WE GET TO ALGECIRAS, AND ARE MADE WRETCHED.--THE FAT SPANIARD AND
THE LEAN ENGLISHMAN.--A RED-LETTER DAY AT GIBRALTAR.--THE
LIGHTS.--ADIEU TO EUROPE.
All the old difficulties about boats recommenced at Malaga; and, much as
we disliked the place, which seemed to have grown dustier and fishier
since we had left it, we were obliged to remain there several days. At
last we learned somehow that there was a boat, named the _Adriana_,
doing weekly services between Malaga and Algeciras, and Malaga and
Tangiers, and that, as all communication by sea between Malaga and
Gibraltar had ceased on account of the cholera, on the _Adriana_ we must
build all our hopes.
But, as luck would have it, she had left the harbour just as we had come
in, so that there was nothing to do but await her return, and pray for
fair weather. What made our very fates, as it were, hang upon the
_Adriana_, was the information received by telegram that a boat left
Gibraltar for Oran on the following Friday. It was now Monday, and,
according to all accounts, the _Adriana_ was to return on Tuesday or
Wednesday, and go to Algeciras the next day. But Tuesday passed, and
Wednesday came; and people prophesied bad weather; and the _Adriana_ did
not appear. Cervantes and his fellow-captives at Algiers hardly looked
oftener for the ship that was to deliver them, than did we for the
_Adriana_. We were always running down to the beach and straining our
eyes after some imaginary sail. But none appeared; and we were dining in
rather a melancholy state at the prospect of losing our boat to Oran,
when the master of the hotel sent us a message that the _Adriana_ had
arrived, and would set out for Algeciras at seven o’clock next morning.
We had splendid weather for the trip. The dawn was grey and pearly, and
from its heart, like some gorgeous bird slowly soaring from a dusky
nest, arose the warm, brilliant, southern day. The sea was smooth as a
lake; the sky of deepest, warmest blue; the mountains, of loveliest form
and colour; the little sailing boats, fairy things, seen in so enchanted
a scene and atmosphere! Words, indeed, fail to give any idea of this
beautiful coast scenery; but it must be seen on such a day as we saw it.
One is not accustomed to think much of the beauty of Gibraltar, and the
first sight of it was quite a surprise to me. The Cornish coast has no
finer view than this colossal mass of limestone rock, and the colour of
it, so grey and silvery, and so soft, against a light-blue sky, is
something indescribable.
We had been assured again and again that we should reach Algeciras in
time to get into Gibraltar that night; but, as the afternoon wore on,
public opinion on board veered. The captain, who seemed quite confident
about the matter at noon, shook his head gravely an hour later.
“You doubt,” I said, “whether we shall reach Algeciras in time, or
whether we shall find means of getting into Gibraltar?”
“I doubt both,” he replied.
“But,” I continued, “we are going to start for Oran by the steamer that
leaves Gibraltar to-morrow. It is absolutely necessary that we get into
Gibraltar to-night, or the steamer may have left.”
“I don’t say that you can’t do it, Señora,” he said; “but there are
difficulties. It is difficult to get into Gibraltar by sea at all, on
account of the quarantine, and after four o’clock it is impossible.” He
pulled out his watch. “I am afraid by the time we reach Algeciras it
will be too late for that. As to riding round the bay, if we get into
harbour in pretty good time, and if you can get horses, and if it is
tolerably light, why you can do it, of course.”
There was nothing to do but wait; but the Captain’s prognostics
proved true. We did not reach Algeciras in time to get into
Gibraltar--supposing there had been boats to take us, which there were
not; and as to the latter part of his speech, that was also true; for
there was no obstacle in the way of riding round the bay that night,
except that there were no horses; and if there had been horses, there
was no time; and if there had been time, there was no light.
There is only one inn at Algeciras, and hither flocked all the unhappy
passengers by the _Adriana_, clamouring for horses, mules, boats,
guides, anything so long as they could get into Gibraltar that night.
It was a cry of “A horse, a horse, a kingdom for a horse!” you would
have fancied that everybody’s life hung upon getting into Gibraltar. I
think some gentlemen did get horses, but they were exceptions; and the
little inn was so crowded as to present the appearance of a camp. Beds
were made up _ex improviso_ all over the house, and we had to content
ourselves with a hole of a room, boasting neither window nor chimney,
nor chair, nor table, nor, indeed, any furniture but two beds, and fleas
innumerable.
Before retiring to this cell for the night, however, we had a very good
dinner, seasoned with some racy gossip of Gibraltar life. We were too
tired to dine at the _table d’hôte_ (if you are wise, avoid _table
d’hôtes_ when possible), and preferred to eat the crumbs that fell from
other travellers’ tables afterwards. These were served to us in a
pleasant little _comedor_, looking towards beautiful, inhospitable
Gibraltar, with its thousand lights shining like tiers of stars above
the dark blue bay. The waiter, who called himself an Englishman, though
on what grounds I cannot precisely determine--perhaps because he was
born in sound of Gibraltar gun-fire--served the dinner, and then sat
down to see us eat. He was so young, so evidently overworked, and so
unconventional as a waiter, that we took this familiarity as a matter of
course, and listened to what he had to say.
“You seem to be the only waiter in the place,” we said; “how do you
manage to attend upon everybody?”
He sighed a very long sigh.
“Yes, it’s awful work,” he said, in his queer Gibraltar English, “since
the Quarantine regulation keeps everybody out of Gib. I am ready to drop
of fatigue now, and this has been going on for weeks. We don’t get to
bed till midnight, and we are up at four or five o’clock in the morning,
and sleep just anywhere. The Quarantine is worse than the cholera, ten
times.”
“You are English?” I asked, a little cautiously.
“The Lord be praised, I am! Oh! the Spaniards are a bad set, I assure
you; and don’t we pitch into ’em when we get a chance! It was not very
long ago that we had a regular fight, six Englishmen against six
Spaniards, all of us young men, and the Spaniards came off very
shabbily. We killed one outright.”
“How shocking! but do you mean to say that the police don’t interfere?”
“That’s as it happens. The English have no business here in Algeciras,
you know, and if the Spanish gendarmes disturbed themselves whenever
knives are drawn, they’d have an uneasy time of it.”
He went on to tell us some more stories about the state of society in
Algeciras, which we took _cum grano salis_, having no personal
experience of it.
“Shall I not take mine ease at mine inn?” was not applicable to the
unfortunate people whom unhospitable Gib. had driven into Algeciras. We
dined pretty well because we were not dainty; but so stringent were the
Quarantine regulations, that such refreshing luxuries as lemonade,
vegetables, and fresh fruits could not be had for love or money.
Whatever we asked for, and we only asked for very simple things, “was at
Gibraltar;” indeed, everything was at Gibraltar--except the fleas.
We went to bed early, having ordered horses and Spanish saddles at six
o’clock next morning; but the fleas would let us have no sleep. There
was no armour against them but Spanish patience. Glad indeed were we
when morning came, and, after a hasty toilet and a cup of horrible
coffee, we descended to the street, being informed that the horses were
ready. The word _ready_ does not however bear its English signification
in Spain. If you have ordered a horse in England and you are told it is
ready, you know that you have only to put on hat and gloves and mount.
In Spain, it suffices for an animal to exist, or for a thing to be known
to be somewhere, and they are both ready. We had made, perhaps, an
unwise bargain, but the only one that seemed possible to make, in
ordering horses of two proprietors, two of a very big Spaniard and one
of a very small Englishman. Of course this led to all sorts of
complications, but I must tell my story from the beginning. In the first
place, on being told that the horses were ready, and not finding them on
the spot, we sent a man to look after the lad who had gone to look after
the little boy who had gone to look after the horses that the Spaniard
and Englishman had promised to send, but didn’t. When the man had come
back to say that the lad told him that the little boy told him that the
men told him they were coming, we resigned ourselves for a little while,
and, by-and-by, the men and the horses did indeed come. But then ensued
an altercation as fierce as any detailed by Homer. It was like the fable
of the big boy with the little coat, and the little boy with the big
coat. The Englishman’s horse was small, but he had only a large saddle,
and the Spaniard had only a small saddle for a very large horse. There
was what is popularly called a “row,” and the inhabitants of Algeciras
turned out like a swarm of bees to see and hear and take part in it.
This commotion lasted nearly an hour, and not till two hours from the
time of our descent into the street did we set off.
The ride round the bay was so full of gracious, soothing beauty, that we
soon forgot all the discomforts gone through before. The atmosphere of
early morning is always delicious in the South; and, to-day, the pale
blue bay, the green heights, the glistening white sands, the terraced
city, and the grey rocks, seen through so transparent a medium, looked
more like a reflexion of a beautiful scene than a scene itself.
We rode quite close to the water’s edge, and the musical plashing of the
waves, and the sweetness and softness of the air, would have healed any
weariness of flesh and spirit, I think. We were weary enough at
starting, but had grown quite fresh and strong by the time we had
reached the “Lines.”
The only drawback to this delightful ride was the garrulousness of my
guide. The fat Spaniard had placed himself, with all the baggage, on his
strongest horse, and led the way, looking the picture of slothful,
self-indulgent _nonchalance_; my friend rode his second horse,
comfortably mounted on a Spanish saddle; I followed on the little
Englishman’s horse, a small, incapable beast, who had evidently been
over-worked and ill-fed during the last few busy weeks.
There are some people, luckily very few, who inspire one with
instinctive repugnance, and this little Englishman, as he called
himself, was one. He was so small, freckled, and ugly, so conceited, and
so envious of the big Spaniard, that he reminded one of the frog in
Æsop’s fables, which tried to blow itself out to the size of the ox.
“Look at that fellow going there,” he said in his queer Gibraltar
English, and pointing to his enemy; “he is the worst man in the world,
and would as soon stick a knife into you as look at you. Just because I
set up as horse-dealer and letter, he spites me so that he would kill me
if he dared; but I’m an Englishman, and he just knows that he’d better
keep his hands off me. He is as mad as a hornet because you English
ladies employed me, although he hadn’t another horse in the world. When
English travellers come to Algeciras, whom do you suppose they would
employ, Señora, an Englishman or a Spaniard?”
“Why, I suppose they would pick the best horses,” I replied wickedly;
“that is the most important point.”
He looked at his own poor brute a little ruefully. “I’d back my horse
against any in Gibraltar when he is fresh,” he said, “but he went this
same journey late last night, and has been hacking at it for days.”
“Precisely,” I answered, “he can only just put one foot before the
other, and if the saddle hurts him as much as it does me, the sooner I
get off the better for both of us.”
“Yes, I know the saddle goes badly,” he went on in the same aggrieved
tone; “but it’s all that bad man’s fault. His saddle just fits Bobby
here, and this one is just twice too big. I ran home and got the very
pillows from under my wife’s head, who is ill of ague, but they slip off
like nothing.”
“I’m sorry you robbed your wife of her pillows,” I said; “but, pillows
or no pillows, my saddle is as uneven as a gridiron, whilst the Señora
yonder rides as comfortably as possible.”
“Oh! yes; that bad man is rich, you know, and can afford to have
everything nice. It’s just such men as he who eat up poor young
beginners like us.”
“Of course,” I answered, coolly; “the man may be bad or good, but so
long as he supplies good horses and comfortable saddles, he’ll find
customers--though he is a Spaniard, and were to run a knife into
somebody every night.” And with this conclusion, we concluded.
We were now on English ground, and fancied ourselves in England. The
change happened all on a sudden. We had been in Spain a few minutes
back. Spain was not a hundred yards off, and now we were at home, among
home-like faces, friendly voices, and familiar scenes; and over our
heads, on the crest of the grand old rock waved the jolly “Union Jack.”
There was a hunt outside the town, and we met parties of officers in
scarlet, accompanied by fair-haired girls, managing their thoroughbreds
as only Englishwomen can; groups of red-haired, clear-complexioned
Highlanders, stood about the camps, and the infantine population of some
English village seemed out at play on the grass; sturdy housewives were
cooking, washing, and nursing babies in the tents; the roads were no
longer break-neck bridle-tracks, but real, broad, smooth roads, hard and
fit for use; the Spanish soldier, in tight moccasins and short brown
cloak, had disappeared as if by magic, giving way to the scarlet coat
and the tartan.
The “Spanish lines” are, indeed, no more nor less than a handful of
houses called by courtesy the town of La Linea. In Ford’s time, La Linea
consisted of “a few miserable hovels, the lair of greedy officials, who
live on the crumbs of Gibraltar;” at least so he writes of it in 1839,
but we were assured that there is a decent inn at La Linea now, and that
it is quite possible for belated travellers to sleep there. The contrast
between Spain and England--two opposed countries placed in such strange
juxtaposition--is most striking. You pass in five minutes from a land of
sleepy, blissful lethargy to a stirring, bustling, look-alive sea-port
and garrison town. I dare say Gibraltar would not be a pleasant place to
live in, but after spending so many weeks among people who think nothing
in the world worth hurrying about, and no one’s time of the slightest
importance whatever, it was delightful to breathe the business-like,
martial air of the place. You cannot help doing in Spain as the
Spaniards do, and by the time you have traversed the length and breadth
of Old Castile and Andalusia, you must be of a very unimpressionable
temperament indeed if you have not imbibed the _genius loci_, that
indescribable Oriental habit of living from morning to night without the
least inclination to trouble oneself about anything under the sun.
Here, in Gibraltar, you feel at once subjected to the military spirit
that rules it. The streets are alive with music; the sharp fife, the
warlike cornet, the rolling drum; there is always a “recall” being
sounded, or a _réveillé_, or a gun being fired. You might fancy war was
going on from the constant bustling to and fro of regiments and
recurrence of signals. And there is a stirring air about the streets
which is quite new. The town is alive with people, all intent on
business or pleasure, and if you have any business on hand, you find
means of doing it quickly and satisfactorily.
The day was delicious, and at the Club-house Hotel we were met by my
friend’s cousin, Colonel----, who carried us off to his pretty house
outside the town, and introduced us to his wife and beautiful little
fair-haired child. The house commanded a lovely view of the sea, and
was surrounded by roses and geraniums in full bloom; otherwise we might
have imagined ourselves in England, so thoroughly English was the tone
of the household. We had a long, busy, delightful day at Gibraltar,
driving about in Colonel----’s pretty English carriage; and the very
name of the place will always be pleasant to me on account of the
wonders of nature and art we saw there, the brilliant atmosphere that
made every impression doubly vivid, above all, the graceful and hearty
hospitality of our host and hostess. Gibraltar is magnificent. Sorry,
indeed, were we that we could not see it better and make it the
head-quarters of excursions to Ronda, Tangiers, and Tetuan. As it was,
we saw something of the stupendous galleries tunnelled in the rock,
something of the bastions and batteries, something of the marvellous
scenery from the heights, and something of the gay, rattling,
picturesque town. We saw nothing of the apes--a little colony who have
the topmost crags all to themselves, and are most religiously and wholly
tabooed, no one being allowed to molest or kill them--and nothing of
the three hundred classes of plants, which are said to flourish on the
rock. Neither did we see anything of those picturesque Ronda smugglers
whom Captain Scott describes so enthusiastically in his travels
published nearly thirty years ago. But we saw enough of Gibraltar to
leave it with regret and to look upon our last day in Spain--for I
suppose I may so call it--as one of the brightest.
At nine o’clock gun-fire we left the port in an open boat, and after an
hour’s rowing reached our steamer, the _Spahis_. The night was glorious,
and the sea as smooth as glass. Overhead shone myriads of large bright
stars, and the lights of Gibraltar made a lesser, but hardly less
brilliant, firmament lower down. We thought, as we looked alternately at
those shining fields above and below, we had happy auspices for our
onward journey.
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