been too long delayed. A revolutionary citizens’ army, bolstered so strongly as it had been by enthusiasm and ideals, might only four days earlier have routed an uninspired opposition. The loss of the four days had given the Government the time it needed to ready itself for action, but nevertheless, Camillas with its flower bombardments, parading