What a beautiful place! Your friend and i are almost the same age. His plants look quite at home and show it by their prodigious growth. My climate is similar and is often compared with that of the Mediterranean. I love your pen name. It rang a bell that last rang in my school daze. Haha. Enjoy your day.
Stay stoneder.
...I seem to remember... that while I was one day in Alcalá de Toledo, a young man came to sell an old book, and some letters and papers to a ragman; and as I am very fond of reading, even if they are torn papers lying in the streets, and carried away by this natural inclination of mine, I took one of the letters that the young man was selling, and I saw it with characters that I knew to be Arabic charecters.
And since, although I knew them, I could not read them well, or whether it was Arabic or Aljamaic Castilian, I looked around to see if there was an aljamaic Moorish who could read them to me, and it was not very difficult to find such an interpreter; for even if I looked for a
translator of a language written in even older characters, I would found one...
Finally, as luck would have it, I found one who, having told him of my desire and placed the ramshackled book in his hands, he opened it at random in the middle and reading
a little of it, he began to laugh:
It was the "History of Don Quixote of La Mancha", written by Cide Hamete Benengeli, a wise Arabic-La Mancha's man and historian...
...I bought all the papers and letters from the boy for half a real; and I took the aljamaic Moorish to my house, where in little more than a month and a half, for two arrobas of sultanas' dry grapes and two bushels of wheat, he translated all the papers, which dealt with a certain Don Quixote, into the Castilian language without being aljamaic ...
Note:
"Aljamaic": "aljamiado": Spanish written with the Arabic alphabet (or Arabic written with the Latin-Castillian alphabet); person able to read/write aljamaic Spanish.
