GARLIC VENDER.GARLIC VENDER.
To me the best part of Malaga was the view of it from the deck of a Segovia steamer, on the eve of a cruise along the coast. Behind the plain sandy-colored houses rose a background of mountains fantastic in outline as flames; the cathedral, in no way striking, towered up above the roofs, and was in turn overshadowed by an ancient fortress on the eastern height, which was one of the last to fall before the returning tide of Spanish arms, and still claws the precipitous ridge with innumerable towers and bastions, as if to keep from slipping off its honorable eminence in the drowsy lapses of old age. Below this, close to the water, stood the inevitable Plaza de Toros—an immense cheese-shaped structure of stone, where a friend of mine, Spanish by birth, tells me he was once watching the game of bulls, when part of the crowd were struck by the happy thought of starting a revolution. They acted at once on this bright idea; they "pronounced" in favor of something, and attacked the military guard. In an instant a battle had begun; the place resounded with musketry, and the populace tore away pieces of the masonry to hurl at the troops below. But that was in the good old days, and such things do not happen now, though there is always a strong detachment of soldiers on hand at the arena, ready for any sudden revival of these freaks. The water around usshone with a lustre like satin; and, fluttering over the bright green surface, played incredibly vivid reflections of blue and red from the steamers; while the pure white light, striking back from the edges of the undulations, quivered and shimmered along the black hulk of a vessel, and looked like steam or mist in constant motion.
Highly effective, too, was the carbineer (all custom-house officers in Spain, whether armed or not, are calledcarabineros) who stood on deck with a musket at rest, a living monument to the majesty of the revenue laws. We had been solemnly warned beforehand of the risk we ran in carrying a basket of ale on board in the face of this functionary, and the importance of giving him apeseta(twenty cents) had been urged upon us; but we at first looked for him in vain, and when we found him he appeared so harmless that we kept thepeseta. I noticed that he laid his gun aside as much as possible. Part of the time he smoked a short pipe under cover of his huge mustache, and eyed people sternly, as if suspecting that they might take advantage of this temporary relaxing of vigilance; but he studiously avoided seeing any merchandise of any description.
The steamer was to start at four in the afternoon, and we made great haste to get on board in time; but there had evidently never been the smallest intention of despatching her until an hour and a half later. This was in accord with the national trait of distrust. No one was expected to believe the announcement as to the time, and if the real hour had been named, no onewouldhave believed it. Aware of this, the more experienced natives did not even begin to come aboard until toward five o'clock. Spanish clocks are the most accommodating kind of mechanism I have ever had the fortune to encounter. They appear to exist rather as an ornamental feature than as articles of use. You order a carriage, and it is promised at a certain time; you are told that something is to be accomplished at a fixed hour; but this is only done out of deference to your outlandish prejudices. The hour strikes, and the thing is not done. You begin to doubt whether the hour itself has arrived. Is it not a vulgar illusion to suppose so? Your Spaniard certainly thinks it is. He knows that time is an arbitrary distinction, and prefers to adopt the scale of eternity. The one exception is the bull-fight. That is recognized as a purely mundane and temporal institution; it must not be delayed a moment; and to make sure of punctuality, it is begun almost before the time announced. But anything like a sea-voyage, though it be only along the shore, comes under a different heading, and must be undertaken with as muchmystery and caution as if it were a conspiracy to erect a new government.
To tell the truth, we were glad to get away from the tyranny of the minute-hand, and were not displeased at the lazy freedom of the steamer. The stewards came up and shut the skylights, spread a table-cloth over them, laid plates, and formed a hollow square of fruits and olives in the centre. Those of the passengers that listed took their places at this improvised banqueting board, and by the time thepucherowas served—a savory stew composed of chopped meat, beans, carrots, spices, and any little thing the cook's fancy may suggest—we were moving out of the basin, past the curved mole and the light-house, and toy battery at its end. The sunset had thrown its glow over sky and mountains, as if it were an after-thought, to make the surroundings perfect. We glided smoothly over a floor of blue—deep, solid-looking, and veined with white—a pale golden dome above us, and a delicious wind playing round us, like the exhalation of some balmy sub-tropical dream. On these coast steamers one buys a ticket for the transport, and then pays for what he eats. This rule reduced the company at our deck table to a choice and pleasant circle, the head of which was Señor Segovia, one of the owners of the line, a benignant, comfortable Spaniard—"an Andalusian to the core," as he proudly said. We had, as usual, early chocolate at six or seven; breakfast not so near eleven as to admit any suspicion of subserviency to the base time-keeping clock; and dinner—a second but ampler breakfast—between five and six. Some of the first-cabin passengers brought their own provision, or purchased it at the towns where we touched every day, and fed secretly in out-of-the-way places. As for the second-class, consisting mainly of peasants swathed in strange garments edged and spotted with fantastic color, they were never seen to eat; but I think that privately they gnawed the pride of ancient race in their hearts, and found it sufficient provender. We would come upon them, when we went forward in our night patrol, lying on the deck in magnificent unconcern, enveloped by stately rags wound round and round their bodies, and lifting toward us a stern, reproachful gaze at our interruption of their tranquillity.
The Mediterranean was calm as a pond, and we roused ourselves to a serene morning, under which the hills gleamed pale and clear along the margin of the waves, the huge sides seamed with dry water-courses, like the creases in a human palm. Beyond the first line of peaks we could descry for a while the soft ghostly whiteness of an inland snow range glimmering above the faded green, the violet shadows, the hardstreaks of white and powderings of red earth in the lower series. No sign of life was seen upon the puckered, savage coast. It was the bulwark of that Tarshish to which Solomon sent his ships for gold; new to us as it was new to him, yet now unutterably old; silent, yet speaking; uncommunicative, yet vaguely predicting a future vast and unknown as the vanished ages. It would be hard to tell how awful in its unchanged grandeur was the face of those mighty hills, so unexpectedly eloquent.
DIVING FOR COPPERS.DIVING FOR COPPERS.
It was a relief to find that we were approaching Almeria. A road cut in the rock; a stout arched bridge carrying it over an indentation of the sea; a small square edifice on a rock to guard the road; then the distant jumble of low houses along a sheltered bay, and an empty fortress on the sharp hillcrest over it—these were the tokens of our progress toward another inhabited spot. We had on board a two-legged enigma in a white helmet-hat, who wrote with ostentatious industry in a note-book, played fluently on the cabin piano, and now emerged upon the quarterdeck in a pair of bulging canary leather slippers which gave his feet the appearance of overgrown lemons. He afterward proved to be an English colporteur. We also had a handsome, gay, talkative, and witty Frenchman, who, with a morbid conscientiousness as to what was fitting, insisted on being sea-sick, although the sea was hardly ruffled; and him we succeeded in resuscitating, after the boat had come quietly to anchor in the harbor, so far that he began to long audibly for Paris and the café on the boulevard, "et mon absinthe." We watched with these companions thenaked boys who surrounded the vessel in a flotilla of row-boats, offering to dive for coppers thrown into the water, precisely as I have seen young Mexican Indians do at Acapulco. Near by lay another steamer just in from Africa, disembarking a mass of returned Spanish settlers, fugitives from the atrocities of the Arabs at Oran: a pathetic sight as they dropped silently into the barges that bore them to shore—some utterly destitute, with only the clothes in which they had fled before the fanatic murderers, and others accompanied by a few meagre household goods. Did they feel that "irremediable nostalgia," I wonder, of which Señor Castelar speaks? The sun was as hot as that which had shone upon them just across the strait, on the edge of the Dark Continent; and the low-roofed glaring houses huddled at the feet of the Moorish stronghold, the Alcasaba, were so Oriental that I should think they must have found it hard to believe they had left Africa at all.
Almeria, like other towns of this southern shore-line, is more Eastern than Spanish in appearance—only the long winding or zigzag covered ways, traced on the steep hills like swollen veins, indicated the presence of the lead-mines which give it an existence in commerce. These conduct the poisonous smoke to a point above the air inhaled by the townsfolk, and it is seen puffing from tall chimneys at the crest of the steep, as if the mountain were alive and gasping for breath. The town, faintly relieved against its pale, dusty background as we first saw it, almost disappeared in the blinding blaze of light that swept it when we got closer. We landed, and attempted to walk, but the dry, burning heat made us shrink for shelter into any narrow thread of shadow that the houses presented. Even the shadows looked whitish. It was impossible to get as far as the weed-grown cathedral, which, as we could see from the water, had been provided in former times with fortified turrets for defence against piratical incursions. So we sunk gratefully into a restaurant kiosk at the head of thealameda, where we could look down the hot, yellow street to a square of cerulean sea; and there we sipped lemonade while tattered, crimson-sashed peasants moved about us, some of them occasionally dashing the road with water dipped from a gutter-rivulet at the side. We had barely become reconciled to the Granadan women in trousers, when we were obliged to notice that the men in this vicinity wore short white skirts in place of the usual nether garment. How is Spain ever to be unified on such a basis as this? The local patriots had seemingly wrestled with the problem and been defeated, for a dreary memorial column in front of the kiosk recorded how they had fallen in some futile revolutionary struggle.
On a promontory, passed as we sailed away, the drought and dust of the town yielded suddenly to luxurious greenness of sugar-cane and other growths. Almeria was once surrounded by similar fertility, but the land has been so wastefully denuded of forest that all through this region—the old kingdoms of Murcia and Valencia—only certain favorable spots retain their earlier plenty by means of constant care and assiduous watering. Cartagena, one of the chief naval stations of the country, cannot exhibit even such an oasis. It is unmitigated desert. Not a tree or shrub shows itself amid the baked and calcined stone-work and blistering pavements of the city; and the landscape without looks almost as arid. The place is considered impregnable to a foreign foe, and I can't imagine that foe wanting it to be otherwise, if conquest involves residence. Entered by a narrow gap commanded by batteries, the harbor is a round and spacious one, scooped out of frowning highlands that bear on the apex of their cones unattainable forts, thrown up like the rim around volcanic craters. There is but one level access to the city on the land side, and that is blockaded by a stout wall with a single gate. Such was our next goal, reached after a quiet night, which Velveteen and I spent in the open air, having carried our rugs and pillows up from the state-room on its invasion by new passengers. At two o'clock in the morning our vessel stole into the port. There was one pale amber streak in the east, over the gloomy, indistinct heights studded with embrasured walls and mine chimneys. By-and-by a brightness grew out of it. Then the amber was reflected in the glassy harbor. An arch of rose cloud sprung up after this, and was also reflected, the hills lightening to a faded gray and brown. All this time the stars continued sparkling, and one of them threw rings of dancing diamond on the broken wave. Suddenly the diamond flash and the rose tint vanished, and it was broad golden-white day, with calorific beams beating strongly upon us, instead of the crepuscular chill of dawn that had just been searching our veins.
Cartagena has its war history, of course. A Commune was established there by Roque Barcia in 1873, which declined allegiance to the republican government at Madrid, and the city was accordingly besieged. Barcia had been living on forced loans from the inhabitants, and was loath to go; but the army of the republic made a few dents in the stone wall with twenty-pounders, and that decided him. He got on board the Spanish navy in the harbor, and ran away with it to Africa. Perhaps that accounts for the slimness of the naval contingent now. There is an academy for cadets in the place, but only twosmall ships-of-war were anchored in the noble bay. The town of Cartagena is remarkable for big men and very minute donkeys. The men ride on the donkeys with incredible hardihood. You see a burly Sancho Panza flying along the main street at a rapid pace, with his sandalled feet some three inches from the ground, and wonder what new kind of motor he has discovered, until you perceive beneath his ponderous body a nervous, vaguely ecstatic quivering of four black legs, attached to a small spot of head from which two mulish ears project.
A MODERN SANCHO PANZA.A MODERN SANCHO PANZA.
There is not much to see in Cartagena. Blind people seem to be numerous there—a fact which may be owing to the excessive dazzle of the sunlight and absence of verdure. But I couldn't help thinking some of them must have gone blind from sheerennui, because there was nothing around them worth looking at. Our visit, however, was in one respect a success: we found a broad strip of shade there. It was caused by the high city wall intercepting the forenoon light. Out of the shadow some enterprising men had constructed, with the aid of two or three chairs and several pairs of shears, a barber's shopal fresco; and asses and peasants, as they travelled in and out through the city gate, stopped at this establishment to be shaved. For it is an important item in the care of Spanish donkeys that they should be sheared as to the back, in order to make a smoother resting-place for man or pannier. So while the master held his animal one of the barbers plied some enormous clacking shears, and littered the ground with mouse-colored hair, leaving the beast's belly fur-covered below a fixed line, and for a small additional price executing a raised pattern of starpointsaround the neck. The tonsorial profession is an indispensable one in a country where shaving the whole face is so generally practised among all the humbler orders, not to mentiontorerosand ecclesiastics; but the discomfort to which the barber's customers submit is astonishing. Instead of being pampered, soothed, labored at with confidential respectfulness, and lulled into luxurious harmony with himself, as happens in America, a man who courts the razor in Spain has to sit upright in a stiff chair, and meekly hold under his chin a brass basin full of suds, and fitting his throat by means of a curved nick at one side. One individual we saw seated by the dusty road at the gate, with a towel around his shoulders and another in his hands to catchhis own falling locks. He looked submissive and miserable, as if assisting at his own degradation, while the barber was magnified into a tyrant exercising sovereign pleasure, and might have been expected, should the whim cross him, to strike off his victim's head instead of his hair.
STREET BARBER.STREET BARBER.
BIBLES VERSUS MELONS.BIBLES VERSUS MELONS.
The voyage continued as charmingly as it began. Quiet transitions from the deep blue outside to the pronounced green within the harbors were its most startling incidents. The colporteur gave tracts to the sailors, or traded Bibles for melons with the fruit boys; the Frenchman,who was making a commercial tour through the provinces, bestowed a liberal and cheerful disparagement on the nation which afforded him a business. We continued to eat meals in holiday fashion on the skylight hatches, and slept there through the balmy night, occasionally seeing the sailors clambering on the taffrail or in the rigging, always with cigarettes, the glowing points of which shone in the darkness like fire-flies. The gravity with which they stuck to thesepapelitoswhile knotting ropes or lowering a boat was fascinating in its inappropriateness. The headlands grew less bold before we tied to the dock at Alicante in the hush of a sultry night. We could see nothing of the town except a bright twinkle of lamps along the quay, contrasting gayly with the blood-red light on a felucca in the harbor, its long vivid stain trickling away through the water like the current from a wound; and the rules of the customs would not admit of our landing till morning.
OURtrunks had been on the dock two or three hours when we debarked in a small boat, and some fifteen men had gathered around them, waiting for the owners, like sharks attracted by floating fragments from a ship and wondering what manner of prey is coming to them. They all touched their caps to us as we bumped the shore. These cap-touches are worth in the abstract about one real—five cents. The grand total of speculative politeness laid out upon us was therefore more than half a dollar; but, on our selecting two porters, values rapidly declined, and the market "closed in a depressed condition." The customs officers wore a wild, freebooters' sort of uniform—blue trousers with a red stripe, blue jeans blouses with a belt and long sword, and straw hats. They were also very lazy; and while we were awaiting their attentions we had time to observe the manner of unloading merchandise in these latitudes. Every box, barrel, or bale hoisted out of a lighter was swung by a rope to which twenty men lent their strength; there were three more men in the lighter, and three others arranged the hoisting tackle; in all, twenty-six persons were occupied with a task for which two or three ought to suffice. Each time, the crowd of haulers fastened on the cable, ran off frantically with it, and then, in a simultaneous fit of paralysis, dropped it as the burden was landed.
These laborers wore huge straw hats, on the crown of which wasfitted abirreta, the small ordinary blue cap of the country. They had a queer air of carrying this superfluous cap around on top of the head as a sort of solemn ceremony. The wharf was alive, too, with small wagons, roofed over by a cover of heavy matting made ofespartograss, and furnished with a long, rough-barked pole at the side, to be used as a brake. Above this busy scene towered a luminous sienna-tinted cliff, sustaining the castle of Santa Barbara poised in the white air like a dream-edifice; though a rift high up in the hill marks the spot where the French exploded a mine during the Peninsular war. All these Mediterranean towns are guarded by some such eagle's eyry overlooking the sea, and the old monarchs showed a fine poetic sense in granting them for municipal arms their local castle resting on a wave. Close to the lapping waters lay the serried houses, bordered by an esplanade planted with rows of short palms. When the carbineers had looked vaguely into our trunks, and shut them again, the porters tossed them into a little cart, and plunged into the town at a pace with which we could compete only so far as to keep them in sight while they twisted first around one corner and then another, and then up a long chalky street to the Fonda Bossio, which has the name of being the best hotel in Spain. It has excellent cookery, and some furlongs of tile-floored corridor, which the servants apparently believe to be streets, for they water them every day, just as the thoroughfares are watered, out of tin basins. We were overwhelmed with courtesy. For instance, I would call the waiter.
CUSTOMS OFFICERS.CUSTOMS OFFICERS.
"Command me, your grace," was his reply.
"Can you bring me some fresh water?" ("Fresh" always means cold.)
POST INN, ALICANTE.POST INN, ALICANTE.
"With all the will in the world."
When he came with it I tried to rise to his standard by saying, "Thanks—a thousand thanks."
"They do not merit themselves, señor," said he, not to be outdone.
I asked if I could have agarspachofor breakfast. Thegarspachois an Andalusian soup-salad, very cooling, made of stewed and strainedtomato, water, vinegar, sliced cucumber, boiled green peppers, a dash of garlic, and some bits of bread; the whole served frost-cold.
"I don't know—it is not in the list. I feel it, señor. It weighs upon my soul. But I will see, and will return in an Ave Maria to let you know."
He never left me without asking, "Is there anything wanting still?"
ALICANTE FRUIT-SELLER.ALICANTE FRUIT-SELLER.
The waiters and chamber-maids ate their meals at little tables in the hall, and whenever I passed them, if they were eating, they made a gracious gesture toward theirpillauof rice. "Would your grace like to eat?"
This offer to share their food with any one who goes by is a simple and kindly inheritance from the East; but it becomes a little embarrassing, and I longed for a pair of back stairs to slink away by, without having to decline their hospitality every time I went out.
To go out in the middle of the day was like looking into the sun itself. Everybody stayed in-doors behind thick curtains of matting, and dozed or dripped away the time in idle perspiration; but hearing unaccountable blasts of orchestral music during this forced retirement, I inquired, and found them to proceed from the rehearsal of a Madrid opera company then in Alicante. Our attendant at table proved to be a duplex character—a serving-man by day and a fourteenth lord in the chorus by night, with black and yellow stockings, and a number of gestures indicating astonishment, indignation, or, in fact, anything that the emergency required. We had the pleasure of seeing him on the stage that very evening, and of listening to an extravagant performance of "La Favorita," between two acts of which an usher came in and collected the tickets of the whole audience. The theatre was remarkably spacious for a town of thirty thousand inhabitants; but Alicante is a favorite winter resort, and even maintains a "Gallistic Circus;" that is, a place for cock-fights.
The Garden of Alicante is a luscious spot, hidden away some two or three miles from the town, and owned by the Marques de Venalua, a young man of large wealth, who spends all his time at Alicante, and is a public benefactor, having introduced water in pipes at his own expense. The carriage and consumption of water, indeed, seemed to be the chief business of the population. They have a system of fountains for distributing sea-water from which the salt has been extracted, and women and children are kept going to these with huge jars, to satisfy the local thirst. To be born thirsty, live thirsty, and die so, is a privilege enjoyable only in countries like Southern Spain. One can form there, too, a vivid idea of the desert, from the delight with which he hails the greenHuerta, or garden. The road and fields on the way thither were like a waste of cinders and ashes. The almond and fig trees, the pomegranates and algarrobas beside the way, were coated with dust that lay upon them like thin snow; and the almond-nuts, where they hung in sight, resembled plaster casts, so pervasive was thewhite deposit. But all at once we mounted a low rise, and the wide stretch of verdant plantations lay before us, thick-foliaged, cool, sweet, and refreshing, with villas embowered among the oranges and palms, a screen of dim mountains beyond, and the silent blue sea brimming the horizon on the right. It was a spectacle delicious as sleep to tired eyes; it brought a cry of pleasure to my lips and grateful life to the heart.
But this spot, lovely as it is, becomes insignificant beside the glorious Huerta of Valencia, stretching for more than thirty miles from the olive-clad hills around Jativa to that city, which is the pleasantest in Mediterranean Spain, and the most characteristic of all, after Toledo, Granada, and Sevilla. There one travels through an unbroken tract of superb cultivation—a garden in exact literalness, yet a territory in size.
METHOD OF IRRIGATION NEAR VALENCIA.METHOD OF IRRIGATION NEAR VALENCIA.
CHURCH OF SANTA CATALINA, VALENCIA.CHURCH OF SANTA CATALINA, VALENCIA.
We took the rail from Alicante in the evening; but a mass of Oran fugitives, escorted by a company of soldiers (for the most part drunk), encumbered our train, and delayed its starting for an hour or two. Then followed a slow, wearisome ride through the black night, with achange at the junction of La Encina about twelve o'clock, involving much tribulation in the re-weighing and renewed registering of baggage; after which we were stowed into a totally dark compartment of the other train, and made to wait three hours longer. With the firstrays of dawn our locomotive began to creep, and we fell into a doze, from which I was awakened after a while by the loud irruption of somebody into our carriage, accompanied by a jangle like that of sleigh-bells. It turned out to be a peasant, who, in consequence of the general over-crowding, had been ushered into the first-class carriage, bringing with him a couple of children and some mule-harness provided with bells. I was inclined to be indignant with him for his disturbing intrusion; but, as it was now broad daylight, I began to look out of the window, and soon had cause to consider the peasant a benefactor; for we were just leaving Jativa, a most picturesque old town, with a castle famous even in Roman times; the native place, also, of the Borgias (Pope Calixtus III., and Rodrigro, the father of Cæsar Borgia). Immediately afterward we entered the garden region. Miles of carefully-tended growth, thousands of orchards linked together in one series, acres upon acres of fields where every square inch is made to yield abundantly—such is the Huerta of Valencia. We passed endless orange-groves, each single tree in which had its circle of banked earth to hold the water when let on from the canals of tile that coursed everywhere like veins of silver, carrying life to the harvests. Then came vast fields dotted with the yellow blossom of the pea-nut, on low vine-like plants. Again, breadths of citron and lemon, followed by extensive rice farms, where the cultivators stood dressing the unripe plantations, up to their ankles in the water of a feathery green swamp. Not a rood of earth is unimproved, excepting where some thriving red-roofed village is hemmed in by the fragrant paradise. In one place you will see, perhaps, a mouldering red tower like those of the Alhambra, or a church spire lifted amid the trees, and, high above the other greenery, clusters of date-palms leaning together, as if they whispered among themselves of other days. Near by is the Lake of Albufera, close to the sea and twenty-seven miles in circumference—nourished both from the sea and from the river Turia, so that it becomes an immense reservoir of fish and game. Its marshy edges once offered shelter to numerous smugglers, and it is said that General Prim, who was on good terms with them, found a hiding-place there while in danger and before he came to power. No wonder that the Cid fought gallantly to win this land from the infidel, and when he had gained it sent for his wife and daughter from distant Burgos to come and see the prize! Its fertility to-day, however, is due to the irrigation introduced by the Moors, and since maintained. The same thing could be done with the Tagus and Ebro rivers, but the Spaniard having had theexample before him for only about six centuries, has not yet found time to follow it. The water supply is so precious that proprietors are allowed to use it for their own crops only on fixed days, and for so many hours at a time. Disputes of course arise, but they are settled by the Water Court—a tribunal without appeal, consisting of twelve peasant proprietors, who meet once a week in Valencia; and I saw them there holding their session in very primitive style, on a long pink sofa set in an arched door-way of the cathedral.
A VALENCIA CAB.A VALENCIA CAB.
Valencia was in the midst of its annual festival when we arrived; a bright, gay, spirited, and busy town, more cheerful than ever just then. There were to be three days of bull-fighting—"bulls to the death!"—with eight taurian victims each day; the best swordsmen in Spain; and horses and mules displaying gilded and silvered hoofs. The theatres were perfumed. There were match games ofpelota—rackets—the national substitute for cricket or base-ball; and a week's fair was in progress on the other side of the river Turia, with bannered pavilions, thousands of painted lanterns; lotteries, concerts, and booth shows, to which the admission was "half price for children and soldiers." Trade was brisk also in the city; brisk in the Mercado, that quaint business street crowded with little stalls, and with peasants in blue, red, yellow, mantled and cothurned, their heads topped with pointed hats or wrapped with variegated handkerchiefs deftly knotted into a high crown; brisk, likewise, in those peculiar shops behind the antique Silk Exchange, which are named from the signs they hang out, representing the Blessed Virgin, Christ, John the Baptist, or the Bleeding Heart. One had for its device a rose, and another, distinguished by two large toy lambs placed at its door, was known without other distinction as the Lamb of God. But in the more modern quarter the shop-keepers ventured on a Parisian brilliancy which we did not encounter anywhere else. Their arrangement of wares was prettily effective, and the fashion prevailed of having curtains for the show-windows painted with figures in modern dress, done in exceedingly clever, artistic style, well drawn, full of humor and fine realistic characterization.
Altogether, Valencia is the cheeriest of Spanish cities, unless one excepts Barcelona, which is half French, and in its present estate wholly modern. Moreover, Valencia abounds in racy and local traits, both of architecture and humanity. The Street of the Cavaliers is lined with sombre, strange, shabbily elegant old mansions of the nobility, with Gothic windows and open arcades in the top story; the new houses are gayly tinted in blue and rose and cream-color; and the gourd-like domes of the cathedral and other large buildings glisten with blue tiles and white, set in stripes. You find yourself continually, as you come from various quarters, bringing up in sight of the octagonal tower of Santa Catalina, strangely suggestive of a pagoda, without in the least being one. The Silk Exchange, from which the shining web that wealth is woven out of has long since vanished, contains one of the most beautiful of existing Gothic halls under a roof sustained by fluted and twisted pillars, themselves light as knotted skeins; while from the outer cornice grotesque shapes peer out over the life of to-day; a grinning monk, an imp playing a guitar, a crumbling buzzard, serving as gargoyles. Just opposite is the market, where you may buy enormous bunches of luscious white grapes for a penny, or pry into second-hand shops rich in those brilliant mantles with the "cat" fringe of balls, for which the town is as noted as for its export of oranges. The old battlemented walls of the city, it is true, have been torn down: it was done simply to give employment to the poor a few years since. But there are some fine old gates remaining—those of Serranos and Del Cuarte. We drove out of one and came in by the other, about half a mile away—a diversion that brought us under a rigid examination from the customs guard, which levies a tax on every basket of produce brought in from the country, and was inclined to regard us as a dutiable importation.
BARCELONA FISHERMEN.BARCELONA FISHERMEN.
One may go quite freely to the port, however—the Grao—which is two miles distant. A broad boulevard hedged with sycamores leads thither, which in summer is crowded bytartanas—bouncing little covered wagons lined with crimson curtains, and usually carrying a load of pretty señoritas—and by more imposing equipages adorned with footmen in the English style. Everybody goes to the shore to bathe toward evening, for Valencia is the Brighton of the Madrileños. The little bathing establishments extend for a long distance on the sands, and are very neat. Each has its fanciful name, as "The Pearl," or "The Madrid Girl," and the proprietors stand in front vociferously soliciting your custom. Between these and the water are refreshmentsheds with tables, and every one eats or drinks on coming out of the sea. Farther down the shore the women have their own houses, and a fence of reeds protects them from intrusion while they are running to or from the surf; but it is my duty to record that the men formed a line at this fence, and systematically gazed through the breaks in it, which was the more embarrassing, perhaps, because the fair Valencians bathe in very plain, baggy, and ugly gowns. On the streets or in the Glorieta Garden, and in their proper habiliments, they are the noblest looking and most beautiful of Spanish women, often possessing flaxen hair and dark-blue eyes which recall a Gothic ancestry, together with something simple and regular about the features that is perhaps due to the ancient Greek colonization. At still another part of the beach horses were allowed to go into the waves; and this was a sight also eminently Greek in its suggestion. Naked boys bestrode the animals, and urged them forward into the spray-fringed tide. The arched necks, the prancing movement of the horses, the sportive shock of foam against their broad chests, and the pressing knees of the nude ridersin full play of muscle to keep their seats, were like a breathing and stirring relief on some temple frieze, clear-cut in the pure and sparkling sunlight. There was once a Valencian school of painters, but we saw nothing of this in their work. The museum offers what our newspapers would call a "carnival" of rubbish, but it also contains some striking, shadowy, startlingly lighted canvases of Ribalta—saints and martyrs and ascetics vividly but not joyously portrayed; a few wonderful portraits by Goya, fresh as if only just completed; and one of Velasquez's three portraits of himself.
From Valencia to Barcelona the valleys along the coast are fertile. Vineyards, spreading their long files of green over a warm red soil that seems tinged with the blood of the grape, vie with the olive in that picturesque, productive belt between the hills and the blue, swelling sweep of the Mediterranean. Here is Murviedro, the old Saguntum, once the scene of a fierce siege and horrible sufferings, now basking quietly in the hot light—a time-worn, sun-tanned, beggared old city, which is not ashamed to make a show of its decayed Roman theatre; and farther on Tarragona, which professes to have had at one time a million inhabitants, and is now a little wine-producing town. Churches and castles, rich in delicate workmanship and all manner of historic association, crop up everywhere. The very shards in the fields, you fancy, may suddenly unfold something of that full and varied past which was once as real as to-day's meridian glow. Yet at any moment you may lose sight of all this in the brilliant, stimulating, yet softly modified beauty of the landscape's colors, and your whole mind is absorbed by the vague neutral hues of a treeless hill-side, or the rich, positive blue of the sea, in which the white sail of achalupaseems to be inlaid like a bit of ivory.
All the while, as you go northward, Spain—the real Spain—is slipping from you. The palms disappear as if a noiseless earthquake had swallowed them up; even the olive becomes less frequent, and by-and-by you are in piny Catalonia. You reach Barcelona, the greatest commercial city of the kingdom, and you find it the boast of the citizens that they are not Spaniards. They are Spanish mainly in their love of revolt. So prompt are they to join in every uprising, that the garrison quartered there has to be kept as high as ten thousand men; but for the most part it is rather a French maritime dépot than a thing of ancient or peculiar Spain. There is a large and artificial park on one side, and the fort of Monjuich on the other, and a lot of shipping in the harbor; and a glorious embowered avenue, called the Rambla,where pale-faced, long-lashed, coquettishly smiling women walk in great numbers, carrying out the usual national custom of a peripatetic reception and conversation party. It was the feast of Santiago when we came—it is always a feast of something everywhere in that pious country—and the theatres were doing a great business with trifling plays and charming ballets. Barcelona is not only the industrious city, it is also the cultivated one of the Peninsula. The opera there is one of the best in the world, and was once carried off bodily to Madrid by an ardent manager, who for his pains received the scorn of the envious Madrid people: they would not come to his performances, and he was almost ruined in consequence.
The old cathedral of the city is a temple singularly impressive by simple means—a sober Spanish-Gothic structure bathed in a perpetual gloom, through which the stained windows show with a jewelled splendor almost supernatural. The weirdness of the interior effect is farther intensified by the dark pit of Santa Eulalia's shrine opening under the altar, and set with a row of burning lamps, on which the darkness seems to hang like a cloak depending from a chain of gold. The invariable rule in Spanish cathedrals is that the choir should be placed in the central nave, like that at Westminster Abbey, and elaborated into a complete enclosure by itself—which, although it interferes with the total effect of the interior, is frequently very striking in its lavish agglomeration of carved wood and stone, metal railings, gilding, and similar details. It was in the peculiarly picturesque choir of this cathedral of Santa Eulalia that the order of the Golden Fleece was once convened by Charles V., and the panels over the stalls are blazoned with the bearings of the various nations and nobles represented in that body. Being discovered only after one has grown accustomed to the dark, these fading glories of heraldry steal gradually upon the eye, as if through the obscuring night of time. I found the ancient cloister, without, on the south-west side, a delightful, shadowy, suggestive place: there, too, may be seen a fountain surmounted by a small equestrian statue of St. George, which reminds one of a fabulous story in Münchausen; for the tail of the horse is formed by a jet of water flowing out of the body at the rear. Inside the church again hangs, under the organ-loft, an enormous wooden and painted Saracen's head—a species of relic not uncommon, I believe, in Catalonian temples. It may be added here that the custom of the "historical giants" at Corpus Christi is maintained in Barcelona as we had seen it at Burgos, and those effigies are stowed away somewhere in the sacred precincts. There is acurious mingling of the naïve and the sophisticated in the fact that some of the giants, wearing female attire, have new dresses for each year, and thereby set the fashions for the ensuing twelvemonth for all the womankind of the city. And however advanced the urban society may be, with its trade, its opera, its books, gilded cafés and superb clubs, the spirit of progress does not spread very far into the country. When a piece of railroad was built, not very long ago, opening up a new rural section in the neighborhood, the peasants watched the advance of the locomotive along the rails with profound interest. Finally, one old man asked, "But where is themulekept?—inside?"
He was willing to admit that the engine worked finely, but no power could convince him that it was possible for it to go by other impulsion than that of a mule's legs.
Another relic of by-gone times is the cap universally worn in this region by the longshoremen, the fishers, and the male portion of the lower orders generally; for it is nothing less than the old Phrygian liberty cap, imported hither by the Paul Pry Phœnicians ages ago. Woven in a single piece, it appears at first sight to be a long, soft, commodious bag, tinted with vermilion or violet or brown as the case may be. Into the aperture the native inserts his head and then pulls the rest of the flapping contrivance down as far as he pleases, letting the end float loose in the wind, or more commonly bringing it round to the front, curling it over and tucking it in upon itself in such a way as to make an overhanging protection for the eyes, and to give the whole a look that recalls the top of an Oxford student's cap. With this head-gear, and wearing sandals made of fine hempen cord tied by long black tapes, the men presented a free, half barbarous and sufficiently picturesque appearance. I don't know how long we might have continued to roam the streets of Barcelona, listening to the uncouthpatoisof the locality, in which French and Spanish words are so outlandishly mingled, nor how long we should have clung to the remnants of architecture and history that jutted seductively above the surface of the modern here and there, if it had not been that cold necessity limited our time and propelled us relentlessly northward. Even now I find that my pen is reluctant to leave the tracing of those vanished scenes, and hesitates to write the last word as much as if it were an enchanter's wand, instead of a plain, business-like little instrument.
With its usual fatuity the railroad obliged us to start so early that at the first dusky gray streak of dawn we were dismally taking our coffee in thepatioof the hotel. Thedueñowas sleeping by sectionson two hard chairs, considerately screened from us by a clump of orange shrubs, and murmuring now and then some direction to the half-invisible waiter floating about in a dark arcade; but he roused himself, and woke up wholly for a minute or two while perpetrating a final extortion. Otherwise the silence was profound. It was the silence of the past, the unseen current of oblivion that sets in and begins to eddy round the facts of to-day, in such a country, the moment human activity is suspended or the reality of the present is at all dimmed. Silence here leads at once to retrospection; differing in this from the mute solitude of American places, which somehow always tingles with anticipation. And thedueño, in overcharging us, became only the type of a long line of historic plunderers that have infested the Peninsula from the date of the Roman rule down to the incursion of Napoleon and the most recent period. His little game was invested with all the dignity of history and tradition. The sickly light of day above the court struggled feebly and dividedly with the waning yellow of the candle-flame on our table.
"After all," said Velveteen, "I'm glad to be going, for this is no longer Spain."
And yet, at the instant of leaving, we discovered that it was indeed Spain, and a pang of regret followed those words.
As we issued from the hotel we saw, crossing the street in the increased dawn-light, and striding toward the dépot, the two Civil Guards. It looked as if we should be captured on the very threshold of liberty. The thought lent wings to our haste.... Some hours afterward, when we were passing through the tunnels of the Pyrenees, we congratulated ourselves on our escape; and, indeed, as we looked back to the mountain-wall from France, we could fancy we saw two specks on the summit which might have been our pursuers. They were too late! Their own excess of mystery had baffled them. They had dogged us every league of the way, and yet we had traversed Spain without being detected as—what? I really don't know, but I'm sure those Civil Guards must. If not, their military glare, their guns, and their secrecy are the merest mockeries.
How softly the waves broke along the Mediterranean sands that morning, close to the rails over which we were flying! Green and white, or violet, and shimmered over by the crimson splendor of the illumined East, they surged one after another upon the golden shore and spent themselves like wasted treasure. There was something mournful in their movement—something very sad in the presence ofthis beauty which I was never to see again. Did I not hear mingled with the sparkling flash and murmur of those waves a long-drawn "A-a-ay!"—the most pathetic of Spanish syllables, which had thrown its shadow across the fervid little songs heard so often by the way?