1) The narrator arrives in Pamplona, Spain with friends to watch the annual San Fermin festival and bullfights. 2) In the days leading up to the festival, workers prepare the town by erecting barricades and making repairs to the bullring. 3) On the morning of the festival launch, the narrator hears people singing in wine shops and attends a mass at the cathedral before meeting friends in the town square, where the first rocket is fired to announce the start of celebrations.

1. After a while we came out of the mountains, and there were trees along both sides of the road, and a stream and ripe
fields of grain, and the road went on, very white and straight ahead, and then lifted to a little rise, and off on the left
was a hill with an old castle, with buildings close around it and a field of grain going right up to the walls and shifting
in the wind. I was up in front with the driver and I turned around. Robert Cohn was asleep, but Bill looked and
nodded his head. Then we crossed a wide plain, and there was a big river off on the right shining in the sun from
between the line of trees, and away off you could see the plateau of Pamplona rising out of the plain, and the walls of
the city, and the great brown cathedral, and the broken skyline of the other churches. In back of the plateau were the
mountains, and every way you looked there were other mountains, and ahead the road stretched out white across the
plain going toward Pamplona.
We came intothe townonthe other side of the plateau, the roadslanting upsteeplyanddustilywithshade-trees
on both sides, and thenlevelling out throughthe new part of towntheyare buildingup outside the oldwalls. We
passed the bull-ring, highandwhite andconcrete-lookinginthe sun, andthen came into the bigsquare bya side
street andstopped infront ofthe Hotel Montoya.
We often talked about bulls and bull-fighters. I hadstoppedat the Montoya for several years. We never talked for
very long at a time. It wassimplythe pleasure of discovering what we each felt. Menwouldcome infrom distant
towns andbefore theyleft Pamplona stop and talkfor a few minutes withMontoya about bulls. These men were
aficionados. Those who were aficionados couldalways get rooms evenwhenthe hotel was full. Montoya
introduced me to some of them. Theywere always verypolite at first, andit amusedthem verymuchthat I should
be an American. Somehow it was takenfor grantedthat an Americancouldnot have aficion. He might simulate it or
confuse it with excitement, but he could not reallyhave it. Whentheysawthat I hadaficion, and there wasno
password, noset questions that couldbring it out, rather it was a sort of oral spiritualexamination withthe
questions always a little onthe defensive and never apparent, there was this same embarrassedputting the hand
on the shoulder, or a "Buen hombre." But nearlyalways there was the actual touching. It seemedas thoughthey
wantedto touch you to make it certain.
The next two days in Pamplona were quiet, andthere were nomore rows. The townwas getting readyfor the
fiesta. Workmenput up the gate-posts that were to shut offthe side streets whenthe bulls were releasedfrom the
corrals andcame running through the streets in the morningon their wayto the ring. The workmendug holes and
fitted in the timbers, each timber numberedfor its regular place. Out onthe plateaubeyondthe townemployees of
the bull-ring exercised picador horses, galloping themstiff-leggedonthe hard, sun-bakedfields behind the bull-ring.
The big gate ofthe bull-ring was open, andinside the amphitheatre was being swept. The ring wasrolledand
sprinkled, andcarpenters replacedweakenedor crackedplanks in the barrera. Standing at the edge of the smooth
rolledsandyou couldlook upinthe emptystands and see oldwomen sweeping out the boxes.
Now on the day of the starting of the fiesta of San Fermin they had been in the wine-shops of thenarrow streets of the
town since early morning. Going down the streets in the morning on the way to mass in the cathedral, I heard them
singing through the open doors of the shops. They were warming up. There were many people at the eleven o'clock
mass. San Fermin is also a religious festival.
I walked down the hill from the cathedral and up the street to the café on the square. It was a little before noon.
Robert Cohn and Bill were sitting at one of the tables. The marble-topped tables and the white wicker chairs were
gone. They were replaced by cast-iron tables and severe folding chairs. The café was like a battleship stripped for
action. Today the waiters did not leave you alone all morning to read without asking if you wanted to order
something. A waiter came up as soon as I sat down.
"What are you drinking?" I asked Bill and Robert.
"Sherry," Cohn said.
"Jerez," I said to the waiter.
Before thewaiter brought thesherry the rocket that announced the fiesta went up in the square. It burst and there was
a gray ball of smoke high up above the Theatre Gayarre, across on the other side of the plaza. The ball of smoke hung
in the sky like a shrapnel burst, and as I watched, another rocket came up to it, trickling smoke in the bright sunlight.
I saw the bright flash as it burst and another little cloud of smoke appeared. By the time the second rocket had burst
there were so many people in the arcade, that had been empty a minute before, that the waiter, holding the bottle high
up over his head, could hardly get through the crowd to our table. People were coming into the square from all sides,
and down the street we heard the pipes and the fifes and the drums coming. They were playing the _riau-riau_ music,
the pipes shrill and the drums pounding, and behind them came the men and boys dancing. When the fifers stopped
they all crouched down in the street, and when the reedpipes and the fifes shrilled, and the flat, dry, hollow drums
tapped it out again, they all went up in the air dancing. In the crowd you saw only the heads and shoulders of the
dancers going up and down.

2. In the square a man, bent over, was playingon a reed-pipe, and a crowdof childrenwere following him shouting,
and pulling at his clothes. He came out of the square, the childrenfollowinghim, and pipedthem past the café and
down a side street. We sawhis blank pockmarked face as he went by, piping, the children close behindhim
shoutingandpulling at him.