one of the latest recollections. Between San Juan de los Reyes and the
palace of Roderick we met unexpectedly a crowd of boys and girls,
followed by a few men, all carrying lighted candles that glowed
spectrally, for the sun was still half an hour high in the west. A
stout priest, with white hair and a vinous complexion, had just gone
down the street, and this motley group was following the same direction.
Somewhat in advance walked a boy with a small black and white coffin,
held in place on his head by his upraised arm, as if it were a toy; and
in the midst of the candle-bearers moved a light bier like a
basket-cradle, carried by girls, and containing the small waxen form of
a dead child three or four years old, on whose impassive, colorless face
the orange glow of approaching sunset fell, producing an effect natural
yet incongruous. A scampering dog accompanied the mourners, if one may
call them such, for they gave no token of being more impressed, more
touched by emotion, than he. The cradle-bier swayed from side to side as
if with a futile rockaby motion, until the bearers noticed how
carelessly they were conveying it down the paved slope; and the members
of the procession talked to each other with a singular indifference, or
looked at anything which caught their random attention. As the little
rabble disappeared through the Puerta del Cambron, with their long
candles dimly flaming, and the solemn, childish face in their midst,
followed by the poor unconscious dog, it seemed to me that I beheld in
allegory the departure from Toledo of that spirit of youth whose absence
leaves it so old and worn.
[Illustration]
_CORDOVAN PILGRIMS._
I.
[Illustration: T]
The House of Purification, as the great mosque at Cordova was called,
used to be a goal of pilgrimage for the Moors in Spain, as Mecca was for
Mohammedans elsewhere. Their shoes no longer repose at its doors, but
other less devout pilgrims now come in a straggling procession from all
quarters of the globe to rest a while within its fair demesne--hallowed,
perhaps, as much by the unique flowering of a whole people's genius in
shapes of singular loveliness as by the more direct religious service to
which it has been dedicated and re-dedicated under conflicting beliefs.
It was with peculiar eagerness, therefore, that we set out on our way.
An American who was following the same route had joined us--a man with
ruddy, bronzed cheeks and iron-gray hair, whom I at first should have
taken for the great-grandson of a Spanish Inquisitor, if such a thing
were possible. His iron persistence and the intensity of his prejudices
were in keeping with that character--the only trouble being that the
prejudices were all on the wrong side. Whetstone (as he was called)
shared our eagerness in respect of Cordova, though from different
motives. He hailed each new point in his journey with satisfaction,
because it would get him so much nearer the end; for the reason he had
come to Spain was, apparently, to get out of it again. "I don't see what
I came to Spain for," Whetstone would observe to us, dismally; and, for
that matter, we could not see either. "If there ever _was_ a
God-forsaken country--Why, look at the way a whole parcel of these men
at the dinner-table get out their cigarettes and smoke right there,
without ever asking a lady's leave! I'd like to see 'em try it on at
home! Wouldn't they be just snaked out of that room pretty quick?" He
had under his care a young lady of great sensibility, a relative by
marriage, accompanied by her maid; and the maid was a colored woman of
the most pronounced pattern. Altogether our pilgrim party embraced a
good deal of variety. The young American girl, being a Catholic, was
really a palmer faring from shrine to shrine. Rarely a convent or a
chapel escaped her; she sipped them all as if they had been flower-cups
and she a humming-bird, and managed to extract some unknown honey of
comfort from their bitterness. It was like having a novice with us.
[Illustration: WHETSTONE.]
The night journeys by rail, so much in vogue in Spain, have their
advantages and their drawbacks. At Castillejo, a junction on the way to
Cordova, we had to wait four hours in the evening at a distance of
twenty miles from the nearest restaurant. The country around was
absolutely desolate except for tufts of the _retamé_--a sort of broom
with slim green and silvered leaves, which grows wild, and, after
drying, is used by the peasants as a substitute for rye or wheat flour.
Only two or three houses were in sight. The tracks with cars standing on
them, and the unfinished look of the whole place, made us feel as if we
had by mistake been carried off to some insignificant railroad station
in Illinois or Missouri. The only resource available for dinner was a
_cantineria_, or drinking-room, where a few blocks of tough bread lent
respectability to a lot of loaferish wine-bottles, and some uninviting
sausages were hung in gloomy festoons, with a suspicious air of being a
permanent architectural fixture intended as a perch for flies. The
Spaniards invent little rhymed proverbs about many of their villages,
and of one insignificant Andalusian hamlet, Brenes, the saying is,
"If to Brenes thou goest,
Take with thee thy roast."
But Castillejo seems to be an equally good subject for this warning. We
recalled how lavishly, on the way to Toledo, we had presented bread,
meat, and strawberries to some country folk who were not in the habit of
eating, and how ardently they had thanked us. As we passed their house
in returning it was closed and lifeless, and we were convinced that they
had died of a surfeit. How willingly would we now have undone that deed!
However, after making some purchases from an extremely deaf old woman
who presided over such poor supplies as the place afforded, we asked her
if she could have coffee prepared. "If there is enough in the house,"
she replied to our interrogatory shrieks. Accordingly, we carried a
table out under some trees on the gravel platform, to eat _al fresco_.
[Illustration: COFFEE AT CASTILLEJO.]
When we found ourselves in this way for the first time thrown back on
the Spanish sausage, we resisted that unsympathetic substance with all
the vigor of despair. But, aided by some bad wine, an interesting
conversation with the Novice, and the glow of a sunset sky that looked
as if strewn with fading peony petals, we recovered from the shock
caused in the beginning by a mingled flavor of garlic, raisins, and
pork. In truth, there was something enjoyable about this wild supper
around which our quartette gathered in the dry, dewless twilight. An
ancient female, resembling a broken-down Medea, came out and kindled a
fire of brushwood beyond the track, swung a kettle there, and cooked our
coffee, bending over the flame-light the while with her scattered gray
tresses, and wailing out doleful _peteneras_, the popular songs of
Spain. The songs, the fire, the wine, the strange scene, were so
stimulating that we were surprised to find all at once the dark vault
overhead full of stars, the comet staring at us in its flight above the
hills, and our ten-o'clock train nearly due.
The next morning we were in a region totally unlike anything we had seen
before, excepting for the ever-present mountain ranges wild as the
Pyrenees or Guadaramas. The light of dawn on these barren Spanish
mountain-sides, drawn up into peaks as sharp as the points of a
looped-up curtain, produces effects indescribable except on canvas and
by a subtle colorist. The bare surfaces of rock or dry grass and moss,
and the newly reaped harvest fields lower down, blend the tints of air
and earth in a velvet-smooth succession of madder and faint yellow,
olive and rose and gray, fading off into a reddish-violet at greater
distances.
These eminences are a part of the Sierra Morena, where Don Quixote
achieved some of his most noteworthy feats--the liberation of the
galley-slaves, the descent into the Cave of Montesinos, the capture of
Mambrino's helmet, and the famous penance. So weird is the aspect of
these desolate hills, enclosing silent valleys in which narrow tracts of
woods are harbored, that I suspected it would be easy to breed a few Don
Quixotes of reality there. Craziness would become a necessary diversion
to relieve the monotony of existence.
[Illustration: PRIMITIVE THRASHING.]
A winding river-bed near by was bordered by tufted copses of oleander in
full flower, and hedges of huge serrated aloe guarded the roads. On the
hill-sides a round corral for herds would occasionally be seen. In the
fields the time-honored method of threshing out grain by driving a sort
of heavy board sledge in a circle over the cut crop, and of winnowing by
tossing up shovelfuls of the grain-dust into the breezy air, was in
active operation. By-and-by the olive orchards began. As far as we could
see they stretched on either side their ranks of round dusty green
tree-heads. Thousands of acres of them--one grove after another: we
travelled through fifty miles of almost unbroken olive plantations,
until we fancied we could even smell the fruit on the boughs, and our
eyes were sick and weary with the sameness of the sight. Then the river,
which from time to time had shown its muddy current in curves and
sweeps, moving through the land at the bottom of what might have been an
enormous drain, turned out to be the famous Guadalquivir, which, as Ford
vividly puts it, "eats its dull way through loamy banks." At last
Cordova, seated in an ample plain--Cordova, in vanished ages the home of
Seneca, Lucan, Averroës, and the poet Juan de Mena--Cordova, white in
the dry and gritty sun-dazzled air, with square, unshadowed two-story
houses, overlooked by the bell-tower of its incomparable Mezquita
Cathedral: a cheerful Southern city, maintaining large gardens,
abounding in palms and myrtles and orange and lemon trees; possessing,
moreover, clean streets of perceptible width.
[Illustration: WHILE THE WOMEN ARE AT MASS.]
After the "interpreter," or hotel guide, the beggar: such is the order
in these Spanish towns, and not seldom the guide is merely a bolder kind
of beggar. Two or three of the most frantically miserable and loathsome
charity-seekers I ever saw surrounded our omnibus as we awaited our
baggage, and stuffed their hideous heads in at the windows and door,
concentrating on us their fire of appeals. Velveteen had heard that the
sovereign remedy for these pests was to treat them with consummate
politeness and piety. "Pardon me, brother, for God's sake!" was the
deprecatory formula which had been recommended, and he now proceeded to
recite this, book in hand. Unfortunately it took him about five minutes
to get it launched in good style and pure Spanish, during which time the
beggars had an opportunity entirely to miss the sense. A few grains of
tobacco dropped into the hat of one of them were more efficacious, for
they had the result of mystifying him and hopelessly paralyzing his
analytical powers. Finally the guide, coming with the baggage,
recognized his rivals, and drove them off.
At several places on the way we had seen our twin military persecutors
waiting for us, sometimes with white havelocks, and again in glazed
hat-covers and capes. "Are they disguising themselves, so as to fall
upon us unawares?" I asked my friend. We determined not to be deceived,
however, by the subtle device. These Spanish police-soldiers go through
more metamorphoses in the linen and water-proof line than any troops I
know. It must be excessively inconvenient to run home and make the
change every time a slight shower threatens; and invariably, as soon as
they get on their storm-cover, the sun begins to shine again. On our
arrival they seemed to have made up their minds to arrest us at once;
they came striding along toward us in duplicate, one the fac-simile of
the other, and we gave ourselves up for lost. But just as they were
within a few paces, their unaccountable policy of delay caused them to
deviate suddenly, and march on as if they hadn't seen us. "One more
escape!" sighed Velveteen, fervently.
Strangely enough, the languor which we had left in the middle of the
kingdom, at Toledo, was replaced in this more tropical latitude by great
activity. The shop streets presented a series of rooms entirely open to
the view, where men and women were busily engaged in all sorts of small
manufacture--shoes, garments, tin-work, carpentering. They were happy
and diligent, as if they had been animated writing-book maxims, and sung
or whistled at their tasks in a most exemplary manner.
[Illustration: WATER-STAND IN CORDOVA.]
"Cordovan leather" still holds it own, on a petty scale, and the small
cups hammered out of old silver dollars constitute, with filigree
silver-work, a characteristic local product. The faces of the people
betrayed their gypsy blood oftentimes, and there was one street chiefly
occupied by the Romany folk. Traces of blond or light chestnut hair
showed that the Moorish stock had likewise left some offshoots that do
not die out. The whole aspect of Cordova presents at once a reflex of
the refined and enlightened spirit of the ancient caliphate. Everybody,
including most of the beggars, has a fresh and cleanly appearance; the
very priests undergo a change, being frequently more refined in feature
and of a more tolerant expression than those of the North. The women set
off their rosy brown complexions and black hair with clusters of rayed
jasmine blossoms, flattened and ingeniously fixed in rosette form on
long pins. The men, discarding those hot felt hats so obstinately worn
in the central provinces, make a comfortable and festive appearance
in their curling Panamas. On the Street of the Great Captain--the chief
open-air resort, commemorating Gonsalvo of Cordova, who led so ably in
the triumphant Christian campaigns--the people laugh and chat as if they
really enjoyed life. There is a great deal of wealth in the place, and
the lingering atmosphere of its past greatness is not depressing, as
that of Toledo is, for it was never the home of bigotry and ignorance.
Its prosperous epoch under Abdur-rahman and his Ommeyad successors was
one of brilliant civilization. It was then a nursery of science and the
arts; its inhabitants numbered a million. It had mosques by the hundred,
and nearly a thousand baths--for the Spanish Moors well knew the
civilizing virtue of water, and kept life-giving streams of it running
at the roots of their institutions. The houses of the modern city are
very plain on the exterior, and their common coat of whitewash imparts
to them a democratic equality, though aristocracy is still a living
thing there, instead of having sunk into pitfalls of squalor and
idleness, as in the sombre city by the Tagus.
"But now the Cross is sparkling on the mosque,
And bells make Catholic the trembling air."
[Illustration: THE GAY COSTER-MONGERS OF ANDALUSIA.]
Gloomy little churches crop out in every quarter, and a few convents of
nuns remain, where you may hear the faint, sad litany of the unseen
sisters murmured behind the grating, while a priest chants service for
them in the lonely chapel. The bells of these churches and of the
mosque-cathedral are hardly ever silent; the brazen jargon of their
tongues echoes over the roofs at all hours, and the hollow, metallic
tinkle of mule-bells from the otherwise silent streets at times strikes
one as making response to them. The beauty of the cathedral--still
called the Mezquita (mosque)--lies almost solely in the preservation of
its original Moorish architecture.
[Illustration: THE MEZQUITA.]
The site was first occupied as a place of worship by the Roman Temple of
Janus, and this in turn became a basilica of the Gothic Christians.
Abdur-rahman, after the Christians had long been allowed by the caliphs
to continue their worship in one half of the basilica, reared the
supremely wonderful House of Purification as it now stands; and then,
after the conquest by Ferdinand and Isabella, in the reign of Charles
V., the cumbrous high altar and choir, which choke up so much of the
interior, transformed it once more into a stronghold of Christian
ceremonial. But when you enter at the Gate of Pardon the long, wide
Court of Oranges, you find yourself transported instantly to Mohammedan
surroundings; you are under the dominion of the Ommeyades.
[Illustration: RELIC PEDDLERS.]
High walls hem in this open-air vestibule, where rows of orange-trees
rustle their dense foliage in the warm wind. Their trunks are corpulent
with age, for some of them date back to the last Moorish dynasty, and at
one end stands the tank where followers of the Prophet washed themselves
before entering in to pray. The Gate of Pardon, under the high-spired
bell-tower, takes its name from the custom which obtained of giving
criminals refuge by its portal. The murderer who could fly hither and
gain the central aisle of the temple, directly opposite the gate across
the court, was safe for shelter by the Mihrab, or inner shrine, at the
farther end of the aisle. All the nineteen aisles formerly opened from
the fragrant garden, though Catholic rule gives access by only three;
but inside one sees at a glance the vast consecrated space which was so
freely open to the Mussulmans--an interior covering several acres, not
very lofty, yet imposing from its exquisite proportions. A wilderness, a
cool, dark labyrinth of pillars from which light horseshoe arches rise,
broken midway for the curve of another arch surmounting each of these,
spreads itself out under the roof on every hand--grove of stone in a
cave of stone stretching so far that the eye cannot follow its intricate
regularity, its rare harmony of confusion. The rash Christian renovators
who, overruling the protest of the city, undertook to remodel so
exceptional a monument, covered the arches with whitewash; but many of
them have been restored to the natural hues of their red and white
marble. Imagine below them the pillars, smooth-shafted and with fretted
capitals. Of old there were _twelve hundred_ of them supporting the
gilded beams and incorruptible larch of the roof, and a thousand still
stand. Each is shaped from a single block, and many quarries contributed
them. Jasper and porphyry, black, white, and red, emerald and rose
marble, are all represented among them; though with their diversity they
have this in common, that from the pavement up to about the average
human height they have been worn dark, and even smoother than the
workmen left them, by the constant touching and rubbing and leaning of
generations who have loitered and worshipped in the solemn twilight that
broods around them. A large number were appropriated from the old Roman
temple which stood on the spot; others were plundered from temples at
ancient Carthage; still others were brought entire from Constantinople.
They typify the different powers that have been concerned in the making
and unmaking of Spain, and one could almost imagine that in every column
is concealed some petrified warrior of those conflicting races, waiting
for the spell that shall bring him to life again.
[Illustration: THE GARDEN OF THE ALCAZAR.]
On the surface of one of these marble cylinders is scratched a rude and
feeble image of Christ on the cross, hardly noticeable until pointed
out. It is said to have been traced there by the finger-nail of a
Christian captive who was chained to the pillar when it formed part of a
dungeon somewhere else. He had ten years for the work, and enjoyed the
advantage of a tool that would renew itself without expense whenever it
began to wear out. I must say that we were touched by this dim record of
the dead-and-gone prisoner's silent suffering and faith. The shock of
doubt struck us only when, in another part of the mosque, we came upon
another pillar against the wall, bearing an exact reproduction of the
finger-nail sculpture, and furthermore provided with a holy-water basin
and a lamp burning under the effigy of the captive, who appears to have
been canonized. "How is this?" I asked the guide. "Here is the same
thing over again!" He scrutinized me carefully, taking an exact measure
of my credulousness, before he replied, "Ah, but the other is the real
one!" It all seems to depend on which pillar gets the start.
[Illustration: PRIEST AND PURVEYOR.]
[Illustration: FLOWERS FOR THE MARKET.]
But there is no deception whatever connected with the inner Mihrab,
where there is a marvellous alcove marking the direction of Mecca, on
the east. Its ceiling, in the shape of a quarter-globe, is cut from a
single great piece of marble, which is grooved like a shell. And when
the light from candles is thrown into this Arab chapel it glances upon
elaborate enamelling on the surface, the vitreous glaze of minute and
almost miraculous mosaic making it flash and sparkle with rays of the
ruby, the emerald, the topaz, and diamond. There in the dusk the
glittering splendor scintillates as brilliantly as it did eight hundred
years ago, and shoots its beams upon the unwary eye as if it were a
cimeter of the defeated race suddenly unsheathed for vengeance. In this
place was kept the wondrous Koran stand of Al-Hakem II., which cost a
sum equal now to about five million dollars. It disappeared a while
ago--mislaid, it should seem, by some sacristan of orderly habits who
was clearing up the rubbish, for no one appears to know where it went
to. The sacred book within it was incased in gold tissue embroidered
with pearls and rubies, and around the spot where it was enshrined the
solid white marble floor is unevenly worn into a circular hollow, where
the servants of the Prophet used to crawl seven times in succession on
their hands and knees. This homage was paid by the brother of the
Emperor of Morocco only a few years since, when he visited Spain, and
indulged the luxurious woe of weeping over the fair empire his people
had lost. The bewildering arabesques, the lines of which pursue and lose
each other so mysteriously about the shrine, managing to form pious
inscriptions in their intricate convolutions--by an exception to all
other Hispano-Arabic decoration, which employs only stucco--are wrought
in marble, frigid and stern as death, but embossed into a living grace
as of vine tendrils.
Whetstone had been remarkably silent after entering the Mezquita. I
fancied that he did not wholly approve of it. But after we had looked
long at this epitome of the beautiful which I have just tried to sketch,
he observed, impartially, in turning away, "I tell you, those fellows
knew how to chisel some!" He had merely been trying to reduce the facts
to their lowest terms.
Priests and boys were marching with crucifixes from the choir as we came
away: the incense rolled up against the lofty smoke-dimmed altar; and
the mild-faced celibate who played the organ sent harmonies of unusually
rich music (performed at our guide's special request) reverberating
among the thousand-columned maze of low arches. But my fancy went back
to the time when gold and silver lamps had shed from their perfumed oils
the only illumination there, and when the jewelled walls, smouldering in
the faint light, had looked down upon the prostrate forms of robed and
turbaned zealots. Then we passed out through the Court of Oranges into
the street, with those forty towers of the cathedral wall again seen
standing guard around it, and found ourselves once more in modern
Cordova.
[Illustration: TRAVELLERS TO CORDOVA.]