CHAPTER X.SEVILLE.
DON MIGUEL DE MANARA, a Spanish rake, one of many like the Don Juan who stands as type of his race, having spent his life in the way rakes love to live, undertook to be religious in his later years. He had sowed his wild oats, and never got much of a crop, and now that death was likely to call for him soon, he thought to get ready for his coming by making over to some pious uses what he had not spent upon his lusts. According to the theory of that church which takes care of all Spanish souls, he made a sure thing of it by founding a hospital, to which was given the name of “La Caridad.” A brotherhood, whose special vocation was to minister to persons sentenced to death, and to bury their bodies, took charge of it. It is famous far beyond Seville and Spain. Its patients are tended by young men of good families in the city, who minister by turns to the sick and dying brought to thisCharity. Perhaps some of the young gentlemen nurses, like the founder, have an eye to a compromise of their own infirmities, by giving attention to these miserably sick poor.
But the fame of the hospital is so great because it has within its walls some of the noblest paintings in the world!
The building stands in an obscure part of the town, and we had a long search to find it, Antanazio, our guide, being quite unused to take his travellers to hospitals and out-of-the-way churches, as theatres and bull-fights and fandangoes among the gypsies are much more attractive. But we foundit; an old woman janitor let us in, and led us to the chapel where the art-treasures are to be seen.
This church is the guardian of the masterpieces ofMurillo. His manner is as distinctly marked as Raphael’s or Titian’s, and the power of none of the Italian masters, unless we except Leonardo da Vinci, is greater than his. It was difficult to believe this in Italy, where Murillos are comparatively rare, but here, where alone his greatest and best works are to be found, it is easy to believe that he is among the first. Several of his pictures in this church are of St. John, and in one of them an angel assists the saint in carrying a sick man, and in another the same saint washes the feet of a pauper. The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes is a wonderfully faithful presentation of that sublime scene. But the great picture, the one we specially came to see, is “Moses striking the Rock in the Desert.” Its eloquence tells and pleads its own story: a famished multitude pressing to the gushing stream and gathering the precious waters in their hands; mothers drinking, while their children, with parched lips, are pleading for the life-saving draught; even the beasts declare their joy at the sight of water, and gratitude lights up the faces of the thronging Israelites. But the central, majestic figure in the group, on which the painter’s high art is lavished with a wealth of skill, is Moses, with folded hands and upturned eyes, acknowledging the goodness and the power which this miracle, almost as wondrous to him as to his people, has so suddenly revealed. Near him is his brother Aaron, scarcely less than Moses in the scene, for he, priest-like, is still in the act of prayer. And in the people every form and feature of human life and feeling are portrayed, each after its own kind, with the hand of a master.
There are several pictures here by others, as well as other Murillos, that I have not space to mention. Marshal Soult carried off five of the great pictures by Murillo, and twoof them, “Abraham entertaining the Angels,” and the “Prodigal Son,” were bought by the Duke of Sutherland. Wellington recovered, at Waterloo, some of Soult’s spoils of the galleries of Spain. The French are great thieves when they get among pictures or statuary. They once had the Venus de Medicis boxed and ready for Paris. War is pretty much the same game all the world over, and always.
The picture-gallery of Seville was saved from French spoliation by the forethought of a Spanish amateur, who sent all the paintings to Gibraltar before the French reached Seville. We found, to our disappointment, that the museum was closed for repairs, and a special order from the governor was necessary. Instead of sending the order, he promised to send us a guide to conduct us through the gallery the next day. An hour after the time he came, and the only service he came to perform was to lead us to the door of the museum, which was close to our lodgings, and then to receive his fees for this needless service. That was very Spanish. The porter then admitted us and received his fees. Another led us across the court into the hall where the pictures were standing along the walls, unhung, and he received his fees. When the convents in Spain were suppressed, the best pictures among them were gathered into this museum. Murillo painted some of his finest works for the Capuchin convent, which stood near the Cordova gate. One of the sweetest and most perfect of paintings is that of the two saints of Seville, the maidens Justa and Rufina, who held up the giralda, or tower of the cathedral, when it was likely to be blown down in a tempest. In the days of Pagan Spain a procession was passing through the streets bearing an image ofVenus, to which the people made homage. Two young women, lately converted to the Christian religion, by name Justa and Rufina, refused to worship the idol, and the multitude in their madness made martyrs of them on the spot. When the Christians becamemasters of the city, the maidens became its tutelar saints, and are painted as holding the giralda in their hands, in honor of their kind interposition in a storm.
Here is Murillo’s first and last page of the gospel,—the Annunciation is the first page, with the beauty and joyful hope of the motherhood of him who is the desire of all nations; the last page is the Mother of Jesus weeping over the death of him who was to have redeemed Israel. The St. Thomas giving alms, by Murillo, has been praised by the best critics as not excelled by any of his works. Wilkie placed it among the finest.
It is a question often asked, and never answered, Why can we not have these pictures, or such as these, in the Western World? Few of the many who would enjoy and appreciate them ever can come to Spain or Italy, and must they live and die without the sight of all these glorious works of art? It would be an easy matter to have copies made of the most celebrated and magnificent pictures, and transported to New York, into a national gallery. Copies may be made so as to challenge comparison with the original, and to give a fair idea of the distinctive manner of each of the artists. It does not require the same genius to make a perfect copy that it does to conceive and give birth to the original. And there are no living artists, and have been none in the last three hundred years, to paint character, soul, thought, feeling, as those men did whom we call the Old Masters. We have as great painters now as they. But not in their line of things. England and France and America have had, and now have, artists whose works could not have been produced by Da Vinci, Giotto, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Titian, Carlo Dolce, or Murillo. But there is no one alive now to paint the Last Supper, the Judgment, the Transfiguration, the Charles V. on horseback, or the Smitten Rock, comparable with those majestic transcripts of sentiment which stand up in the world of art among man’sworks, as Niagara and Mont Blanc are sublime among the works of God.
After writing the account of the bull-fight in a former chapter, it occurred to me that you might ask whether I went to see thesportmyself, or relied altogether on the descriptions of the ladies and others. That is a fair question, and I am therefore obliged to say that I did not; that I have never seen a bull-fight. Three reasons prevented me from going. First, they are usually to be seen only on Sunday, and I never go to places of amusement on that day, at home or abroad. Secondly, I have no taste for sights of blood, and would rather go the other way than into the bull-ring at any time. And thirdly and lastly, in the way of reasons for not going, there was not a bull-fight while I was there! It was and is yet the winter season, when the weather is cool compared with spring and summer, and the bulls do not fight well except when the weather is hot. The “season,” which is even more distinctly marked than that of opera in Paris or New York, begins the first Sunday after Lent, and a performance takes place every Sunday afterwards, if the weather permits, till the height of summer suspends it for a few weeks when the heat is excessive. It is resumed from the latter part of August until the first of October. Then the fall and winter are made dull by its absence, and the Spaniards long for the return of hot weather and the beasts.
There is a great deal of exaggeration in the descriptions given by those who enjoy the sport. The horses selected for the sacrifice are miserable jades, that are fit for nothing else but to be killed, and the bulls are rarely so fierce as to be dangerous, unless goaded or provoked into phrensy by the tricks of the combatants. The men who go into the fight are all hired butchers or fighters, who are paid regular salaries, like actors in a theatre, and they make a business of it. And so universal is the rage of the people to seethis, the national sport and pastime, that the ring must furnish seats for ten, fifteen, or twenty thousand people, and the price of admission for such a multitude readily supplies the means to meet the great expenses of the entertainment.
One of the most curious facts developed by the bull-fight is the fondness that women have for such scenes. It is no fiction that ladies, whose refinement cannot be called in question, are in raptures when the fight is the most savage and bloody. It always was so. In the amphitheatres of Italy, when martyr Christians were compelled to fight with wild beasts, the fairest and proudest of women were among the spectators, who looked on with delight when their fellow-creatures were torn limb from limb. I have often heard it said, here and elsewhere, that women are more fond of these bloody spectacles than men are. We know they are more sympathetic with suffering, and in the hospital and chamber of sickness and anguish, they minister with a long-suffering patience and fortitude from which the sterner stuff that men are supposed to be made of revolts at once, or soon shrinks worn out, “used up,” as we say.
What is the effect of these scenes of blood and butchery on the national character? In the streets the boys play bull-fight: one holds up a red handkerchief and shakes it in the face of another boy, who makes a lunge at him with his head, and then pursues him, and another sets off afterhim, and so the bull-ring is enacted in the highway. As all the large towns have bull-rings, and the poorest classes of people manage to get money enough to see the show, and the country boy can give his girl no greater treat than to take her to a bull-fight, the thing is in the widest sense national, and its influence reaches down to the lowest ranks, while it is the pet of the nobility and gentry. And its effect must be degrading, brutifying, and demoralizing. If there were any thing in the Spanish character to work upon, for good or evil, the influence of such a decided national pastimewould be more distinctly pronounced. But the senselessprideof the Spaniard,—pride with nothing to be proud of; pride with idleness, ignorance, and poverty; pride of the meanest and most contemptible sort,—is the warp and woof of Spanish character, and there is hardly any thing more in them than there would be in a nation of peacocks.
When you have excepted the vice of intoxication, and a great exception it is, you have said all that can be said in favor of the moral habits of the Spanish people. They do not steal from one another, that I know of, any more than other people do. But they certainly commit murders more frequently than other nations do, unless the slayer is maddened by drink. In estimating the comparative morality of peoples, this matter of intemperance holds the balance. It is the prolific parent of the greater part of the crimes of a people where it is the prevailing vice, yet very few moralists are disposed to reckon it the crime of crimes. In Spain the women are said to be almost universally corrupt. As a matter of course, the men must be just as bad. I have been assured here in Granada, by those who ought to know, having long resided here and become thoroughly acquainted with the state of things, that there is no social morality among men and women in Spain: that from the highest to the lowest they have all gone out of the way, and that they are known—the women are—as divided into four classes, with different degrees of refinement in vice, but all four classes lost to virtue and without conscience of sin. It is quite probable that such a statement is to be taken with many grains of allowance. But making all deductions that one’s good nature demands, there still remains a sediment of truth that one shudders to admit. In this plane of inquiry we are met with the truth that Austria, Italy, France, and Spain are the Roman Catholic countries where the vice of licentiousness corrupts the moral of social life. The Protestant countries of Europeare in colder climes, and intemperance is the vice that among the poorer people breeds misery more ruinous to their health and prosperity.
At the railway station, when we were leaving Seville for the Alhambra by the way of Malaga, a group of natives in the costume of Andalusia presented a picturesque and not unpleasing appearance. In thecitiesof Europe it is rare to see any thing national and peculiar in the dress of the people. Fashion is an empire that extends over every nation, and reigns in London, Berlin, Vienna, and Madrid with resistless sway. The seat of government is in Paris, and her edicts are obeyed in free America as well as in France. But when you get into the rural districts, the people cling to an ancientrégime; a fashion, indeed, who sat on the throne long years ago, and has never been put aside by any revolutions of modern invention. These rural Andalusians, in breeches and sandals, with red belt or sash, and loose jacket, and conical hat and wide rim turned up all around, are dressed as their great-grandfathers were, and as their own great-grandchildren will be, and others, for generations to come. They had been to the cityon an excursion, and were now going home again, none the better, but a deal the worse for the change of life they had suffered in town.
It was a good opportunity to learn something of the life of these people, who form, after all, the great mass of any nation, and the part of the people with whom every true heart is in sympathy. The rich and the gay, the fashionable people who throng in cities, can live as they please. The poor, who live from hand to mouth, and cannot choose for themselves, but must live as they can, these are the people in every country whose condition we want to inquire into; and when we have learned of their state, we know what their country is. It is the average of human comfort that we want to get at.
And it is a real help towards one’s satisfaction with the condition of a people to know that it does not take a vast amount of the good things of this life to make one happy, if he has never had any thing more or better than the little he has been contented with. These Andalusians work on the farms of large proprietors, and get six to ten cents a day and their food, when they are working by the season. This sounds small. The wages of laboring men who find themselves, and who work by the day, will average forty or fifty cents a day. To know what such pay is worth we must know how they live, and what it costs to buy the food they have. Their food is chiefly soup of bacon oil and vegetables, with bread and fruit. They take a kettle of this thick soup, more like a pudding than a soup, to the fields with them; and day after day, year in and year out, eat substantially the same thing. And this food costs the peasants a very little more than nothing. The ground is easily worked, the climate is so favorable to growth and land so abundant, that what can be raised for food is almost as accessible to the poor as if vegetables were spontaneous and free to everybody. So it is that thesepoorpeople are quite as well off, as to the mere physical comforts of life, as those who get one, two, and five dollars a day in other lands, and have to pay so much for food and lodgings as to be sorely puzzled to do what a cat often tries to do,—make both ends meet.
These Spanish peasants appear to be lively, intelligent, and wide-awake. They give a reason for doing any thing, when they are asked; and that is more than the Irish or English peasantry can do at home, or in the land of the soaring eagle. Except in Russia, there is not a people on the continent of Europe that appear more stolid and unthoughtful, more like mere cattle or machines, than the farm peasantry of merry England. This may be in appearance only; but the truth is that you can get more out of anignorant laborer on the continent of Europe, whose language you do not more than half understand, than out of an English farm hand who is supposed to speak English.
Beer has something to do with this matter of stupidity. These southern climates in Europe and this soil are favorable to the culture of wine-grapes, and wine is the solace and stimulus of the commonest people. You may buy as good a bottle of wine for thirty cents in Spain as you would have to pay three or four dollars for in New York. And if you will not give thirty cents for it, you can have as much as you want for little or nothing. Until the railroads were built and transportation made easy and cheap, it was common, when the new vintage came in, to empty the casks that held what was left over of former years. And a church was pointed out to me that was built with mortar made with wine instead of water, there being a scarcity of water in the vicinity but plenty of wine that was to be thrown away. Sherry wine, which is thesackof Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, is the leading wine of Spain, and is made now and here just as wine was made in the times of Hesiod and Isaiah; for in such climes as this the people keep on doing things as their ancestors or others did in the same place thousands of years ago. They drink wine as freely as the English drink beer, and as Americans drink rum and water. But they do not get drunk as our people do, and they are not so stupid as the beer drinkers of England are. They are stimulated, of course, and the exhilaration is carried to excess sometimes. It is not true to say there is no drunkenness in wine-growing countries, but the best informed men, who had the most abundant opportunities of learning the facts in the case, assured me thatintemperanceis not common; that it is very rare among the working people of Spain. This is not to be used as an argument in favor of wine raising and wine drinking in America. It would indeed be better for the health of the drinking mento drink pure wine than bad whiskey, or the vile compounds that are sold as wine in our country. But if wine were as cheap in the United States as in Spain, there would be just as much intemperance in the United States as now. The climate and the strife of such a country as ours furnish causes for the use of stimulating drinks that do not exist in Italy or Spain; and philanthropists who discuss and legislate on the subject of temperance, without regard to the physical circumstances of a people, are in the same case with the traveller who reckoned his bill without his host. It is well to multiply and fortify wholesome laws to restrain men from evil indulgence, and it is our duty to ply all possible moral agencies to reform and save our fellow-men; but our duty does not end with legislating and preaching. There are social burdens to be raised from the poor by the voluntary action of the rich, and by the application of the gospel principle of brotherhood, which will so ameliorate the condition of the lowly that they will not be tempted as now, by the pressure of weariness, care, and woe, to fly to the intoxicating cup for help to bear their load, or to forget that it is on them. But this disgression is getting dry, if it is on drinking.
A beautiful trait of character and a lovely custom of the Spanish peasantry appear in their love for parents. They yield to themobedience, respect, veneration, and love, after they are aged, and the children are men and women grown. The married children delight to have their parents to direct and govern them as in childhood, and these children even quarrel among themselves to get and keep possession of their aged parents. This trait of character is said to mark a slow country, where the past, the ancient, is held in honor; while progress has no such reverence for old age. Would to God that we had a little more Spain in young America, if it is Spanish to honor one’s father and mother.
In the Alameda, at Malaga.
In the Alameda, at Malaga.
In the Alameda, at Malaga.
CHAPTER XI.MALAGA.
THE wind blowing from the north-west,—that is, a land breeze, at Malaga, excites the nervous system so much, that in courts of law it is held to be an extenuating circumstance in case of crime. It is therefore of great importance to know which way the wind blows when youare proposing to kill your neighbor or to commit a forgery. In our country we have hardly got to that point, but in Boston, where easterly winds prevail, the phrenologists set up a plea in behalf of the Malden murderer that was quite as absurd as the Malaga weather. In New York, the doctrine of mental and moral disturbance is held to be an extenuating circumstance in crime. And some of our eminent citizens, merchants, bankers, lawyers, doctors, and ministers have united in representing the strong excitement engendered by stock speculation, as an excuse for forgery. From all of which it is fair to infer that the guilt or innocence of a man in the New World, as well as the Old, depends very much upon the way the wind blows.
Malaga is one of the most celebrated resorts for invalids. It is not a resort of fashion, like Nice and Mentone, and perhaps Sicily is more sought by those whose maladies are partly imaginary and the other part nervous. But Malaga is a place to which intelligent physicians send hundreds of patients who are in a bad way, and yet have a fair chance of getting well if they spend a few winters in this uniform, genial, mild, but not enervating clime. The warm south wind comes in upon it from the sea, on whose shore it lies, and the mountains in the rear shield it from the northern blasts. In an ordinary room, without fire, the thermometer (Fahr.) ranges all winter long from fifty-two to seventy deg., never higher or lower, unless when an extraordinary fit of weather is on, and the average temperature is about fifty-five deg. from November to March. It is six degrees warmer than Rome, which is one of the dampest, chilliest, and most disagreeable places for an invalid to winter in. I tried hard to get well in Florence and Rome and Nice, and then fled to Spain, and found what neither Italy nor Southern France would furnish,—an equable clime; warm, but not debilitating. Nature has a laboratory for making mineral waters that chemists in vain attempt to imitate, and there are peculiarcombinations of atmospheric elements in divers places, that must be tried on the spot if you would get the good of them. The invalid who wishes a climate that braces him up without exciting him to cough, will have to breathe in a great many places, perhaps, before he finds those opposite qualities blended, and if an unprofessional opinion is worth any thing, it is here given, that the south of Spain is the paradise desired. But nothing is more important for consumptives than uniformity of climate, and the argument in favor of Malaga is complete, when you learn that the range or variation of its temperature islessthan that of any other place on the continent of Europe! Pau, that beautiful little nest in the Pyrenees, so sheltered by the hills that no wind visits it too roughly, has a range of no less than sixty-eight degrees during the year, and Rome has sixty-two, and even Nice, fairest of watering-places for winter, ranges sixty, but Malaga has only a range of forty-nine degrees in the year.
It rained almost every day in Rome. It rains in Florence implacably, just when you wish it would not. Nice is fairer, but not always fair. Malaga is so uniformly pleasant, that a day without sunshine is very unusual in the months of November, December, and January. Good authority says there are not, during the whole year, more than ten days on which rain would prevent an invalid from taking exercise. It seemed to me that the winter weather in Malaga is more nearly like to that of Cairo, in Egypt, than any other place, and there are but four degrees of difference in the average temperature.
But take it summer and winter through, and in the last nine years it has rained only 262 times, or thirty-nine times in the course of each year: and think of it, O ye dwellers in London, or Paris, or New York, it has been foggy or misty but sixteen days in three times three years! And this bright, beautiful atmosphere gives a blue sky sodeep and pure, that it would take a poet of more than average fancy power to invent a firmament of superior glory, or to find a sunset in Greece or Italy to be mentioned in the same day with the gorgeous splendors that clothe the skies of Southern Spain at shut of day.
If you have consumption, or bronchitis, or any malady that is working mischief with your breathing apparatus, do not be governed, nor even guided, by the hasty generalizations of a man who writes from what he sees and hears in a tour for health and pleasure through half a dozen countries in the course of a season. The most that he can tell you is that such a climate as this is said to be excellent for those who have consumption already, and is likely to engender it where it is not; and if you cannot reconcile those two sayings of the books and the people, it is well enough to know that a sickly plant may be saved by being cared for in a hot-house, that might have been made to droop if taken in when it was in healthful vigor. Dr. Lee, whose opinion is of great weight, regards the climate of Madeira, Pau, or Pisa better than that of Malaga, for incipient tubercular disease, in persons of an excitable habit. And so much caution is to be used in deciding upon the means to be used for saving life by change of clime, that I would not write a line on this subject if I supposed that any one would be foolish enough to make a voyage on the strength of it.
When a miserly client attempted to get an opinion out of a lawyer by asking him at dinner, “What would you advise me to do in such and such a case?” the lawyer answered, “I should think the best thing you could do would be to take advice.” And this is what I advise.
No finer grapes than those of Malaga do we enjoy at home in the winter season, and the trade in raisins is enormous. We have been familiar with a raisin-box, but it was something quite novel to see extensive factories making nothing else but these rude little cases, all to be used forpacking raisins. The raisin stores or depots where the boxes are waiting to be exported were so vast as to astonish me, but when one thinks of the extent to which they are distributed throughout the civilized world, it is only wonderful that the trade is not far greater.
The country around is flowing with wine and oil. It might easily be made to yield cotton and sugar enough to supply the market of Europe. But it is inSpain, and nothing thrives in Spain but Romanism and its sister.
Through a succession of streets so narrow that no wheel carriages can pass, and designed only for bipeds and quadrupeds to go on foot, reeking with smells that made fragrant the memory of Cologne, we wound our way, meeting Moors from Morocco, in their picturesque costume, caps, togas, or shawls, with bare legs and sandals; meeting gypsy women and gypsy men whose home is Spain, and whose story is part of life in Spain, we plied our devious walk on Sunday into the little square in front of the Malaga Cathedral. Built of white stone, on the site of a mosque, and still retaining part of the old Mahometan structure, it rises in a mass about three hundred feet square, to the height of 130 feet, and the tower rises 220 feet above the roof. High mass was celebrated when we entered, and few worshippers were present: most of these were women of some “religious” order, and some priests, not serving at the altar but on their knees before it, on the beautiful pavement of blue and white marble. Perhaps the interior is too light and florid: the various decorations have been added at periods so remote from each other that they lack harmony. But what is wanting in severity and solemn majesty is made up in the variety of ornament, portals, statues, and wood carvings.
The tribes of Jordan, in Palestine, once held this city and region, reigning and rejoicing in the climate, the soil, and the sea. They sent the luscious grapes away to China, and Ibu Bathula, who was here in 1630, was quite asdelighted with what he had to eat and see as we are, who come 230 years after him, for he says: “I have seen eight pounds of grapes sold for twopence; its pomegranates are like rubies, and unequalled in the whole world; its courts have no rivals in beauty, and are shaded by wonderful groves of oranges.” He adds that he saw a preacher collecting money to ransom some Moors whom a Spanish fleet had captured. He rejoiced in the wine of Malaga, and all the more, it is probable, because its use was forbidden by the Koran: for we have the highest authority to say that stolen waters are sweet. And is it not Al-Makkari who tells the story of a dying Moor who prayed: “O Lord, of all things which thou hast in Paradise, I only ask for two; grant me to drink Malaga and Muscat wine!”
The old fortress once stood here, from which the beautiful Florinde threw herself into the sea, and by her death roused the rebellion that was headed by her father, and drove from the throne her betrayer, Roderick, the last of the Gothic kings. But all these stories, are they not written in the chronicles of Washington Irving, and is there any one so incredulous as to doubt the truthfulness of the thousand-and-one legends of that fascinating and most learned historian? For my part, since I have been dreaming here in the Alhambra, I have no more doubt of the Spanish tales that he told than I have of the verities of the Arabian Nights or the legend of Sleepy Hollow.
What travel was in Spain before the invention ofdiligencesI know not, but probably the rich rode on horse or mule back, and the poor footed it; now that railroads have brought distant cities near each other, it is only occasionally that you are treated to an old-time ride in a coach, and perhaps you may be glad that once at least, in Spain, it was necessary for us to undergo this species of locomotion.
Between Malaga, a great seaport, and Granada, the ancient and glorious city of the Alhambra, there is no communicationexcept bydiligence. The time is fourteen hours. And the hour for starting is six in the evening! You have before you this luxury, of one long, jolting, execrable night ride, with no rest, no change from dewy eve till morn. You may be a delicate lady, or a feeble old man, or a middle-aged invalid, seeking rest and finding none; but you must go by the diligence, and go in the night and all night, or hire a carriage for yourself, and then there is no certainty that you will ever get to the other end of your journey.
The Spanishdiligenceis divided into two inside compartments, theberlinaorcoupeof three seats in front, and interior of six. By waiting over a day or two, we were able to get possession of the three seats in front, and though the fare was more than in the interior, we had the comfort of escaping suffocation by tobacco smoke, and of seeing the fun ahead.
At least a hundred ladies and gentlemen, evidently of the higher class, assembled at the coach office to take leave of some one who was going to Malaga to hold an office under government. It was a genteel and decorous company, and a sight quite peculiar to the country. In America or England, men are often escorted to and from the station, but this was a social, rather than a public ovation, and was a quiet and handsome farewell to a popular man in society.
THE DILIGENCE.
THE DILIGENCE.
THE DILIGENCE.
Wherewithal shall I give you an idea of the team that took us out of Malaga that lovely winter evening! Ten mules, the most refractory, ill-mated, and discordant beasts that have served a master since the days of Balaam, were hitched together and to the diligence with rope harness of primitive construction. On one of the leaders rode a postilion: by the side of the midway pairs ran a man whose duty and privilege it was to beat them; and the wheel mules were guided by reins in the hands of thedriver on the top of the diligence. The driver thrashed the mules at his feet; the whipper thrashed the three pairs in the middle of the team, and the postilion thrashed the leaders. All thrashing at once as fast and as hard as they could. All shouting at once at the top of their voices, the lumbering vehicle is at last fairly launched and away it goes. The postilion on the forward beasts blows his horn to signal the people in the narrow and crooked streets that the thing is coming. The driver snaps his whip like a revolver, and after the snap brings the lash around the flanks of the lazy brutes: the whipper is now on one side and now on the other; whip, whip, whip all the while; kicking, punching, shouting, the mules spread themselves all abroad, never pulling in concert, but each one on his own hook, and as we got along out of the suburbs and into the broader ways of the country, the rebellious creatures seemed to grow frantic under the ceaseless blows rained upon them by their tormentors, and plunged and kicked till one of them made confusion all confounded by turning a somerset out of his harness and bringing the whole concern to a standstill. It was a short process, putting him in again, and then away they all scampered, more like a drove of cattle than a harnessed team, but the beating was redoubled the more they ran, till I really began to think it was time for these dumb beasts to open their mouths and speak some words of remonstrance. And yet how soon we became so demoralized, as rather to enjoy the excitement and frolic of the ride.
Night was drawing on. We begin to ascend the mountains behind Malaga. The city lies at their feet, all glorious in the golden light of a setting sun. The bay is a lake of loveliness; and the sea, unbounded, stretches off under the southern sky. Orchards of olives, always green, and hills that are vineyards in the season of grapes, and orange-trees, are around us,—evidence of a rich and fertilecountry. Yet every half mile or so an armed patrol guards the road to make it safe for travellers, and we have two or three on the top of the diligence with their guns loaded to give a welcome to any “gentleman of the road” who might be disposed to make free with unsuspecting travellers. And so, with the excitement of the novel mode of transportation, and listening with ears erect to the tales of robbers with which Antanazio beguiled the mortal hours, we passed a long and wretched night, winding among craggy mountains on the verge of precipices, and crossing deep ravines.
It was three o’clock in the morning when we reached Loja, where we were to stop for refreshments! out of thediligencetumbled a miserable set of people, sleepy but sleepless, cross and hungry, and made a general rush to the hostelry—by courtesy called an inn. Nobody was up, but in the course of ten or fifteen minutes a dirty old man brought in a pot of chocolate and put a plate of cakes in the middle of a table which had been spread with a cloth overnight. I noticed little black spots around on the cloth, and putting my finger at one of them, away hopped a flea, and a flock of them were soon in motion. The chocolate was good, and the fleas were stimulating. In twenty minutes we were caged again, and, with fresh teams and good spirits, set off for Granada.
About six o’clock in the morning we were passing through Santa Fé,—a large town—in the streets of which hundreds of men and women were seen standing, about to march off in gangs to distant fields to work. The inhabitants do not live in scattered houses over the country,—here and there a farmer’s cottage, as with us,—but, dwelling for safety in villages, they must go miles and miles away to and from their fields of daily labor. This Santa Fé has a history. It was built by Ferdinand and Isabella while laying siege to Granada, and here Columbus cameand successfully made his plea for their royal favor and help to go out into the ocean in search of a new world. He found it that same year. Granada fell in 1492, and the last of the Moorish strongholds yielded to Spanish power.
As we rode across the wide and fertile plain that lies in front of Granada, the lofty mountains appeared; the east was in shadow, and the west tinged with the rising sunlight. Soon the city on a hill rose on the right, crowned with the Alhambra. One could not fail to be excited as the dreams of childhood and youth were becoming real. An hour more and we were in peaceful possession of Granada, and comfortably lodged within the grounds of the Alhambra.