THE LAST FOOTHOLD OF THE MOOR
Ronda crouches on the bald summit of a rock so mighty that one can
easily fancy it the broken base of some pillar that once upheld the sky.
Nature seems here to have established division of labor. The gigantic
rock bearing aloft the city sustains of itself not a sprig of
vegetation. Below, so far below that Ronda dares even in summer to fling
down unburied the mutilated carcasses from her bullring, spreads the
encircling _vega_, producing liberally for the multitude above, but
granting foothold scarcely to a peasant's hovel. Beyond and round about
stretches the sierra, having for its task to shelter the city against
prowling storms and to enrich the souls of her inhabitants with its
rugged grandeur.
Travelers come to Ronda chiefly to gaze elsewhere. As an outlook upon
the world she is well worth the coming; as a city she is almost
monotonous, with her squat, white-washed houses sweltering in the
omnivorous sunshine. Her only "sight" is the _Tajo_, the "gash" in the
living rock like the mark of some powerful woodman's ax in the top of a
tree-stump. A stork-legged bridge spans it, linking two unequal sections
of the town, which without this must be utter strangers. A stream
trickles along its bottom, how deep down one recognizes only when he has
noted how like toy buildings are the grist-mills that squat beside it
pilfering their power.
Elsewhere within the town the eyes wander away to the enclosing
mountains. The wonder is not that her inhabitants are dreamy-eyed;
rather that they succeed at intervals in shaking off the spell of
nature's setting to play their roles in life's prosaic drama. As for
myself, I rambled through her piping streets for half the afternoon
because she is Spanish, and because my supply of currency was falling
low. Ronda boasts no bank. Her chief dry-goods merchant, however--by
what right my informant could not guess--boasts himself a banker. I
found the amateur financier at home, which chanced to be distant the
height of one short stairway from his place of business. When I had
chatted an hour or two with his clerks, the good man himself appeared,
rosy with the exertions of the siesta, and examined the ten-dollar check
with many expressions of gratitude for the opportunity.
"We shall take pleasure," he said, "in liquidating this obligation. You
will, of course, bring persons of my acquaintance to establish your
identity, como es costumbre in large financial transactions?"
I had never so fully realized how convincing was my command of Spanish
as when I had succeeded within an hour in convincing this bond-slave of
"costumbre" that express-checks are designed to avoid just this
difficulty. He expressed a desire to examine the document more
thoroughly and retired with it to the depths of his establishment.
Toward evening he returned with pen and ink-horn.
"I accept the obligation," he announced, "and shall pay you fifty-seven
pesetas, according to yesterday's quotation on the Borsa. But I find I
have such a sum on hand only in coppers."
"Which would weigh," I murmured, after the necessary calculation,
"something over thirty pounds. You will permit me, senor, to express my
deep gratitude--and to worry along for the time being with the money in
pocket."
Travelers who arraign Honda for lack of creature comforts can never have
been assigned the quarters a peseta won me for the night in the "Parador
de Vista Hermosa." The room was a house in itself, peculiarly clean and
home-like, and furnished not only with the necessities of bed, chairs,
and taper-lighted effigy of the Virgin, but with table, washstand, and
even a bar of soap, the first I had seen in the land except that in my
own knapsack. When the sun had fallen powerless behind the sierra, I
drew the green reed shade and found before my window a little _rejaed_
balcony hanging so directly over the Tajo that the butt of a cigarette
fell whirling down, down to the very bottom of the gorge. I dragged a
chair out into the dusk and sat smoking beneath the star-sprinkled sky
long past a pedestrian's bedtime, the unbroken music of the Guadalvin
far below ascending to mingle with the murmur of the strolling city.
To the north of Ronda begins a highway that goes down through a country
as arid and rock-strewn as the anti-Lebanon. Here, too, is much of the
Arab's contempt for roads. Donkeys bearing singing men tripped by along
hard-beaten paths just far enough off the public way to be no part of
it. Now and again donkey and trail rambled away independently over the
thirsty hills, perhaps to return an hour beyond, more often to be
swallowed up in the unknown. The untraveled carretera lay inches deep
in fine white dust. Far and near the landscape was touched only with a
few slight patches of viridity. The solitary tree under which I tossed
through an hour of siesta cast the stringy, wavering shade of a
bean-pole.
Sharp-eyed with appetite, I came near, nevertheless, to passing unseen
early in the afternoon a village hidden in plain sight along the flank
of a reddish, barren hill. In this, too, Andalusia resembles Asia
Minor; her hamlets are so often of the same colored or colorless rocks
as the hills on which they are built as frequently to escape the eye. I
forded a bone-dry brook and climbed into the tumbled _pueblo_. Toward
the end of the principal lack of a street one of the crumbling
hovel-fronts was scrawled in faded red, with the Spaniard's innocent
indistinction between the second and twenty-second letters of the
alphabet:
[Illustration: Aqui se bende bino]
Once admitted to the sleepy interior, I regaled myself on bread, cheese,
and "bino" and scrambled back to the highway. It wandered more and more
erratically, slinking often around hills that a bit of exertion would
have surmounted. I recalled the independence of the donkeys and,
picking up a path at an elbow of the route, struck off across the rugged
country.
But there is sound truth, as in all his venerable if somewhat
baggy-kneed proverbs, in the Spaniard's assertion that "no hay atajo sin
trabajo." In this short-cut there was work and to spare. As long as
the day lasted the way continued stiff and stony, ceaselessly mounting
or descending, with never a level of breathing-space breadth nor a
moment's respite from the rampant sunshine. A few times I stumbled upon
an inhabited heap of stones in a fold of the hills. Man, at least fully
clothed, seemed never before to have strayed thus far afield. From each
hutch poured forth a shaggy fellow with his draggled mate and a flock of
half-naked children, all to stare speechlessly after me as long as the
crown of my hat remained in sight.
The highway had deserted me entirely. As darkness came on, the dimming
outline of the cragged hills rising on either hand carried the thoughts
more than ever back to the savage, Bedouin-skulking solitudes of Asia
Minor. Long after these, too, had blended into the night I stumbled on.
At length there fell on my ear the distant dismal howling of dogs. I
pressed forward, and when the sound had grown to a discordant uproar
plunged, stick in hand, into a chaos of buildings jumbled together on a
rocky ridge,--the village of Penarruria.
The twisting, shoulder-broad channels between the predelugian hovels
were strewn with cobblestones, no two of equal size or height, but all
polished icy smooth. I sprawled and skated among them, a prey to
embarrassment for my clumsiness, until my confusion was suddenly
dispelled by the pleasure of seeing a native fall down, a buxom girl of
eighteen who suffered thus for her pride in putting on shoes. Throughout
the town these were rare, and stockings more so.
The _venta_ into which I straggled at last was the replica of an Arabic
_khan_, as ancient as the days of Tarik. It consisted of a covered
barnyard court surrounded by a vast corridor, with rock arches and
pillars, beneath which mules, _borricos_, and a horse or two were
munching. One archway near the entrance was given over to human
occupation. The _posadero_ grumbled at me a word of greeting; his wife
snarled interminably over her pots and jars in preparing me a meager
supper. Now and again as I ate, an _arriero_ arrived and led his animal
through the dining-room to the stable. I steeled myself to endure a
rough and stony night.
When I had sipped the last of my wine, however, the hostess, sullen as
ever, mounted three stone steps in the depth of the archway and lighted
me into a room that was strikingly in contrast with the dungeon-like inn
proper. The chamber was neatly, even daintily furnished, the walls
decorated college-fashion with pictures of every size and variety, the
tile floor carpeted with a thick rug, the bed veiled with lace curtains.
It was distinctly a feminine room; and as I undressed the certainty grew
upon me that I had dispossessed for the night the daughter of the house,
who had turned out to be none other than that maid whose pride-shod
downfall had so relieved my embarrassment. Evidently the venta of
Penarruria afforded no other accommodations befitting a guest who could
squander more than a half peseta for a mere night's lodging.
Over the head of the bed, framed in flowers and the dust-dry memento of
Palm Sunday, was a chromo misrepresentation of the Virgin, beneath which
flickered a wick floating in oil. I was early trained to sleep in
darkness. When I had endured for a long half-hour the dancing of the
light on my eyelids, I rose to blow it out, and sank quickly into
slumber.
I had all but finished my coffee and wedge of black bread next morning
when a double shriek announced that my forgotten sacrilege had been
discovered. The modern vestal virgins, in the persons of the posadera
and her now barefoot daughter, charged fire-eyed out of my erstwhile
quarters and swooped down upon me like two lineal descendants of the
Grecian Furies. I mustered such expression of innocence and
fearlessness as I was able and listened in silence. They exhausted in
time their stock of blistering adjectives and dashed together into the
street publishing their grievance to all Penarruria. Gradually the
shrill voices died away in the contorted village, and with them my
apprehension of figuring in some modern auto da fe. As I was picking up
my knapsack, however, an urchin burst in upon me shouting that the
guardia civil thereby summoned me into his presence.
"Ha," thought I, "Spain has merely grown more up-to-date in dealing with
heretics."
The officer was not to be avoided. He sat before a building which I
must pass to escape from the town; a deep-eyed man who manipulated his
cigarette with one hand while he slowly ran the fingers of the other
through the only beard, perhaps, in all the dreaded company of which he
was a member. His greeting, however, was cordial, almost diffident. In
fact, the cause of my summons was quite other than I had apprehended.
Having learned my nationality from the inn register, he had made so bold
as to hope that I would delay my departure long enough to give him a
cigarette's worth of information concerning the western hemisphere.
"I have resigned from the guardia," he said in explanation of his
un-Spanish curiosity, "and in three months I go to make cigars in your
Tampa, in la Florida. Spain can no longer feed her children."
I sketched briefly the life in the new world, not forgetting to picture
some of the hardships such a change must bring a man of the fixed habits
of forty, and took leave of him with the national benediction.
For some hours I trudged on across a country similar to that of the day
before. The heat was African. The Spanish summer resembles an
intermittent fever; with nightfall comes an inner assurance that the
worst is over, and infallibly with the new day the blazing sun sends
down its rays seemingly more fiercely than before. The reflection of
how agreeable would be a respite from its fury was weaving itself into
my thoughts when I swooped suddenly down upon a railway at a hamlet
named Gobantes. I had no hope of covering all Spain afoot. Away among
the hills to the north the whistle of a locomotive that moment sounded.
I turned aside to the station and bought a ticket to Malaga.
The train squirmed away through howling, arid mountains, abounding in
tunnels and tumbled bottomless gorges; then descending headlong to the
plain, landed me at the seaport in mid-afternoon. Even Malaga on the
seashore suffers from the heat. Her Alameda was thick in dust as an
Andalusian highway; beneath the choking trees that bordered it the stone
benches were blistering to the touch. The excursion was rewarded,
however, if by nothing more than the mighty view of the sail-flecked
Mediterranean from the summit of the Gibilfaro, reached by a dripping
climb through shifting rubble and swarms of begging gypsy children.
Africa was visible, dimly but unmistakably. Below simmered the city,
unenlivened by a single touch of green; to the right the vega stretched
floor-level to the foot of the treeless Alhama. Directly beneath me,
like some vast tub, yawned the bullring, empty now but for a score of
boys playing at "torero," flaunting their jackets in the face of an
urchin fitted with paper horns, and dashing in pretended terror for the
barrier when he turned upon them. The ascent of the Gibilfaro must
certainly be forbidden on Sunday afternoons. From this height the
struggle in the arena, visible in its entirety, yet purged by distance
of its unpleasing details, would be a scene more impressive than from
the best seat in the tribunes.
When I reached the station next morning the platform gate was locked and
the train I had hoped to take was legally departed. A railway
hanger-on, in rags and hemp sandals, however, climbed the iron picket
fence and shouted a word to the engineer. Then beckoning to me to
follow, he trotted back into the building and rapped authoritatively on
the closed window of the ticket-office.
"Senor," he said, as the agent looked out upon us, "be kind enough to
sell this caballero a ticket."
"The train is gone," answered the agent.
"Not so, senor," replied the bundle of rags haughtily; "I am having it
held that this cavalier may take it."
"Ah, very well," responded the official; and having sold me the ticket,
he handed to the hanger-on the key to the platform gate. As I passed
through it the latter held out his hand, into which I dropped a copper.
"Muchisimas gracias, caballero," he said, bowing profoundly, "and may
your grace forever travel with God."
It was noon when I descended at Bobadilla, the sand-swept junction where
all southern Spain changes cars. The train to Granada was soon jolting
away to the eastward. Within the third-class compartment the heat was
flesh-smelting. The bare wooden cell, of the size of a piano-crate, was
packed not merely to its lawful and unreasonable capacity of ten
persons, but with all the personal chattels under which nine of those
persons had been able to totter down to the station. Between the two
plank benches, that danced up and down so like the screen of a threshing
machine as to deceive the blind man beside me into the ludicrous notion
that the train was moving rapidly, was heaped a cart-load. To attempt
an inventory thereof would be to name everything bulky, unpleasing, and
sharp-cornered that ever falls into the possession of the Spanish
peasant. Suffice it to specify that at the summit of the heap swayed a
crate of chickens whose cackling sounded without hint of interruption
from Bobadilla to the end of the journey.
The national characteristics of third-class are clearly marked. Before
a French train is well under way two men are sure to fall into some
heated dispute, to which their companions give undivided but speechless
attention. The German rides in moody silence; the Italian babbles
incessantly of nothing. An Englishman endures a third-class journey
frozen-featured as if he were striving to convince his fellows that he
has been thus reduced for once because he has bestowed his purse on the
worthy poor. But the truly democratic Spaniard settles down by the
compartmentful into a cheery family. Not one of my fellow-sufferers but
had some reminiscence to relate, not a question arose to which each did
not offer his frank opinion. He who descended carried away with him the
benediction of all; the newcomer became in a twinkling a full-fledged
member of the impromptu brotherhood.
Nine times I was fervently entreated to partake of a traveler's lunch,
and my offer to share my own afternoon nibble was as many times declined
with wishes for good appetite and digestion. Travelers who assure us
that this custom inherited from the Moor has died out in Spain are in
error; it is dead only among foreigners in first-class carriages and
tourist hotels--who never had it. The genuine Spaniard would sooner
slap his neighbor in the face than to eat before him without begging him
to share the repast.
We halted more than frequently. On each such occasion there sounded
above the last screech of the brakes the drone of a guard announcing the
length of the stay. Little less often the traveler in the further
corner of the compartment squirmed his way to the door and departed.
With a sigh of relief the survivors divided the space equitably between
them--and were incontinently called upon to yield it up again as some
dust-cloaked peasant flung his bag of implements against my legs with a
cheery "buenas tardes" and climbed in upon us.
Then came the task of again getting the train under way. The brisk "all
aboard" of our own land would be unbearably rude to the gentle Spanish
ear. Whence every station, large or small, holds in captivity a man
whose only duty in life seems to be that of announcing the departure of
trains. He is invariably tattered, sun-bleached, and sandal-footed,
with the general appearance of one whom life has used not unkindly but
confounded roughly. How each station succeeds in keeping its announcer
in the pink of dilapidation is a Spanish secret. But there he is,
without fail, and when the council of officials has at length concluded
that the train must depart, he patters noiselessly along the edge of the
platform, chanting in a music weird, forlorn, purely Arabic, a phrase so
rhythmic that no printed words can more than faintly suggest it:
"Seno-o-o-res viajeros al tre-e-e-en."
"Gentlemen travelers to the train" is all it means in mere words; but
rolling from the lips of one of these forlorn captives it seems to carry
with it all the history of Spain, and sinks into the soul like a voice
from the abysmal past.
Among my fellow-passengers was the first Spanish priest with whom I came
into conversational contact. In the retrospect that fact is all but
effaced by the memory that he was not merely the first but the only
Spaniard who ever declined my proffer of a cigarette. To one eager to
find the prevailing estimation of the priesthood of Spain false or
vastly overdrawn, this first introduction to the gown augured well. He
was neither fat nor sensual: rather the contrary, with the lineaments of
a man sincere in his work and beneficent in his habits. His manner was
affable, without a hint of that patronizing air and pose of sanctity
frequently to be observed among Protestant clergy, his attitude of
equality toward the laity peculiarly reminiscent of the priests of
Buddha.
At the station of San Francisco half the passengers descended. The
building was perched on a shelf of rock that fell away behind it into a
stony gulf. Surrounding all the station precinct ran a weather-warped
and blackened fence, ten feet high, along the top of which screamed and
jostled fully two score women and girls, offering for sale every species
of ware from cucumbers to turkeys. Hucksters and beggars swarm down--or
rather up--on San Francisco in such multitudes that the railway company
was forced to build the fence for the protection of its patrons. But
the women, not to be so easily outdone, carry each a ladder to surmount
the difficulty. As the train swung on around a pinnacle of rock, we
caught a long enduring view of the source of the uproar--the populous
and pauperous city of Loja, lodged in a trough-like hillside across the
valley.
Not far beyond there burst suddenly on the sight the snow-cowled Sierra
Nevada, and almost at the same moment the train halted at Puente Pinos.
I recalled the village as the spot where Columbus saw the ebbing tide of
his fortunes checked by the messengers of "Ysabel la Catolica"; but not
so the priest.
"One of our great industries, senor," he said, pointing to several
smoke-belching chimneys near at hand. "Puente Pinos produces the best
sugar in Spain."
"The cane is harvested early?" I observed, gazing away across the flat
fields.
"No, no," laughed the priest, "betabel (sugar beets)."
Spanish railways are as prone as those of Italy to repudiate the printed
promise of their tickets. We descended toward sunset at a station named
Granada only to find that the geographical Granada was still some miles
distant. The priest had offered to direct me to an inn or I should
perhaps have escaped entirely the experience of riding in a Spanish
street-car. It crawled for an hour through an ocean of dust, anchoring
every cable-length to take aboard some floundering pedestrian. Many of
these were priests; and as they gathered one by one on either side of my
companion, the hope I had entertained of discovering more of virtue
beneath the Spanish sotana than the world grants oozed unrestrainably
away. For they were, almost without exception, pot-bellied,
self-satisfied, cynical, with obscenity and the evidences of unnatural
vice as plainly legible on their countenances as the words on a printed
page.
We reached at last the central plaza, where my guide pointed out a large
modern building bearing across the front of its third story the
inscription, "Gran Casa de Viajeros de la Viuda Robledo." As I
alighted, a band of valets de place swept down upon me. I gave them no
attention; which did not, of course, lessen the impertinence with which
they danced about me. Having guessed my goal, one of them dashed before
me up the stairs, shouting to the senora to be prepared to receive the
guest he was bringing.
The widow Robledo was a serene-visaged woman in the early fifties; her
house a species of family hotel never patronized by foreigners. We came
quickly to terms, however; I was assigned a room overhanging the
culinary regions, for which, with the customary two and a half meals a
day, I engaged to pay four pesetas.
At the mention of money, the tout, who during all the transaction had
not once withdrawn the light of his simian countenance, demanded a
peseta for having found me a lodging. I reminded him of the real facts
of the case and invited him to withdraw. He followed me instead into my
new quarters, repeating his demands in a bullying voice, and for the
only time in my Spanish experience I was compelled to resort to physical
coercion. Unfortunate indeed is the tourist who must daily endure and
misjudge the race from these pests, so exactly the antithesis of the
courteous, uncovetous Spaniard of the working class.
I had not yet removed the outer stain of travel when a vast excitement
descended upon Granada,--it began to rain. On every hand sounded the
slamming of doors, the creaking of unused shutters; from below came up
the jangling of pans and the agitated voices of servants. The shower
lasted nearly ten minutes, and was chronicled at length next day in all
the newspapers of Spain.
From the edge of Granada city a long green aisle between exotic elms
leads easily upward to the domain of the Alhambra. In its deep-shaded
groves, so near yet seeming so far removed from the stony face of
thirsty Spain, reigns a dream-inviting stillness, a quiet enhanced
rather than broken by the murmur of captive brooks. For this, too,
remains in memory of the Moor, that the waters of the Genii and Darro
are still brought to play through a score of little stone channels
beneath the trees. There I drifted each morning, other plans
notwithstanding, to idle away the day on the grassy headland before and
below which spreads the vastness of the province of Granada, or
distressing the guardians of the ancient palace with my untourist-like
loiterings. But for her fame the traveler would surely pass the
Alhambra by as a half-ruined nest of bats and beggars. Yet within she
retains much of her voluptuous splendor, despite the desolating of time
and her prostitution to a gaping-stock of tourists. Like so much of the
Mussulman's building, the overshadowed palace is effeminate, seeming to
speak aloud of that luxury and wantonness of the Moor in his decadent
days before the iron-fisted reyes catolicos came to thrust him forth
from his last European kingdom. In this she resembles the Taj Mahal;
yet the difference is great. For the effeminacy of the Alhambra is the
unrobustness of woman, while the Taj, like the Oriental man, is
effeminate outwardly, superficially, beneath all which shows sound
masculinity.
In the city below is only enough to be seen to give contrast to the
half-effaced traces of magnificence on the hill. He who comes to
Granada trusting to read in her the last word of the degradation of the
once regal and all powerful must continue his quest. Of squalor and
beggars she is singularly free--for Spain. Something of both remains
for him who will wander through the Albaicin, peering into its
cave-dwellings, wherein, and at times before which romp brown gypsy
children garbed in the costume in which the reputed ancestor of us all
set forth from the valley of Eden, or occasional jade-eyed hoydens of
the grotto sunning their blacker tresses and mumbling crones plying
their _bachi_ in conspicuous places. But even this seems rather a misery
of parade than a reality, a theatrical lying-in-wait for the gullible
_Busne_ from foreign shores.
By night there is life and movement in Granada; a strolling to and fro
along the Alameda to the strains of a military band, the droning of the
water-carriers who bring down lump by lump the ice-fields of the Sierra
Nevada, and a dancing away of the summer night to the clatter of the
castanet. But by day--once only during my stay was the languid pulse of
the city stirred during the sunlit hours. A conscript regiment
thundered in upon us, blocking all traffic and filling the air with a
fog of dust that dispelled for a time my eagerness to seek again the
open road; a dust that thick-shrouded beneath its drab the very color of
caisson and uniform, dry-blanketing the panting horses, and streaking
the faces of men and officers with figures like unto the ornamental
writing on the inner walls of the Alhambra.