Who have come to
see you, brother? Have they not been such as Paco and his wife,
wretches without a house, or, at best, one filled with cold and
poverty; so that you have had to stay at a mesuna, at a posada of
the Busne; and, moreover, what have the Cales given you since you
have been residing here? Nothing, I trow, better than this
rubbish, which is all I can offer you, this Meligrana de los
Bengues.'
Here he produced a pomegranate from the pocket of his zamarra, and
flung it on the table with such force that the fruit burst, and the
red grains were scattered on the floor.
The Gitanos of Estremadura call themselves in general Chai or
Chabos, and say that their original country was Chal or Egypt. I
frequently asked them what reason they could assign for calling
themselves Egyptians, and whether they could remember the names of
any places in their supposed fatherland; but I soon found that,
like their brethren in other parts of the world, they were unable
to give any rational account of themselves, and preserved no
recollection of the places where their forefathers had wandered;
their language, however, to a considerable extent, solved the
riddle, the bulk of which being Hindui, pointed out India as the
birthplace of their race, whilst the number of Persian, Sclavonian,
and modern Greek words with which it is checkered, spoke plainly as
to the countries through which these singular people had wandered
before they arrived in Spain.
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