ABSTRACT
And yet…and yet…what had originally enthralled us, from our first day here, had been the discovery where the juggernaut of time had creaked almost to a halt. Except for the arrival of television, the twentieth century had not yet made its way up the hill. It was Dalmácija’s immutability which had made it precious to us, and to those of our friends who had visited it. But that immutability was now crumbling. Moreover its erosion had coincided with our presence here. Was that a coincidence, or were we in some way responsible for what was happening? Perhaps our arrival here, like that of the conquistadors in the Caribbean or of Cook in the Pacific, had tainted the very culture we admired. The fatal impact. (The Bottlebrush Tree. A Village in Andalusia, Hugh Seymour Davis 1996: 283)
