Читать книгу In Quest of El Dorado онлайн
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You enter Spain through glass doors and see written up "Silence." You open your guidebook and find you are looking at Exhibit A. I have been told that Spain is like Russia, but there is this difference. Belief in Russia will survive the decease of Russia by at least five hundred years. Something is coming out of Russia: yes, but out of Spain—?
No one goes to Spain to see the future. Many go there to see the past, sticking out as it were through the present. And so with me—to make a sentimental journey and trail an idea geographically across the world. I should like to see Columbus again, see him in the midst of the courtiers and mocked by them, and see upon him the smile or frown of Ferdinand and Isabella. My eyes would like to feast on the cloth of gold of the grandees of Spain—go back four centuries and yet be in to-day, and see as it were in a vision the gold of Old Spain and the gold of the Indies, the beautiful bright gold that may be sacrificed but must never be worshiped.