guardians of the town,” he pointed to the battered old statue that
stood on either column, “are Hercules the founder, and Julius Cæsar the
second founder of Seville. Oh, yes! Hercules was here; he stopped and
rested by the river, and founded Seville that time he wandered through
the Peninsula, driving the lowing herds of Geyron before him.”
We had crossed the tawny Guadalquiver, and were driving through Triano,
the potters’ suburb, named for the Emperor Trajan. An open doorway gave
us a glimpse of a man working a wheel with his feet, and holding a newly
moulded clay vase in his hands against the swiftly turning wheel.
“They still make the _azulejos_, and the pottery in Seville, as they did
in the days of the Moors--how do I know? In the days of the Romans!
Remember, when you come to build your house, that the tiles of Triano
are the best, cheapest, and handsomest in the world; that Seville is a
port; and that they can be shipped to you at a fair price. Shall we stop
at the factory and see them? The place supplies the whole of Spain with
crockery. Patsy would fall in love with the big garden pots, and the
pretty jugs.”
The most interesting thing we saw in the factory was the potter himself.
Behind the splendid showrooms, where the fine majolicas and the common
wares of the common people are displayed, in a dark, dank little corner,
sat a man, half his body out of sight, working the potter’s wheel. He
sat on the edge of a square hole in the floor; his legs were hidden, but
his feet were busy turning, turning the wheel. He was old and poor. His
red hands had been in the wet clay who knows how many hours--how many
days? He was spiritless and sad in face and bearing, but oh! the skill
of those poor red hands! The shapeless lump of soft wet clay was thumped
first upon the revolving stand, then as if by magic, though we saw it
with our eyes, it took shape, grew lovely and alive under those hands
that looked so sodden, and yet could turn that gray mud into shapes of
beauty. A cup for a dying man’s broth, a vase for a bride’s rose, a
basin to bathe a new-born child: as each was finished he held it up for
a moment for us to see, then laid it down beside him with the others. I
put a coin in the red, clayey hand. He gave a little mechanical nod, a
word of thanks, and went back to his work. He earns less than an
unskilled child would earn at home. It is doubtful if he can read or
write. He works from dawn to dark--the sight of him gave me great pangs
of homesickness! Pemberton could tell me of no movement to help this man
to a freer life, to a day whose working hours do not absorb every
heartbeat of power. There is only charity! Bread for the hungry, salve
for the sick, almshouse for the worked-out human beast of burden. Oh!
that I could help him to pass through the Gate of Hope into the
Hospitable Land, where every one has his chance, where the ranks are
always open.
Triano was already behind us, and we were out upon the Aracena road that
runs to the north. Tramp, tramp, tramp, the sound of marching men came
towards us out of a cloud of dust. A little farther on we passed a
regiment of small brown soldiers; mere boys, most of them. They all wore
sandals; some had stockings, some were without. They must have been on
fatiguing work, they looked so tired and footsore. In the fields, a band
of peasants were cutting the ruby alfalfa; the air was fragrant with the
honey-sweet smell of it. The harsh whetting of scythes, the soft swish
of sickles through the clover, the song of the leader of the mowers, an
oldish man with a red handkerchief tied round his head, marked the time
for the march of those weary soldiers,
_Adiós padre, y adiós madre,_
_adiós iglesia del pueblo,_
_que voy á servir al rey_
_los ochos años que lo debo._
Goodbye father and mother;
Goodbye church of the village.
I must go and serve the king
For the eight years that I owe him.
One of the last of the soldiers, a superb blond man towering above the
others, repeated the refrain of the mower’s song:
“I must go and serve the king for the eight years that I owe him!”
“Nothing has changed since Strabo praised this pleasant valley,” said
Pemberton. “We still use sickles, and we still take the young men from
the work of the fields, and turn them into soldiers, food for
gunpowder.”
Coming mysteriously towards us, down the straight white road, were half
a dozen little moving heaps of newly cut clover. We could not see, until
they were upon us, the legs of the tiny donkey trotting along under each
fragrant load.
“In Greece,” said Pemberton, “when they want to say a man is a clever,
long-headed chap, they call him an ass. Of all asses, the Spanish is the
wisest. The peasants work them hard, abuse them a little, but they love
them and treat them like members of the family; that is why they are so
intelligent.”
We were passing through gray olive groves, between fields of emerald
wheat: golden butterflies hovered about the wild lavender growing by the
wayside. Here and there, peeping from orchard and ploughed field, were
bits of ruins, all that is left of the once splendid forum, the temples
and palaces of the old Roman city of Italica. At the guardian’s hut,
where we stopped to inquire the way to the circus, we saw a few poor
antiquities, some Roman lamps and fragments of sculpture. The guardian
was absent, and we looked in vain for a trace of the fine Roman mosaic
pavement discovered a hundred years ago, of which we had heard.
A poor monk, Fray José Moscoso, built a wall round it, hoping to
preserve the precious thing, but Soult’s French soldiers destroyed it by
turning the enclosure into a goat pen. There is an engraving of this
mosaic in the Biblioteca Columbina at Seville. When the archæologists
come to Spain,--or rather when the Spanish archæologists carry their
work farther,--there will be a rich treasure trove. Very little
scientific excavation has been undertaken yet. The soil, so rich in
archæological as well as in mineral and agricultural wealth, has hardly
been scratched. That is one of the interesting things about Spain,--it
has still so much to do. With all its wonderful, romantic past, it is
still a young country, with a great future before it. The Spaniards have
been so busy keeping the East out of the West, fighting the battles of
other nations, keeping those wretched Bourbons on the thrones of Italy
where they were not wanted, opening up the New World and making Spanish
America, that they have neglected Spain. That was yesterday. To-day all
is changed. Spain has pulled on the seven-league boots of the giant
Progress, and is striding manfully ahead, making up for lost time.
It is easy enough to turn one’s back upon the great army of ghosts at
Seville in Fair time, when life is at the flood and the pulses leap with
the thrill of it; in Sevilla Vieja, the old Roman city of Italica, it
can’t be done. Here are none but ghosts, and one old gabaloonzy man who
acts, in the absence of the true guardian, as our guide; he is a
shepherd and his sheep crop the grass that grows over Italica. He
stopped his knitting to pick a wild orchid rooted into the crumbling
arch of the old Roman amphitheatre.
“_Miré_,” he said; “this is the bee flower. Can you see the bee?”
His needles clicked again, the only sound in the great circus save the
noise of the sheep cropping the grass of the arena. In and out of the
crimson alfalfa and the wild thyme, buzzed the wild bees gathering
honey. They made a soft humming, at first confused, then growing clearer
and clearer, till the faint hints of meaning in their song seemed to
grow into words:
“Scipio Africanus founded me,” sang the bees, speaking for Italica, “as
a refuge for his veterans after the great war with Carthage.”
Out of the shadowy archway leading to the wild beast dens, a stronger
shadow fell on the grass. Here, in the city his love and care
established for the old soldiers who followed him to victory and
immortal glory, I saw magnanimous Scipio, and at his side, a fainter
pair, Allutius the Celtiberian prince, with the fair woman both men
loved, and whom the Roman, when he learned that she was affianced to
Allutius, renounced, refusing all ransom, and asking as his only
recompense the friendship of Allutius for the Republic. It was not
stranger than all the rest that the shade of the bride looked like
Trinidad.
“Three Emperors I gave to Rome,--Trajan, Hadrian, Theodosius!” ran the
song of the bees, speaking for Italica forsaken.
Trajan--the good emperor of whom Rome still gossips and has so little
harm to say? Why, it was only the other day that standing by your tomb
in the Eternal City, in your forum, in the shadow of the great column
that bears the record of your triumphs, I heard the old story, told and
retold by poet, painter and sculptor; how clear it echoes through the
ages! As you rode forth to battle, a poor widow stood at your bridle and
would not let you pass, crying out for justice for her son, whom your
soldiers had ridden down and killed, innocent of ill. You stopped on
your triumphant way and gave that justice the poor woman cried out for,
then rode on to victory. Five centuries after your death, in the time of
Pope Gregory the Great, your skull was found, with the tongue still
alive, so the great Gregory was able to hold parley with you.
“Trajan! Trajan! Where art thou?” cried Gregory.
“In hell,” answered the Emperor.
“Why art thou in hell?”
“Because I was not baptized!”
At hearing this the grief of Gregory was so great that he went into the
old church of St. Peter, and wept for Trajan in hell. And the tears of
Pope Gregory fell down into hell, and quenched the flames of Trajan’s
torment.
I tell the tale as it was told to me by Giacomo Boni, at the foot of
Trajan’s column in the city of Rome. The spirit of Trajan has laid hold
of Boni, even as it laid hold of the great Gregory, and he, too, arises
to demand for Trajan the Just the tribute of our love.
When the others came back, I told Pemberton what had happened in the old
circus, while they had been hunting for the forum of Ubs Italica.
“You’ll find us dull company after such!” he laughed. “Visits from
Scipio Africanus and Trajan are more exciting than one’s neighbors, and
much more easily returned.”
“The trouble is such friendships are so one-sided!” Patsy objected.
“What can I do for Marcus Aurelius? The greatest Spaniard of them all.
He has done so much for me. His ‘Meditations’ made me think for the
first time in my life.”
“Haven’t you learned yet that you can never return a real benefit to the
person who conferred it? You can only hand it on, pay the debt to the
first needy person you meet. Are we not all debtors to Greeks and
Barbarians? All we can ever do for the dead is to keep their names from
dying; and, what is so much more important, keep alive the flame that
was in them, kindle other souls as they kindled yours. The fire
Prometheus stole from heaven never goes out; it is carried from soul to
soul as one torch is kindled from another, till the whole earth shall be
lighted and no dark places left. The shame of shames is to have received
that fire, and let the flame of it go out in you!”
A peasant man and woman, evidently strangers, strayed into the arena,
and stood staring at the moss-covered stones. The man, a decent fellow
with a pleasant smile and no teeth, greeted the knitting shepherd.
“This perhaps is the ruin of some great palace?” he said.
“It is the bull-ring,” the shepherd corrected, “they say there was a
city here once; you can see where the streets were; there are also bits
of old churches and houses.”
“_Valgame Dios!_” exclaimed the stranger, “perhaps this was an important
town, before it was ruined a hundred years ago or more!”
“_No se sabé_,” said the shepherd indifferently. He called his dog, who
began to herd the sheep, running round and round them in a circle and
barking furiously. The sun was westering; it lacked but an hour of
setting; we were five miles from our dinner, and reluctantly we turned
our backs on Italica, the buried city, with its twice ten hundred years,
and drove back to Seville.
“It is a pestilential trait,--this pulling down old cities to build
new;” said Pemberton, as we drove through the wretched village of
Santiponce. “They pulled down Italica to get building material for
Seville. Only the other day, hardly more than a hundred years ago, they
took some of the stone of the old circus to make the road to Badajos.
Men build cities as birds build nests; not many birds are satisfied with
last year’s nests, not many men with other men’s cities.”
“Have you heard,” called Patsy from the other carriage, as with derisive
hoots they passed us on the old Roman road, “Don Jaime goes with us to
Cordova.”
“As you please,” said the Don; “or take ship and make a little crusade
in the Mediterranean,--to Morocco, if you will.”
The next day we left Seville, stopping on the way to the station for a
last look at the cathedral. We entered by way of the Court of Oranges,
paused beneath the orange trees laden with fruit and blossoms, and drew
long breaths of the delicious fragrance. Here Concepcion and Trinidad
joined us. Both wore the mantilla, still _de rigeur_ for early mass.
Concepcion had a yellow rose in her curls to match her fan. Trinidad
carried a bunch of white rosebuds; she was wearing her own dress to-day;
it showed the curves of beauty better than that loose frock of
Concepcion’s! Both young women looked fresh as roses with the night dew
still on them, and smelt pleasantly of orange-flower water. As we stood
gossiping by the old fountain, a pretty altar boy in white and scarlet
finery came towards us, swinging a gold censer to keep the coals alight.
As he passed he looked at Trinidad, and seemed to swing the censer
towards her: for a moment we saw her in a cloud of blue incense smoke.
We made the tour of the cathedral, and took leave of Murillo’s Guardian
Angel and his San Antonio. A shaft of sunlight carried the stain of the
painted glass, ruby, topaz, emerald, to the columns under the round
window of the Assumption. The golden mass bells tinkled; they were
saying mass in the
[Illustration: ST. JOSEPH AND THE INFANT JESUS.
_Murillo_]
[Illustration: THE GUARDIAN ANGEL.
_Murillo_]
chapel royal before the silver altar where Saint Ferdinand is buried.
Alive, he was King Ferdinand III; dead, he became a saint, because with
his own hands he had carried fagots to burn heretics. A sound of hammers
echoed through the great cathedral.
“The _fiestas_ are over,” said Pemberton; “they are taking down the
monument over the tomb of Ferdinand Columbus.”
As we passed out through the Puerta del Lagarte under the great
crocodile, the twin organs thundered, the choir sang a deep “Amen,” the
bells in the Giralda clanged a parting peal.
“Heavens!” murmured Patsy, as from the train window we looked back at
the darling of Andalusia, lying in the fold of Guadalquiver’s arm, “what
a beautiful world this is!” He blinked as he said it, as if there were
tears in his eyes.
“_Quien no ha vista Sevilla,_
_no ha vista maravilla._”
VII
CORDOVA
_Other towns may be better to live in. None are better to be born in
than Cordova._--EL GRAN CAPITAN
“The old Roman engineer who built Cordova Bridge did a good piece of
work,” said Patsy. “See, those are his foundations; they are solid
still,--it is a good bridge yet! The arches are paltry, modern things
beside them; they were put up centuries later by a Moor called As-Sahn.
It does not seem fair that his name should be remembered, and the
Roman’s forgotten.”
The Roman’s work is not forgotten, and will not be, while Cordova Bridge
stands, and while the city arms remain a bridge on water. The weeds push
between the great stones, a lovely enamel of orange lichen covers the
staunch old piers, around which the amber Guadalquiver laps and murmurs.
The white highroad follows the river south to Seville; the way north is
barred by a range of purple Sierras.
Not even in Italica is the mark of Rome stronger
[Illustration: THE MOSQUE, CORDOVA.]
[Illustration: THE MOSQUE, CORDOVA.]
than in Cordova; the old bridge, the names of the streets, the memories
of the famous Roman citizens who were born here, bring imperial Rome to
mind at every moment. The Romans came to Cordova as conquerors carrying
the eagles through Spain; they made the city the capital of Hispania
Ulterior, and called it the Patrician Colony because so many of the
Romans who settled here and married the graceful, dark-eyed Cordovese
women were of patrician descent. The Roman rule, harsh at first, grew
gentler, for while Rome ruled, Christianity came to Cordova, and pagan
slavery softened to a milder form of vassalage.
“A man can do one of two things with his life,” Patsy philosophized,
“Build it all up into a monument to his own memory, or lay it down in
paving stones--or a bridge--for other people to walk over. Which is the
best worth while? As if one could choose!” He dropped a stone into the
water, and watched the circles spread into larger and larger rings.
We had arrived at Cordova too late to see the Mosque, and had come
directly from the station to the bridge to watch the thin current of
life and traffic pulsing in and out of the dead alive old town. There is
no place like a bridge for gathering impressions of a strange city.
“Hé hé, Macho!” an old muleteer with gold earrings threw a stone at the
brown mule, leader of his team, just in time to prevent his running into
a donkey that was crossing the bridge in the other direction, laden with
paniers full of terra cotta jars. Before the mule train had disappeared,
we heard a great clatter and rattling of loose screws and rivets, as an
old chaise came lumbering along the white highroad from the direction of
Seville, and stopped at the bridge gate. The custom-house officer,
dozing on his bench, woke up, and asked the usual tiresome question.
“Have their Graces anything to declare?”
The gentleman Grace, apparently deaf, behaved as if he had neither seen
nor heard the officer, and had only stopped to flick a horsefly from his
fat white mare. The lady Grace shook her silver curls.
“No, nothing to declare,” she said.
Strapped to the back of the chaise was a cylindrical, horsehair trunk,
studded with brass nails.
“What might this contain?” The officer touched the trunk.
“Only our garments; we have been spending a week at the hacienda.”
“Open it, please. How is this, a ham?”
“Our own. The tax was paid when the pig was killed; twelve _pesetas_. It
was far too much.”
“That is another matter. You must pay the tax on provisions brought
into the city as well.” The officer weighed the ham, and began to make a
calculation with pencil and note-book. “There is also to be added the
fine for not having declared the ham.”
The lady’s eyes snapped angrily, as she gave the officer a piece of her
mind. “You are a miserable loafer! It is to pay salaries to such lazy
fellows as you that honest people are robbed of their honest money!”
It was growing late. By the time the ham was settled for, the vivid blue
of the western sky had turned soft apple-green. We climbed a crazy stair
to the window of the gate, to avoid a drove of cattle driven across the
bridge by a _vaquero_ in a brown _capote_. The comfortable smell of kine
came in at the window. On the other side of the Guadalquiver, in the
golden haze of dust kicked up by those silly, helter-skeltering cows,
lay Cordova. Before us rose the great Mosque; in the centre the towering
masonry of the Christian Cathedral stood out in bold outline against the
distant Sierra. The sun set quietly in the quiet sky; a few minutes
after, the whole heaven was aflame with the glorious crimson after-glow;
the river ran red; the whole earth shone with the reflection. The sunset
was like the death of some great and unsuspected saint, some humble man,
the glory of whose life is only known when he has gone and the whole
world is filled with the light of the soul that has just passed from it.
“The moon will soon be up,” said Patsy. “Let us wait for it. We are not
likely to see sunset and moonrise from Cordova bridge again.”
The custom-house officer made room for us on his wooden bench. As we sat
watching the swallows flit back and forth over the river, Patsy told us
stories about the great men who had lived at Cordova, and we all made
believe we saw them cross the old bridge. A tall military man with a
clanking sword passed through the gate.
“There goes Marcellus, the Tribune who conquered Cordova for Rome; our
friend the engineer must have come here soon after him; isn’t it a pity
we can’t find his name, when such silly ones are remembered?”
“He built a good bridge; does it matter whether he was called Caius or
Cassius?”
“Why, yes, it matters to me,” Patsy persisted. “There was another
Marcellus who came to Cordova later, in Julius Cæsar’s time. How talent
runs in families! Cæsar sent him to rebuild the town after he had half
destroyed it for taking Pompey’s side in that old quarrel we boys used
to fight over again at school. The Senecas came from here, too; there is
a square named for them. You remember the story about Seneca’s wife?
When Nero sent word that Seneca must die, both he and his wife opened
the veins in their arms. Seneca, who was much older than his wife, died
first, whereupon Madam’s women bound up her veins, and she lived several
years after. There was talent in that family, too; the father was a
writer, and Lucan, the poet, was either a cousin or nephew. Hullo! Look
at the folds of that old beggar’s capa; doesn’t it look like a toga? Now
remember that cantankerous face of Seneca’s in the bust at the Naples
Museum, and if you can’t see Nero’s tutor pottering over that old bridge
you’ve no imagination!”
The swallows had all gone to their nests; the soft, fumbling flight of a
pair of small bats wove a pattern against the fading sky.
“That portly gentleman on the white mule might well be Hosius, one time
Bishop of Cordova. You never heard of him, perhaps, but you must have
heard of the Nicene Creed,” Patsy went on. It was evident that we had to
listen to all he knew about Cordova.
“The next time you hear that creed repeated, remember Hosius, Bishop
here in Cordova for sixty-three years; he presided at the Council of
Nicea when the creed was made. That was after he had failed in the task
Constantine set him of persuading Arius to give up the Unitarian heresy.
Think how often he must have ambled over this old bridge.”
It always has been hard to persuade people to give up the Unitarian
heresy! Whenever I hear the Nicene creed, I shall think of Bishop Hosius
whom, that night of nights, we saw ride across the old Roman bridge at
Cordova on a white mule.
“The one I should like best to have known of all the great men who ever
lived at Cordova was the Caliph Abd-er-Rahman. What a man he was!
Servant of the compassionate, they called him. That is his Mosque, those
are his palms; he planted the great-grandfathers of those trees with his
own hand. If you could make Seneca’s toga out of that old beggar’s
_capa_, can’t you see Abd-er-Rahman’s bournous in that young fellow’s
cloak? He is as dark as an Arab; the red handkerchief knotted round his
head under the sombrero makes a decent turban. He has the swagger of a
_torrero_. Conqueror of bulls, conqueror of men, where is the
difference? Toga, bournous, _capa_,--all three garments are practically
the same.”
“What do you suppose Gonsalvo de Cordova, El Gran Capitan wore?”
“A cloak like the rest of them, I fancy. There are a great many things
named for him in the city over there: a theatre, a paseo, I don’t know
what else. In poetry they call him the Scourge of Islam. When I showed
Don Jaime a rather steep bill, he whistled, and said ‘They have made you
out the account of _el Gran Capitan_.’ The size of the bills he
presented to Ferdinand and Isabel for scourging the infidel is the thing
he is best remembered for in Cordova.”
“That’s gossip; history says he really was a great captain,” I
protested.
“According to the proverb, it is the blood of the soldier makes the
great captain,” said Patsy. “As to history, Martial says;--’Give up
frivolous fable and read history!’ He also says, ‘Fool that I was! Why
did I not follow the advice I gave Mamura?’ But, truly, isn’t to-day’s
gossip, to-morrow’s history?”
“To-morrow’s history will be rheumatism if we stay mooning here any
longer,” J. said firmly. “Right about face, homeward, march!”