Spain (2008)
“Near Valencia there stands a town called Elche. It is indeed half African in temper. Around it there straggles the biggest palm grove in Europe, a phenomenon whose dates are not of the best quality, but whose palm fronds, weirdly tied together in bunches on the tree, and thus whitened through lack of sap, are in demand all over Spain because of their well-known powers of protection against lightning. Elche is a low, squarebuilt, flat-roofed, whitewashed, unprepossessing place; but in the shade ...of its palm forest in 1897, they dug up one of the most celebrated busts in the world, La Dama de Elche—the Lady of Elche, carved by an unknown artist at least twenty-five centuries ago, and now, on her plinth in the Prado Museum in Madrid, looking more castiza than ever.
She is a formidable dame: a broad-shouldered, rosy, heavily built woman, slung about with amulets, with an elaborate cartwheel head-dress and a general air of no-nonsense, as though she is about to tell a recalcitrant nephew to pull himself together, or ask some wilting cousin where on earth she bought that frightful dress.MoreLess
She is a formidable dame: a broad-shouldered, rosy, heavily built woman, slung about with amulets, with an elaborate cartwheel head-dress and a general air of no-nonsense, as though she is about to tell a recalcitrant nephew to pull himself together, or ask some wilting cousin where on earth she bought that frightful dress.MoreLess
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