II

Francehappens to be rich in fine relics of Roman bridge-building. Among her antique monuments there are remains of three aqueducts, at Fréjus and Lyon and Luynes; and every pontist has seen photographs of the aqueduct at Lambèse, in the department of Constantine, Algeria. At Vaison, in Vaucluse, over the river Ouvèze, we find an important Roman bridge, built on two rocks, with a single arch not less than thirty metres in span; and along one embankment is a range of tall and narrow arches that start out from the abutment of the bridge. The Pont de Vaison is not in all respects representative of the best Roman work, for its voussoirs, instead of being rimmed and extra-dossed, are fitted into the spandrils (p.282). I do not know the date of this bridge, but Vaison descends from a famous Roman town, Vasio by name, mentioned by Mela (ii.5) as one of the richest towns of the Narbonensis.

It is common knowledge—or it should be—that the Romans adorned some of their bridges with a triumphal arch; and it happens, by rare good fortune, that France owns a small example of this Roman pride. It is the Pont Flavien at Saint-Chamas, which in a single arch, forty-two feet wide, spans the rocky bed of the Touloubre. At eachentrance there is a triumphal arch seven metres high, flanked at each side by two Corinthian pilasters, upon the summit of which the entablature rests. There is a stone lion at each extremity of the entablature; it stands rampant and looks out into the open country, as if to symbolise for ever the wakeful power of Roman thoroughness. Only one of the four lions belongs to Roman workmanship; the others are much younger, and their proportions are bigger. This bridge, again, which I believe to be unique, bears an inscription, from which we learn that it was founded by a certain L. Donnius Flavus, a flamen of Rome and of Augustus. But the name Augustus was a title of veneration given by custom to all the Cæsars, so that Donnius Flavus and his bridge have uncertain dates.

And now we will take a devious walk along some Roman roads through Gard-Hérault, to see what we shall find in the way of antique bridges. From north-east to south-west the region is crossed by the Via Domitiana, which runs from Lyons to the Pyrenees, going over the Rhône at Arles, and passing by Nîmes, Pont Ambroise, Substantion, Saint-Thibéry, Béziers, and Narbonne. At Pont Ambroise the river Vidourle is partly spanned by the ruins of a very picturesque Roman bridge, but its points of interest belong to an earlier chapter (p.82). Near Castelnau, or Substantion, the Via Domitiana crossed the river Lez by a bridge now wholly destroyed; its abutments can be seen when the water is low, but they add nothing to our knowledge of Roman masonry. In mediæval times this bridge was calledthe Pont Lairou, Lero being the Latin name of the river Lez.

Not far from Saint-Thibéry the Via passed over the Hérault at that point where, in the seventeenth century (about the year 1678), the river was split into halves by a great flood, which formed the Île des Bénédictins; the Roman bridge is on the western branch of this divided river. Four arches exist, but originally there were nine, with spans ranging from ten to twelve metres. The piers have cutwaters both upstream and downstream, with circular bays nearly two metres high for the relief of spate water. The facing stones are long, and the filling is local volcanic rubble. This bridge was wrecked by a flood before the year 1536.

The Via Domitiana was carried over the Orb, and then, following the ancient road of Colombiers, it crossed the Capestang by a Roman viaduct called the Pons Selmis or Pontserme, which in 1430 was repaired with 500 quarters of stone 2½ pans long by 1¼ pans thick and wide. It was a tremendous viaduct, its length being 1500 metres; the width did not exceed three metres. In the sixteenth century it fell in for want of repair. At the present time only an isolated arch remains, with fragments of two others. In a document ofA.D.782 this bridge is called Pons Septimus.

Another Roman road left Nîmes in the direction of Larzac, and near Lodève apparently it joined the ancient road from Saint-Thibéry to Millau; at Sommières it crossedthe Vidourle by a magnificent Roman bridge which had no fewer than seventeen arches. To-day only eight arches are visible, the others having been buried under a great accumulation of soil on both banks.[69]Yet the Pont de Sommières, though deprived of nine arches, has a high place among the Roman monuments.

I have now to mention a Roman byway that branched out from the main road on the right bank of the Vidourle, at a little distance from Sommières; it ran toward Substantion, passing by Castries and joining the Via Domitiana near Vendargues. At Boisseron it crossed the river Bénovie, a small tributary of the Vidourle, by a bridge which to-day is extant, though disfigured by modern work. It has a shelving parapet and road, but we cannot describe it as a gabled bridge (p.27). There are five arches of unequal size, the piers on the upstream side have cutwaters, and rectangular bays above the cutwaters ease the pressure of floods.

Frank Brangwyn has drawn for us the wreck of a Roman bridge over the Loire, at Brives-Charensac, in the neighbourhood of Puy; and the big arch, which springs from water-level, is particularly interesting because it has a double ring of voussoirs. The smaller arch belongs to the Middle Ages, for it has a pointed shape.

RUINS OF ROMAN BRIDGERUINS OF A ROMAN BRIDGE OVER THE LOIRE AT BRIVES-CHARENSAC, FRANCE

RUINS OF A ROMAN BRIDGE OVER THE LOIRE AT BRIVES-CHARENSAC, FRANCE

We pass on to Spain, which has been called the land of bridges and aqueducts. A pontist may live there for many years and be happy all the time. Even a hurried author, who visits the antiquity of Spain as a mere journalist, and who mimics vainly the travel books of Alexandre Dumas, finds that the many bridges put some thoroughness into his own work, acting as a drag on the far-sought and dear-bought liveliness with which the million may be charmed. There is the case of S. R. Crockett, who was commissioned to be lively and daring among the Spaniards, so he published in 1903 “The Adventurer in Spain,” a poor copy both of Borrow and of Dumas. “I would like to writea book—copiously illustrated—upon Spanish bridges alone,” he told his readers in a moment of zeal, adding briskly, “that is, if I thought anybody could be found to buy it.” In one passage thought and enthusiasm very nearly broke loose from the discipline of “a popularstyle”:—

“Many bridges, too, there were—wonderful in a country where, as in Spain, there are neither roads to travel upon nor waters to cross—nor even, it may be added, travellers to cross them. Yet in our first hour we had passed, we five apprentice Carlists, at least as many admirable bridges—clean-shaped, practical, suited to the place and to the landscape as a becoming dress fits a pretty woman. This is a rare thing in bridges, and one which is almost never to be found in new countries, where a bridge is invariably an outrage upon the surrounding scenery. Queer bridges we found—triangular bridges, unnecessary bridges, of wood and stone and straw and stubble—but never ugly bridges.”

Mr. Crockett did not understand the rivers of Spain, many of which after a storm leap from their dry beds into raging torrents, and give rough-and-tumble lessons to bridge-builders. From Roman times to our own, these freakish waterways have inspired noble work, that cannot well be rated at too high a level. At Mérida alone a pontist can dream over the past for several months, not only studying the remains of three Roman aqueducts, upon which storks hold their parliaments, but making friends with two Roman bridges, one of which puts the Roman genius inscale with the Guadiana. It is a huge structure, not less than 780 metres in length, with sixty-four arches of granite. Books of reference mention eighty-one arches, but this number includes the relief bays for floods tunnelled through the piers above the cutwaters. Some writers believe that the greater bridge at Mérida was built under Trajan, while others give it to Augustus, who founded Mérida as a home of rest for the veteran soldiers of his last campaign. In 686 the Visigoths restored this bridge; in 1610 it was repaired by PhilipIII; in 1812, during the siege of Badajoz, seventeen of the arches were wrecked in order to close the river. At the northern end we find a Roman castle, now in ruins, so we are able to study a battle-bridge dating from those times when Rome turned wars into colonies.

The Roman bridges of Spain may be divided into fiveclasses:—

1. Those which are low and many-arched, as at Mérida and Salamanca.

2. Those which have two or three arches with shelving parapets and roads, as at Alcantarilla[70]and also near Villa delRio;[71]

3. One or two with a single arch, as at Ronda;

4. Several in which Roman and Moorish masonry are combined, as at Córdova; and

5. There is one Roman bridge so lofty that its parapet is separated from the river-bed by a distance of more than fifty-nine metres. I refer to the famous Puente Trajan over “the melancholy Tagus” at Alcántara. This herculean masterpiece has six arches, his length is a hundred and eighty-eight metres, and the roadway is eight metres wide and quite level. A triumphal archway thirteen metres high stands in the middle, but I regard its Roman origin as doubtful, as the design is not quite in scale with the majesty of the bridge.

Who can say how many writers have tried to describe the Puente Trajan? No description can summon up before the mind an image of his marvellous power and nobility, for these qualities produce a feeling of awe and take from us the wish to write. That he came from an architect and was put together by common masons, huge stone after huge stone, is a fact very hard to believe, as only two things in this bridge mark the littleness of man: one is the archway, that fails to triumph with a Roman spirit, and the other is an arch of modern workmanship. Everything else recalls to my mind a good saying that fell from Marshal Ney whenhe noticed in the aqueduct of Segovia the startling difference between the craft of modern masons and the ancient Roman art in thorough construction. In the fifteenth century some vaults of the Segovian aqueduct were destroyed by wars, and Isabella the Catholic had them rebuilt in the most careful manner. Yet the work was not careful enough, for in less than three hundred years the reconstruction had to be renewed, while the Roman art remained youthful and immovable. In 1808 Marshal Ney was greatly impressed by these facts, and, pointing to the first arch of the modern portion, he said:“C’est ici que commence le travail des hommes.”Even the people of Segovia feel that their soaring aqueduct has in it something far beyond their reach, something grand enough to be called superhuman. Custom has deadened their admiration, of course, has enabled them even to build silly little houses amid the shadows thrown by their antique monument; but yet they doubt the human origin of such perfect masonry and give it to the Evil One, who comforts himself with a tremendous deed of architecture whenever he is greatly bored by the feeble gullibility of mankind.

AQUEDUCT AT SEGOVIATHE ROMAN AQUEDUCT AT SEGOVIA IN SPAIN, WITH MODERN HOUSES CLUSTERED AROUND ITS BASE

THE ROMAN AQUEDUCT AT SEGOVIA IN SPAIN, WITH MODERN HOUSES CLUSTERED AROUND ITS BASE

Nothing is more difficult than to express in words this unhuman character of the best Roman bridges, which reveal eternal manhood and courage in the work done by the men of a day. For instance, here is the Alcántara over the rocky gorge of the Tagus. He was erected for Trajan by Caius Julius Lacer; and we know that Lacer was buried quite close to his bridge, and that his tomb remains on the leftbank. These facts are trite and tame, but when we turn from them to the supreme bridge we pass from bald history into a creation that seems miraculous.

“It is long before the eye can learn to grasp his[72]full dimensions; all around him is rock and mountain, there is nothing to give scale. We are warned of this ... by the camera, for the lens will not look at so wide an angle.... Presently, as we peer over the parapet into the depths of the gulf below us, we realise that there is a man down there walking by the waterside, with a dog that seems to bark though we cannot hear the sound. Slowly our eyes measure the voussoir above which we are standing; it is a twelve-ton block of granite; and the huge vault with its eighty such voussoirs seems to widen and deepen beneath us as we gaze; for the brook that it spans is the river Tagus, whose waters have their source three hundred miles away.“Thus hint by hint we have pieced together the astonishing conclusion that the span of each of the two great central arches is rather wider ... than the interior of the dome ofSt.Paul’s; and that the height of the railway lines above the Firth of Forth is twenty feet less than that of the road above the Tagus! What must the scene be like in winter, when the waters are foaming against the springer stones one hundred and forty feet above their summer level! How vast the strength of these massive piers which for eighteen hundred years have defied the fury of the floods!“Where now is the greatVia Latathat ran from Gades to Rome? Where are the famous cities which it threaded on the way? The vine and olive grow in the forum of Italica, and the Miracles of Mérida are a dwelling for the stork. But here at the wildest point of all its wild journey our eyes may still behold a memorial which nature has assailed in vain:‘Pontem perpetui mansurum in sæcula mundi’;—the monument of Caius Julius Lacer, more enduring even thanWren’s.”[73]

“Thus hint by hint we have pieced together the astonishing conclusion that the span of each of the two great central arches is rather wider ... than the interior of the dome ofSt.Paul’s; and that the height of the railway lines above the Firth of Forth is twenty feet less than that of the road above the Tagus! What must the scene be like in winter, when the waters are foaming against the springer stones one hundred and forty feet above their summer level! How vast the strength of these massive piers which for eighteen hundred years have defied the fury of the floods!

“Where now is the greatVia Latathat ran from Gades to Rome? Where are the famous cities which it threaded on the way? The vine and olive grow in the forum of Italica, and the Miracles of Mérida are a dwelling for the stork. But here at the wildest point of all its wild journey our eyes may still behold a memorial which nature has assailed in vain:‘Pontem perpetui mansurum in sæcula mundi’;—the monument of Caius Julius Lacer, more enduring even thanWren’s.”[73]

Many persons believe that Wellington’s troops, in 1809, blew up one of the smaller arches, but this is untrue. The history of the ruined arch has been given by Larousse. It was cut on two occasions. In 1213 the Saracens destroyed it, and Charles the Fifth rebuilt it in 1543. Two hundred and sixty-five years passed, and then the French in 1808 were compelled by the policy of war to wreck the same arch, and I have already described how Wellington bridged the gap with a netting of ropes—a suspension bridge of ships’ cables—covered with planks (p.16). This temporary work was displaced by a wooden arch, which in 1818 was burnt down; and between this date and the Carlist wars no restoration seems to have been attempted. “The Spaniards were long content with a ferry,” says Mr. Wigram. But now they have renewed the arch “in its native granite, a feat of which they are justly proud. Only, seeing that no cement at all was used in the original building, it was really a little too bad of them toinsist upon pointingallthe joints!” True; but the workmen were modern, not Roman, and it was humility on their part to advertise their cement, their most evident strength.

BRIDGE AT ZARAGOZATHE BRIDGE AT ZARAGOZA, PARTLY ROMAN

THE BRIDGE AT ZARAGOZA, PARTLY ROMAN

The Moorish wordsAl KántarahmeanTHE BRIDGE, and we know that the Titanic masterpiece of Julius Lacer has but few rivals. Let us put it side by side with the most stately bridges at Isfahan in Persia, whose august charm is not so masculine (p.268); then we do honour to the finest pontine architecture in the world. The Alcántara is a King,a Cæsar, while the two Persian achievements are Amazon Queens.

Several bridges in Spain have the honorary title of being Roman, either because they exhibit a combination of Roman and Moorish masonry like the sixteen-arched example at Córdova, or because they may have in them some Roman workmanship, like the Puente de Piedra over the Ebro at Zaragoza, which has seven arches and six very massive piers, far too ungainly to be Roman. Indeed this bridge dates from 1437, but it was built on a classical site, and on Roman foundations. Some houses give interest to the upstream side of the piers, but their roofs do not rise above the level of the parapet.

As for the bridge over the Guadalquivir at Córdova, it is more Moorish than Roman, for most of the Roman arches were destroyed by the eighth century, and they were reconstructed by the Arabs, who established themselves at Córdova in 711. Recently this bridge has been so much repaired that it looks almost new. A big tower, very Moorish in style, the Calahorra, keeps guard at the end remote from the town; and the city entrance has a worn classic gateway and an elevated statue of Saint Raphael, the patron saint of Córdova.

BRIDGE AT CÓRDOVATHE HUGE DEFENSIVE BRIDGE AT CÓRDOVA IN SPAIN. ORIGINALLY ROMAN, BUT REMODELLED BY THE MOORS IN THE NINTH CENTURY, RECENTLY SO MUCH REPAIRED THAT LOOKS ALMOST NEW

THE HUGE DEFENSIVE BRIDGE AT CÓRDOVA IN SPAIN. ORIGINALLY ROMAN, BUT REMODELLED BY THE MOORS IN THE NINTH CENTURY, RECENTLY SO MUCH REPAIRED THAT LOOKS ALMOST NEW

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