There is nothing strikes the traveller in his approach to the rock of
Gibraltar so much as its resemblance to the trade-mark of the Prudential
Insurance Company. He cannot help feeling that the famous stronghold is
pictorially a plagiarism from the advertisements of that institution. As
the lines change with the ship's course, the resemblance is less
remarkable; but it is always remarkable, and I suppose it detracts
somewhat from the majesty of the fortress, which we could wish to be
more entirely original. This was my feeling when I first saw Gibraltar
four years ago, and it remains my feeling after having last seen it four
weeks ago. The eye seeks the bold, familiar legend, and one suffers a
certain disappointment in its absence. Otherwise Gibraltar does not and
cannot disappoint the most exacting tourist.
[Illustration: 04 GIBRALTAR FROM THE BAY]
The morning which found us in face of it was in brisk contrast to the
bland afternoon on which we had parted from Madeira. No flocking
coracles surrounded our steamer, with crews eager to plunge into the
hissing brine for shillings or equivalent quarters. The whitecaps looked
snow cold as they tossed under the sharp north wind, and the tender
which put us ashore had all it could do to embark and disembark us
upright, or even aslant. But, once in the lee of the rocky Africa
breathed a genial warmth across the strait beyond which its summits
faintly shimmered; or was it the welcome of Cook's carriages which
warmed us so? We were promised separate vehicles for parties of three or
four, with English-speaking drivers, and the promise was fairly well
kept. The carriages bore a strong family likeness to the pictures of
Spanish state coaches of the seventeenth century, and were curtained and
cushioned in reddish calico. Rubber tires are yet unknown in southern
Europe, and these mediaeval arks bounded over the stones with a violence
which must once have been characteristic of those in the illustrations.
But the English of our English-speaking driver was all that we could
have asked for the shillings we paid Cook for him, or, if it was not, it
was all we got. He was an energetic young fellow and satisfyingly
Spanish in coloring, but in his eagerness to please he was less grave
than I could now wish; I now wish everything in Spain to have been in
keeping.
What was most perfectly, most fittingly in keeping was the sight of the
Moors whom we began at once to see on the wharves and in the streets.
They probably looked very much like the Moors who followed their caliph,
if he was a caliph, into Spain when he drove Don Roderick out of his
kingdom and established his own race and religion in the Peninsula.
Moslem costumes can have changed very little in the last eleven or
twelve hundred years, and these handsome fellows, who had come over with
fresh eggs and vegetables and chickens and turkeys from Tangier, could
not have been handsomer when they bore scimitars and javelins instead of
coops and baskets. They had baggy drawers on, and brown cloaks, with
bare, red legs and yellow slippers; one, when he took his fez off, had a
head shaved perfectly bald, like the one-eyed Calender or the Barber's
brother out of the _Arabian Nights;_ the sparse mustache and
short-forked beard heightened the verisimilitude. Whether they squatted
on the wharf, or passed gravely through the street, or waited for custom
in their little market among the hen-coops and the herds of rather lean,
dispirited turkeys (which had not the satisfaction of their American
kindred in being fattened for the sacrifice, for in Europe all turkeys
are served lean), these Moors had an allure impossible to any Occidental
race. It was greater even than that of their Semitic brethren, who had a
market farther up in the town, and showed that a Jewish market could be
much filthier than a' Moorish market without being more picturesque.
Into the web of Oriental life were wrought the dapper figures of the
red-coated, red-cheeked English soldiers, with blue, blue eyes and
incredible red and yellow hair, lounging or hurrying orderlies with
swagger-sticks, and apparently aimless privates no doubt bent 'upon
quite definite business or pleasure. Now and then an English groom led
an English horse through the long street from which the other streets in
Gibraltar branch up and down hill, for there is no other level; and now
and then an English man or woman rode trimly by.
The whole place is an incongruous mixture of Latin and Saxon. The
strictly South-European effect of the houses and churches is a mute
protest against the alien presence which keeps the streets so clean and
maintains order by means of policemen showing under the helmets of the
London bobby the faces of the native alguazil. In the shops the
saleswomen speak English and look Spanish. Our driver, indeed, looked
more Spanish than he spoke English.
His knowledge of our rude tongue extended hardly beyond the mention of
certain conventional objects of interest, and did not suffice to explain
why we could not see the old disused galleries of the fortifications. I
do not know why we wished to see these; I doubt if we really did so, but
we embittered life for that well-meaning boy by our insistence upon
them, and we brought him under unjust suspicion of deceit by forcing him
to a sort of time-limit in respect to them. We appealed from him to the
blandest of black-mus-tached, olive-skinned bobby-alguazils, who
directed us to a certain government office for a permit. There our
application caused something like dismay, and we were directed to
another office, but were saved from the shame of failure by incidentally
learning that the galleries could not be seen till after three o'clock.
As our ship sailed at that hour, we were probably saved a life-long
disappointment.
Everywhere the rock of the Prudential beetles and towers over the town;
but the fortifications are so far up in the sky that you can really
distinguish nothing but the Marconi telegraphic apparatus at the top.
Along the sea-level, which the town mostly keeps, the war-like harness
of the stronghold shows through the civil dress of the town in barracks
and specific forts and gray battle-ships lying at anchor in the docks.
But all is simple and reserved, in the right English fashion. The
strength of the place is not to be put forth till it is needed, which
will be never, since it is hard to imagine how it can ever be even
attempted by a hostile force. This is not saying, I hope, that an
American fleet could not batter it down, nor leave one letter of the
insurance advertisement after another on the face of the precipice.
There is a pretty public garden at Gibraltar in that part of the town
which is farthest from the steamer's landing, and this proved the end of
our excursion in our state coach. We found other state coaches there,
and joined their passengers in strolling over the pleasant paths and
trying to make out what bird it was singing somewhere in the trees. We
made out an almond-tree in bloom, after some dispute; and, in fact, the
climate there was much softer than at the landing, so insidiously soft
that it required great force of character to keep from buying the
flowers which some tasteful boys gathered from the public beds. There is
a mild monument or two in this garden, to what memories I promptly
failed to remember afterward; but as there are more military memories in
the world than is good for it, and as these were undoubtedly military
memories, I cannot much blame myself in the matter. After viewing them,
there was nothing left to do but to get lunch, which we got extremely
good at the hotel where a friend led us. There was at this hotel a
head-waiter, in a silver-braided silk dress-coat of a mauve color, who
imagined our wants so perfectly that I shall always regret not taking
more of the omelette; the table-waiter urged it upon us twice with true
friendliness. The eggs must have been laid for it in Africa that morning
at daybreak, and brought over by a Moorish marketman, but we turned from
the poetic experience of this omelette in the greedy hope of better
things. Better things there could not be, but the fish was as good as
the fish at Madeira, and the belief of the chops that they were lamb and
not kid seemed better founded.
There had been an excellent bottle of Rioja Blanca, such as you may have
as good at some Spanish restaurant in New York for as little money; and
the lunch, when reckoned up in English shillings and Spanish undertones,
was not cheap. Yet it was not dear, either, and there was no specific
charge for that silver-braided dress-coat of a mauve color. An English
dean in full clericals, and some English ladies talking in the
waiting-room, added an agreeable confusion to our doubt of where and
what we were, and we came away from the hotel as well content as if we
had lunched in Plymouth or Bath. The table-waiter took an extra fee for
confiding that he was a Milanese, and was almost the only Italian in
Gibraltar; whether he was right or not I do not know, but it was
certainly not his fault that we did not take twice of the omelette.
It is said that living is dear in Gibraltar, especially in the matter of
house rent. The houses in the town are like all the houses of Latin
Europe in their gray or yellowish walls of stone or stucco and their
dark-green shutters. There is an English residential quarter at the east
end of the town, where the houses may be different, for all I know; the
English of our driver or the hire of our state coach did not enable us
to visit that suburb, where the reader may imagine villas standing in
grounds with lawns and gardens about them. The English have prevailed
nothing against the local civilization in most things, while they have
infected it with the costliness of the whole Anglo-Saxon life. We should
not think seven hundred dollars in New York dear for even a quite small
house, but it has come to that in Gibraltar, and there they think it
dear, with other things proportionately so. Of course, it is an
artificial place; the fortress makes the town, and the town in turn
lives upon the fortress.
The English plant themselves nowhere without gathering English
conveniences or conventions about them; Americans would not always think
them comforts. There is at Gibraltar a club or clubs; there is a hunt,
there is a lending library, there is tennis, there is golf, there is
bridge, there is a cathedral, and I dare say there is gossip, but I do
not know it. It was difficult to get land for the golf links, we heard,
because of the Spanish jealousy of the English occupation, which they
will not have extended any farther over Spanish soil, even in golf
links. Gibraltar is fondly or whimsically known to the invaders as Gib,
and I believe it is rather a favorite sojourn, though in summer it is
frightfully hot, held out on the knees and insteps of the rock to the
burning African sun, which comes up every morning over the sea after
setting Sahara on fire.
[Illustration: 05 GIBRALTAR FROM THE NEUTRAL GROUND]
All this foreign life must be exterior to the aboriginal Spanish life
which has so long outlasted the Moorish, and is not without hope of
outlasting the English. I do not know what the occupations and
amusements of that life are, but I will suppose them unworthy enough.
There must be a certain space of neutral life uniting or dividing the
two, which would form a curious inquiry, but would probably not lend
itself to literary study. Besides this middle ground there is another
neutral territory at Gibraltar which we traversed after luncheon, in
order to say that we had been in Spain. That was the country of many
more youthful dreamers in my time than, I fancy, it is in this. We used
then, much more than now, to read Washington Irving, his _Tales of the
Alhambra,_ and his history of _The Conquest of Granada,_ and we read
Prescott's histories of Spanish kings and adventures in the old world
and the new. We read _Don Quixote,_ which very few read now, and we read
_Gil Blas,_ which fewer still now read; and all these constituted Spain
a realm of faery, where every sort of delightful things did or could
happen. I for my part had always expected to go to Spain and live among
the people I had known in those charming books, yet I had been often in
Europe, and had spent whole years there without ever going near Spain.
But now, I saw, was my chance, and when the friend who had been lunching
with us asked if we would not like to drive across that neutral
territory and go into Spain a bit, it seemed as if the dream of my youth
had suddenly renewed itself with the purpose of coming immediately true.
It was a charmingly characteristic foretaste of Spanish travel that the
driver of the state coach which we first engaged should, when we
presently came back, have replaced himself by another for no other
reason than, perhaps, that he could so provide us with a worse horse. I
am not sure of this theory, and I do not insist upon it, but it seems
plausible.
As soon as we rounded the rock of Gibraltar and struck across a flatter
country than I supposed could be found within fifty miles of Gibraltar,
we were swept by a blast which must have come from the Pyrenees, it was
so savagely rough and cold. It may be always blowing there as a Spanish
protest against the English treatment of the neutral territory; in fact,
it does not seem quite the thing to build over that space as the English
have done, though the structures are entirely peaceable, and it is not
strange that the Spaniards have refused to meet them half-way with a
good road over it, or to let them make one the whole way. They stand
gravely opposed to any further incursion. Officially in all the Spanish
documents the place is styled “Gibraltar, temporarily occupied by Great
Britain,” and there is a little town which you see sparkling in the sun
no great way off in Spain called San Roque, of which the mayor is also
mayor of Gibraltar; he visits his province once a year, and many people
living for generations over the Spanish line keep the keys of the houses
that they personally or ancestrally own in Gibraltar. The case has its
pathos, but as a selfish witness I wish they had let the English make
that road through the neutral territory. The present road is so bad that
our state coach, in bounding over its inequalities, sometimes almost
flung us into the arms of the Spanish beggars always extended toward us.
They were probably most of them serious, but some of the younger ones
recognized the _bouffe_ quality of their calling. One pleasant
starveling of ten or twelve entreated us for bread with a cigarette in
his mouth, and, being rewarded for his impudence, entered into the
spirit of the affair and asked for more, just as if we had given
nothing.
A squalid little town grew up out of the flying gravel as we approached,
and we left our state coach at the custom-house, which seemed the chief
public edifice. There the inspectors did not go through the form of
examining our hand-bags, as they would have done at an American
frontier; and they did not pierce our carriage cushions with the long
javelins with which they are armed for the detection of smuggling among
the natives who have been shopping in Gibraltar. As the gates of that
town are closed every day at nightfall by a patrol with drum and fife,
and everybody is shut either in or out, it may easily happen with
shoppers in haste to get through that they bring dutiable goods into
Spain; but the official javelins rectify the error.
We left our belongings in our state coach and started for that stroll in
Spain which I have measured as two up-town blocks, by what I think a
pretty accurate guess; two cross-town blocks I am sure it was not. It
was a mean-looking street, unswept and otherwise unkempt, with the usual
yellowish or grayish buildings, rather low and rather new, as if
prompted by a mistaken modern enterprise. They were both shops and
dwellings; I am sure of a neat pharmacy and a fresh-looking cafe
restaurant, and one dwelling all faced with bright-green tiles. An
alguazil--I am certain he was an alguazil, though he looked like an
Italian carabiniere and wore a cocked hat--loitered into a police
station; but I remember no one else during our brief stay in that street
except those _bouffe_ boy beggars. Of course, they wished to sell us
postal-cards, but they were willing to accept charity on any terms.
Otherwise our Spanish tour was, so far as we then knew, absolutely
without incident; but when we got too far away to return we found that
we had been among brigands as well as beggars, and all the Spanish
picaresque fiction seemed to come true in the theft of a black chudda
shawl, which had indeed been so often lost in duplicate that it was time
it was entirely lost. Whether it was secretly confiscated by the
customs, or was accepted as a just tribute by the populace from a poetic
admirer, I do not know, but I hope it is now in the keeping of some
dark-eyed Spanish girl, who will wear it while murmuring through her
lattice to her _novio_ on the pavement outside. It was rather heavy to
be worn as a veil, but I am sure she could manage it after dark, and
_could_ hold it under her chin, as she leaned forward to the grille,
with one little olive hand, so that the _novio_ would think it was a
black silk mantilla. Or if it was a gift from him, it would be all
right, anyway.
Our visit to Spain did not wholly realize my early dreams of that
romantic land, and yet it had not been finally destitute of incident.
Besides, _we_ had not gone very far into the country; a third block
might have teemed with adventure, but we had to be back on the steamer
before three o'clock, and we dared not go beyond the second. Even
within this limit a love of reality underlying all my love of romance
was satisfied in the impression left by that dusty, empty, silent
street. It seemed somehow like the street of a new, dreary, Western
American town, so that I afterward could hardly believe that the shops
and restaurants had not eked out their height with dashboard fronts. It
was not a place that I would have chosen for a summer sojourn; the sense
of a fly-blown past must have become a vivid part of future experience,
and yet I could imagine that if one were born to it, and were young and
hopeful, and had some one to share one's youth and hope, that Spanish
street, which was all there was of that Spanish town, might have had its
charm. I do not say that even for age there was not a railway station by
which one might have got away, though there was no sign of any trains
arriving or departing--perhaps because it was not one o'clock in the
morning, which is the favorite hour of departure for Spanish trains.
When we turned to drive back over the neutral territory the rock of
Gibraltar suddenly bulked up before us, in a sheer ascent that left the
familiar Prudential view in utterly inconspicuous unimpressive-ness.
Till one has seen it from this point one has not truly seen it. The vast
stone shows like a half from which the other half has been sharply cleft
and removed, that the sense of its precipitous magnitude may
unrelievedly strike the eye; and it seems to have in that moment the
whole world to tower up in from the level at its feet. No dictionary,
however unabridged, has language adequate to convey the notion of it.