Fields after sunset, from the Mirador de las Tres Huegas ridge
Martha Bridegam writes: This bit of description is really from Monflorite, where Orwell was invalided briefly in the spring with an infected hand:
"... Men in ragged blue shirts and black corduroy breeches, with broad - brimmed straw hats, were ploughing the fields behind teams of mules with rhythmically flopping ears. Their ploughs were wretched things, only stirring the soil, not cutting anything we should regard as a furrow. All the agricultural implements were pitifully antiquated, everything being governed by the expensiveness of metal. A broken ploughshare, for instance, was patched, and then patched again, till sometimes it was mainly patches. Rakes and pitchforks were made of wood. Spades, among a people who seldom possessed boots, were unknown; they did their digging with a clumsy hoe like those used in India. There was a kind of harrow that took one straight back to the later Stone Age. It was made of boards joined together, to about the size of a kitchen table; in the boards hundreds of holes were morticed, and into each hole was jammed a piece of flint which had been chipped into shape exactly as men used to chip them ten thousand years ago. I remember my feeling almost of horror when I first came upon one of these things in a derelict hut in no-man’s land. I had to puzzle over it for a long while before grasping that it was a harrow...."- Homage to Catalonia, Chapter 6
