Segovia steamer, on the eve of a cruise along the coast. Behind the
plain sandy-colored houses rose a background of mountains fantastic in
outline as flames; the cathedral, in no way striking, towered up above
the roofs, and was in turn overshadowed by an ancient fortress on the
eastern height, which was one of the last to fall before the returning
tide of Spanish arms, and still claws the precipitous ridge with
innumerable towers and bastions, as if to keep from slipping off its
honorable eminence in the drowsy lapses of old age. Below this, close to
the water, stood the inevitable Plaza de Toros--an immense cheese-shaped
structure of stone, where a friend of mine, Spanish by birth, tells me
he was once watching the game of bulls, when part of the crowd were
struck by the happy thought of starting a revolution. They acted at once
on this bright idea; they "pronounced" in favor of something, and
attacked the military guard. In an instant a battle had begun; the place
resounded with musketry, and the populace tore away pieces of the
masonry to hurl at the troops below. But that was in the good old days,
and such things do not happen now, though there is always a strong
detachment of soldiers on hand at the arena, ready for any sudden
revival of these freaks. The water around us shone with a lustre like
satin; and, fluttering over the bright green surface, played incredibly
vivid reflections of blue and red from the steamers; while the pure
white light, striking back from the edges of the undulations, quivered
and shimmered along the black hulk of a vessel, and looked like steam or
mist in constant motion.
Highly effective, too, was the carbineer (all custom-house officers in
Spain, whether armed or not, are called _carabineros_) who stood on deck
with a musket at rest, a living monument to the majesty of the revenue
laws. We had been solemnly warned beforehand of the risk we ran in
carrying a basket of ale on board in the face of this functionary, and
the importance of giving him a _peseta_ (twenty cents) had been urged
upon us; but we at first looked for him in vain, and when we found him
he appeared so harmless that we kept the _peseta_. I noticed that he
laid his gun aside as much as possible. Part of the time he smoked a
short pipe under cover of his huge mustache, and eyed people sternly, as
if suspecting that they might take advantage of this temporary relaxing
of vigilance; but he studiously avoided seeing any merchandise of any
description.
The steamer was to start at four in the afternoon, and we made great
haste to get on board in time; but there had evidently never been the
smallest intention of despatching her until an hour and a half later.
This was in accord with the national trait of distrust. No one was
expected to believe the announcement as to the time, and if the real
hour had been named, no one _would_ have believed it. Aware of this, the
more experienced natives did not even begin to come aboard until toward
five o'clock. Spanish clocks are the most accommodating kind of
mechanism I have ever had the fortune to encounter. They appear to exist
rather as an ornamental feature than as articles of use. You order a
carriage, and it is promised at a certain time; you are told that
something is to be accomplished at a fixed hour; but this is only done
out of deference to your outlandish prejudices. The hour strikes, and
the thing is not done. You begin to doubt whether the hour itself has
arrived. Is it not a vulgar illusion to suppose so? Your Spaniard
certainly thinks it is. He knows that time is an arbitrary distinction,
and prefers to adopt the scale of eternity. The one exception is the
bull-fight. That is recognized as a purely mundane and temporal
institution; it must not be delayed a moment; and to make sure of
punctuality, it is begun almost before the time announced. But anything
like a sea-voyage, though it be only along the shore, comes under a
different heading, and must be undertaken with as much mystery and
caution as if it were a conspiracy to erect a new government.
To tell the truth, we were glad to get away from the tyranny of the
minute-hand, and were not displeased at the lazy freedom of the steamer.
The stewards came up and shut the skylights, spread a table-cloth over
them, laid plates, and formed a hollow square of fruits and olives in
the centre. Those of the passengers that listed took their places at
this improvised banqueting board, and by the time the _puchero_ was
served--a savory stew composed of chopped meat, beans, carrots, spices,
and any little thing the cook's fancy may suggest--we were moving out of
the basin, past the curved mole and the light-house, and toy battery at
its end. The sunset had thrown its glow over sky and mountains, as if it
were an after-thought, to make the surroundings perfect. We glided
smoothly over a floor of blue--deep, solid-looking, and veined with
white--a pale golden dome above us, and a delicious wind playing round
us, like the exhalation of some balmy sub-tropical dream. On these coast
steamers one buys a ticket for the transport, and then pays for what he
eats. This rule reduced the company at our deck table to a choice and
pleasant circle, the head of which was Señor Segovia, one of the owners
of the line, a benignant, comfortable Spaniard--"an Andalusian to the
core," as he proudly said. We had, as usual, early chocolate at six or
seven; breakfast not so near eleven as to admit any suspicion of
subserviency to the base time-keeping clock; and dinner--a second but
ampler breakfast--between five and six. Some of the first-cabin
passengers brought their own provision, or purchased it at the towns
where we touched every day, and fed secretly in out-of-the-way places.
As for the second-class, consisting mainly of peasants swathed in
strange garments edged and spotted with fantastic color, they were never
seen to eat; but I think that privately they gnawed the pride of ancient
race in their hearts, and found it sufficient provender. We would come
upon them, when we went forward in our night patrol, lying on the deck
in magnificent unconcern, enveloped by stately rags wound round and
round their bodies, and lifting toward us a stern, reproachful gaze at
our interruption of their tranquillity.
The Mediterranean was calm as a pond, and we roused ourselves to a
serene morning, under which the hills gleamed pale and clear along the
margin of the waves, the huge sides seamed with dry water-courses, like
the creases in a human palm. Beyond the first line of peaks we could
descry for a while the soft ghostly whiteness of an inland snow range
glimmering above the faded green, the violet shadows, the hard streaks
of white and powderings of red earth in the lower series. No sign of
life was seen upon the puckered, savage coast. It was the bulwark of
that Tarshish to which Solomon sent his ships for gold; new to us as it
was new to him, yet now unutterably old; silent, yet speaking;
uncommunicative, yet vaguely predicting a future vast and unknown as the
vanished ages. It would be hard to tell how awful in its unchanged
grandeur was the face of those mighty hills, so unexpectedly eloquent.
[Illustration: DIVING FOR COPPERS.]
It was a relief to find that we were approaching Almeria. A road cut in
the rock; a stout arched bridge carrying it over an indentation of the
sea; a small square edifice on a rock to guard the road; then the
distant jumble of low houses along a sheltered bay, and an empty
fortress on the sharp hillcrest over it--these were the tokens of our
progress toward another inhabited spot. We had on board a two-legged
enigma in a white helmet-hat, who wrote with ostentatious industry in a
note-book, played fluently on the cabin piano, and now emerged upon the
quarterdeck in a pair of bulging canary leather slippers which gave his
feet the appearance of overgrown lemons. He afterward proved to be an
English colporteur. We also had a handsome, gay, talkative, and witty
Frenchman, who, with a morbid conscientiousness as to what was fitting,
insisted on being sea-sick, although the sea was hardly ruffled; and him
we succeeded in resuscitating, after the boat had come quietly to anchor
in the harbor, so far that he began to long audibly for Paris and the
café on the boulevard, "_et mon absinthe_." We watched with these
companions the naked boys who surrounded the vessel in a flotilla of
row-boats, offering to dive for coppers thrown into the water, precisely
as I have seen young Mexican Indians do at Acapulco. Near by lay another
steamer just in from Africa, disembarking a mass of returned Spanish
settlers, fugitives from the atrocities of the Arabs at Oran: a pathetic
sight as they dropped silently into the barges that bore them to
shore--some utterly destitute, with only the clothes in which they had
fled before the fanatic murderers, and others accompanied by a few
meagre household goods. Did they feel that "irremediable nostalgia," I
wonder, of which Señor Castelar speaks? The sun was as hot as that which
had shone upon them just across the strait, on the edge of the Dark
Continent; and the low-roofed glaring houses huddled at the feet of the
Moorish stronghold, the Alcasaba, were so Oriental that I should think
they must have found it hard to believe they had left Africa at all.
Almeria, like other towns of this southern shore-line, is more Eastern
than Spanish in appearance--only the long winding or zigzag covered
ways, traced on the steep hills like swollen veins, indicated the
presence of the lead-mines which give it an existence in commerce. These
conduct the poisonous smoke to a point above the air inhaled by the
townsfolk, and it is seen puffing from tall chimneys at the crest of the
steep, as if the mountain were alive and gasping for breath. The town,
faintly relieved against its pale, dusty background as we first saw it,
almost disappeared in the blinding blaze of light that swept it when we
got closer. We landed, and attempted to walk, but the dry, burning heat
made us shrink for shelter into any narrow thread of shadow that the
houses presented. Even the shadows looked whitish. It was impossible to
get as far as the weed-grown cathedral, which, as we could see from the
water, had been provided in former times with fortified turrets for
defence against piratical incursions. So we sunk gratefully into a
restaurant kiosk at the head of the _alameda_, where we could look down
the hot, yellow street to a square of cerulean sea; and there we sipped
lemonade while tattered, crimson-sashed peasants moved about us, some of
them occasionally dashing the road with water dipped from a
gutter-rivulet at the side. We had barely become reconciled to the
Granadan women in trousers, when we were obliged to notice that the men
in this vicinity wore short white skirts in place of the usual nether
garment. How is Spain ever to be unified on such a basis as this? The
local patriots had seemingly wrestled with the problem and been
defeated, for a dreary memorial column in front of the kiosk recorded
how they had fallen in some futile revolutionary struggle.
On a promontory, passed as we sailed away, the drought and dust of the
town yielded suddenly to luxurious greenness of sugar-cane and other
growths. Almeria was once surrounded by similar fertility, but the land
has been so wastefully denuded of forest that all through this
region--the old kingdoms of Murcia and Valencia--only certain favorable
spots retain their earlier plenty by means of constant care and
assiduous watering. Cartagena, one of the chief naval stations of the
country, cannot exhibit even such an oasis. It is unmitigated desert.
Not a tree or shrub shows itself amid the baked and calcined stone-work
and blistering pavements of the city; and the landscape without looks
almost as arid. The place is considered impregnable to a foreign foe,
and I can't imagine that foe wanting it to be otherwise, if conquest
involves residence. Entered by a narrow gap commanded by batteries, the
harbor is a round and spacious one, scooped out of frowning highlands
that bear on the apex of their cones unattainable forts, thrown up like
the rim around volcanic craters. There is but one level access to the
city on the land side, and that is blockaded by a stout wall with a
single gate. Such was our next goal, reached after a quiet night, which
Velveteen and I spent in the open air, having carried our rugs and
pillows up from the state-room on its invasion by new passengers. At two
o'clock in the morning our vessel stole into the port. There was one
pale amber streak in the east, over the gloomy, indistinct heights
studded with embrasured walls and mine chimneys. By-and-by a brightness
grew out of it. Then the amber was reflected in the glassy harbor. An
arch of rose cloud sprung up after this, and was also reflected, the
hills lightening to a faded gray and brown. All this time the stars
continued sparkling, and one of them threw rings of dancing diamond on
the broken wave. Suddenly the diamond flash and the rose tint vanished,
and it was broad golden-white day, with calorific beams beating strongly
upon us, instead of the crepuscular chill of dawn that had just been
searching our veins.
Cartagena has its war history, of course. A Commune was established
there by Roque Barcia in 1873, which declined allegiance to the
republican government at Madrid, and the city was accordingly besieged.
Barcia had been living on forced loans from the inhabitants, and was
loath to go; but the army of the republic made a few dents in the stone
wall with twenty-pounders, and that decided him. He got on board the
Spanish navy in the harbor, and ran away with it to Africa. Perhaps
that accounts for the slimness of the naval contingent now. There is an
academy for cadets in the place, but only two small ships-of-war were
anchored in the noble bay. The town of Cartagena is remarkable for big
men and very minute donkeys. The men ride on the donkeys with incredible
hardihood. You see a burly Sancho Panza flying along the main street at
a rapid pace, with his sandalled feet some three inches from the ground,
and wonder what new kind of motor he has discovered, until you perceive
beneath his ponderous body a nervous, vaguely ecstatic quivering of four
black legs, attached to a small spot of head from which two mulish ears
project.
[Illustration: A MODERN SANCHO PANZA.]
There is not much to see in Cartagena. Blind people seem to be numerous
there--a fact which may be owing to the excessive dazzle of the sunlight
and absence of verdure. But I couldn't help thinking some of them must
have gone blind from sheer _ennui_, because there was nothing around
them worth looking at. Our visit, however, was in one respect a success:
we found a broad strip of shade there. It was caused by the high city
wall intercepting the forenoon light. Out of the shadow some
enterprising men had constructed, with the aid of two or three chairs
and several pairs of shears, a barber's shop _al fresco_; and asses and
peasants, as they travelled in and out through the city gate, stopped at
this establishment to be shaved. For it is an important item in the care
of Spanish donkeys that they should be sheared as to the back, in order
to make a smoother resting-place for man or pannier. So while the master
held his animal one of the barbers plied some enormous clacking shears,
and littered the ground with mouse-colored hair, leaving the beast's
belly fur-covered below a fixed line, and for a small additional price
executing a raised pattern of starpoints around the neck. The tonsorial
profession is an indispensable one in a country where shaving the whole
face is so generally practised among all the humbler orders, not to
mention _toreros_ and ecclesiastics; but the discomfort to which the
barber's customers submit is astonishing. Instead of being pampered,
soothed, labored at with confidential respectfulness, and lulled into
luxurious harmony with himself, as happens in America, a man who courts
the razor in Spain has to sit upright in a stiff chair, and meekly hold
under his chin a brass basin full of suds, and fitting his throat by
means of a curved nick at one side. One individual we saw seated by the
dusty road at the gate, with a towel around his shoulders and another in
his hands to catch his own falling locks. He looked submissive and
miserable, as if assisting at his own degradation, while the barber was
magnified into a tyrant exercising sovereign pleasure, and might have
been expected, should the whim cross him, to strike off his victim's
head instead of his hair.
[Illustration: STREET BARBER.]
[Illustration: BIBLES _VERSUS_ MELONS.]
The voyage continued as charmingly as it began. Quiet transitions from
the deep blue outside to the pronounced green within the harbors were
its most startling incidents. The colporteur gave tracts to the sailors,
or traded Bibles for melons with the fruit boys; the Frenchman, who was
making a commercial tour through the provinces, bestowed a liberal and
cheerful disparagement on the nation which afforded him a business. We
continued to eat meals in holiday fashion on the skylight hatches, and
slept there through the balmy night, occasionally seeing the sailors
clambering on the taffrail or in the rigging, always with cigarettes,
the glowing points of which shone in the darkness like fire-flies. The
gravity with which they stuck to these _papelitos_ while knotting ropes
or lowering a boat was fascinating in its inappropriateness. The
headlands grew less bold before we tied to the dock at Alicante in the
hush of a sultry night. We could see nothing of the town except a bright
twinkle of lamps along the quay, contrasting gayly with the blood-red
light on a felucca in the harbor, its long vivid stain trickling away
through the water like the current from a wound; and the rules of the
customs would not admit of our landing till morning.
II.
Our trunks had been on the dock two or three hours when we debarked in a
small boat, and some fifteen men had gathered around them, waiting for
the owners, like sharks attracted by floating fragments from a ship and
wondering what manner of prey is coming to them. They all touched their
caps to us as we bumped the shore. These cap-touches are worth in the
abstract about one real--five cents. The grand total of speculative
politeness laid out upon us was therefore more than half a dollar; but,
on our selecting two porters, values rapidly declined, and the market
"closed in a depressed condition." The customs officers wore a wild,
freebooters' sort of uniform--blue trousers with a red stripe, blue
jeans blouses with a belt and long sword, and straw hats. They were also
very lazy; and while we were awaiting their attentions we had time to
observe the manner of unloading merchandise in these latitudes. Every
box, barrel, or bale hoisted out of a lighter was swung by a rope to
which twenty men lent their strength; there were three more men in the
lighter, and three others arranged the hoisting tackle; in all,
twenty-six persons were occupied with a task for which two or three
ought to suffice. Each time, the crowd of haulers fastened on the cable,
ran off frantically with it, and then, in a simultaneous fit of
paralysis, dropped it as the burden was landed.
These laborers wore huge straw hats, on the crown of which was fitted a
_birreta_, the small ordinary blue cap of the country. They had a queer
air of carrying this superfluous cap around on top of the head as a sort
of solemn ceremony. The wharf was alive, too, with small wagons, roofed
over by a cover of heavy matting made of _esparto_ grass, and furnished
with a long, rough-barked pole at the side, to be used as a brake. Above
this busy scene towered a luminous sienna-tinted cliff, sustaining the
castle of Santa Barbara poised in the white air like a dream-edifice;
though a rift high up in the hill marks the spot where the French
exploded a mine during the Peninsular war. All these Mediterranean towns
are guarded by some such eagle's eyry overlooking the sea, and the old
monarchs showed a fine poetic sense in granting them for municipal arms
their local castle resting on a wave. Close to the lapping waters lay
the serried houses, bordered by an esplanade planted with rows of short
palms. When the carbineers had looked vaguely into our trunks, and shut
them again, the porters tossed them into a little cart, and plunged into
the town at a pace with which we could compete only so far as to keep
them in sight while they twisted first around one corner and then
another, and then up a long chalky street to the Fonda Bossio, which has
the name of being the best hotel in Spain. It has excellent cookery, and
some furlongs of tile-floored corridor, which the servants apparently
believe to be streets, for they water them every day, just as the
thoroughfares are watered, out of tin basins. We were overwhelmed with
courtesy. For instance, I would call the waiter.
[Illustration: CUSTOMS OFFICERS.]
"Command me, your grace," was his reply.
"Can you bring me some fresh water?" ("Fresh" always means cold.)
[Illustration: POST INN, ALICANTE.]
"With all the will in the world."
When he came with it I tried to rise to his standard by saying,
"Thanks--a thousand thanks."
"They do not merit themselves, señor," said he, not to be outdone.
I asked if I could have a _garspacho_ for breakfast. The _garspacho_ is
an Andalusian soup-salad, very cooling, made of stewed and strained
tomato, water, vinegar, sliced cucumber, boiled green peppers, a dash of
garlic, and some bits of bread; the whole served frost-cold.
"I don't know--it is not in the list. I feel it, señor. It weighs upon
my soul. But I will see, and will return in an Ave Maria to let you
know."
He never left me without asking, "Is there anything wanting still?"
[Illustration: ALICANTE FRUIT-SELLER.]
The waiters and chamber-maids ate their meals at little tables in the
hall, and whenever I passed them, if they were eating, they made a
gracious gesture toward their _pillau_ of rice. "Would your grace like
to eat?"
This offer to share their food with any one who goes by is a simple and
kindly inheritance from the East; but it becomes a little embarrassing,
and I longed for a pair of back stairs to slink away by, without having
to decline their hospitality every time I went out.
To go out in the middle of the day was like looking into the sun itself.
Everybody stayed in-doors behind thick curtains of matting, and dozed or
dripped away the time in idle perspiration; but hearing unaccountable
blasts of orchestral music during this forced retirement, I inquired,
and found them to proceed from the rehearsal of a Madrid opera company
then in Alicante. Our attendant at table proved to be a duplex
character--a serving-man by day and a fourteenth lord in the chorus by
night, with black and yellow stockings, and a number of gestures
indicating astonishment, indignation, or, in fact, anything that the
emergency required. We had the pleasure of seeing him on the stage that
very evening, and of listening to an extravagant performance of "La
Favorita," between two acts of which an usher came in and collected the
tickets of the whole audience. The theatre was remarkably spacious for a
town of thirty thousand inhabitants; but Alicante is a favorite winter
resort, and even maintains a "Gallistic Circus;" that is, a place for
cock-fights.
The Garden of Alicante is a luscious spot, hidden away some two or three
miles from the town, and owned by the Marques de Venalua, a young man of
large wealth, who spends all his time at Alicante, and is a public
benefactor, having introduced water in pipes at his own expense. The
carriage and consumption of water, indeed, seemed to be the chief
business of the population. They have a system of fountains for
distributing sea-water from which the salt has been extracted, and women
and children are kept going to these with huge jars, to satisfy the
local thirst. To be born thirsty, live thirsty, and die so, is a
privilege enjoyable only in countries like Southern Spain. One can form
there, too, a vivid idea of the desert, from the delight with which he
hails the green _Huerta_, or garden. The road and fields on the way
thither were like a waste of cinders and ashes. The almond and fig
trees, the pomegranates and algarrobas beside the way, were coated with
dust that lay upon them like thin snow; and the almond-nuts, where they
hung in sight, resembled plaster casts, so pervasive was the white
deposit. But all at once we mounted a low rise, and the wide stretch of
verdant plantations lay before us, thick-foliaged, cool, sweet, and
refreshing, with villas embowered among the oranges and palms, a screen
of dim mountains beyond, and the silent blue sea brimming the horizon on
the right. It was a spectacle delicious as sleep to tired eyes; it
brought a cry of pleasure to my lips and grateful life to the heart.