Quotes
Translated from the Spanish by Encarnacion Alzpma 25-26 September 1958.
13 stops
- An old female servant that we had — an Amazon who defended her house against bandits and killed one of them with a thrust of a spear — assured me that she had seen her in her childhood passing in he distance over the kogon fields so nimble and so airy that she scarcely made the flexible leaves bend.
- They say also that at times she has deigned to come near them. Then she saluted ceremoniously, she passed by and disappeared under the shadows of the nearby trees.
- Her favorite time for a stroll, according to what they say, was after a storm; then she was seen walking through the fields and where she passed life, order, and calm were reborn. The trees straightened up again their stooped trunks; the rivers confined themselves in their beds and the traces of the unchained elements were erased.
- The masters in their turn looked at each other astonished without saying a word, questioning each other with their glance. They were surprised that those who were uttering those cries had walked so much in so short a time.
- Her vaporous silhouette no longer wanders through the deep valleys nor cruises the cascades in the calm moonlight nights.
- However, the behavior of the young man was quite mysterious, he spent his leisure time wandering the mountain, seated beside some torrent, at times speaking by himself or seemingly listening to strange voices.
- ”Go! Inasmuch as earthly love is necessary to you; inasmuch as you have had no courage either to face a hard lot to defend your liberty and make yourself independent in the bosome of these mountains; inasmuch as you have had no confidence in me, I who would have protected you and your parents, go; I deliver you to your fate, live, and struggle alone; live as you can.”
- Several times I have wandered through the slopes of Makiling and instead of devoting myself to killing the poor doves that tell their love on the high treetops, remembering Mariang Makiling, I have evoked her; I have listened attentively in the silence of the forest to perceive the harmonies of her melancholy instrument and I have stayed until nighttime to see if I could discern her ideal figure floating in the air half illuminated by a ray of moonlight that filtered through the dense foliage. I saw nothing, I heard nothing.
- Later I climbed until the very peak of the mountain (that famous ascent that the friars call filibustera, in spite of the fact that an officers and a solidier of the Civil Guard came with us, tourists,) and we saw delightful spots, enchanting places, worthy to be inhabited by gods and goddesses