IV

The day waned more and more; the sun began to sink, and then it sank

with that sudden drop which the sun has at last. The sky flushed

crimson, turned mauve, turned gray, and the twilight thickened over the

summits billowing softly westward. There had been a good deal of joking,

both Spanish and English, among the passengers; I had found particularly

cheering the richness of a certain machinist’s trousers of bright golden

corduroy; but as the shades of night began to embrown the scene our

spirits fell; and at the cry of a lonesome bird, far off where the

sunset had been, they followed the sun in its sudden drop. Against

the horizon a peasant boy leaned on his staff and darkled against the

darkening sky.

Nothing lacked now but the opportune recollection that this was the

region where the natives had been so wicked in times past that an

ingenious statesman, such as have seldom been wanting to Spain, imagined

bringing in a colony of German peasants to mix with them and reform

them. That is what some of the books say, but others say that the region

had remained unpeopled after the first exile of the conquered Moors. All

hold that the notion of mixing the colonists and the natives worked

the wrong way; the natives were not reformed, but the colonists were

depraved and stood in with the local brigands, ultimately, if not

immediately. This is the view suggested, if not taken, by that amusing

emissary, George Borrow, who seems in his _Bible in Spain_ to have been

equally employed in distributing the truths of the New Testament and

collecting material for the most dramatic study of Spanish civilization

known to literature. It is a delightful book, and not least delightful

in the moments of misgiving which it imparts to the reader, when he

does not know whether to prize more the author’s observation or his

invention, whichever it may be. Borrow reports a conversation with an

innkeeper and his wife of the Colonial German descent, who gave a good

enough account of themselves, and then adds the dark intimation of an

Italian companion that they could not be honestly keeping a hotel in

that unfrequented place. It was not just in that place that our delay

had chosen to occur, but it was in the same colonized region, and I am

glad now that I had not remembered the incident from my first reading of

Borrow. It was sufficiently uncomfortable to have some vague association

with the failure of that excellent statesman’s plan, blending creepily

with the feeling of desolation from the gathering dark, and I now recall

the distinct relief given by the unexpected appearance of two such

Guardias Civiles as travel with every Spanish train, in the space before

our lonely station.

These admirable friends were part of the system which has made travel as

safe throughout Spain as it is in Connecticut, where indeed I sometimes

wonder that road-agents do not stop my Boston express in the waste

expanse of those certain sand barrens just beyond New Haven. The last

time I came through that desert I could not help thinking how nice it

would be to have two Guardias Civiles in our Pullman car; but of course

at the summit of the Sierra Morena, where our _rapido_ was stalled in

the deepening twilight, it was still nicer to see that soldier pair,

pacing up and down, trim, straight, very gentle and polite-looking, but

firm, with their rifles lying on their shoulders which they kept exactly

together. It is part of the system that they may use those rifles upon

any evil-doer whom they discover in a deed of violence, acting at

once as police, court of law, and executioners; and satisfying public

curiosity by pinning to the offender’s coat their official certificate

that he was shot by such and such a civil guard for such and such a

reason, and then notifying the nearest authorities. It is perhaps too

positive, too peremptory, too precise; and the responsibility could

not be intrusted to men who had not satisfied the government of their

fitness by two years’ service in the army without arrest for any

offense, or even any question of misbehavior. But these conditions

once satisfied, and their temperament and character approved, they are

intrusted with what seem plenary powers till they are retired for old

age; then their sons may serve after them as Civil Guards with the same

prospect of pensions in the end. I suppose they do not always travel

first class, but once their silent, soldierly presence honored our

compartment between stations; and once an officer of their corps

conversed for long with a fellow-passenger in that courteous ease and

self-respect which is so Spanish between persons of all ranks.

It was not very long after the guards appeared so reassuringly before

the station, when a series of warning bells and whistles sounded, and

our locomotive with an impatient scream began to tug at our train. We

were really off, starting from Santa Elena at the very time when we

ought to have been stopping at Cordova, with a good stretch of four

hours still before us. As our fellow-travelers quitted us at one station

and another we were finally left alone with the kindly-looking old man

who had seemed interested in us from the first, and who now made some

advances in broken English. Presently he told us in Spanish, to account

for the English accent on which we complimented him, that he had two

sons studying some manufacturing business in Manchester, where he had

visited them, and acquired so much of our tongue as we had heard. He

was very proud and glad to speak of his sons, and he valued us for our

English and the strangeness which commends people to one another in

travel. When he got out at a station obscured past identification by its

flaring lamps, he would not suffer me to help him with his hand-baggage;

while he deplored my offered civility, he reassured me by patting my

back at parting. Yet I myself had to endure the kindness which he would

not when we arrived at Cordova, where two young fellows, who had got in

at a suburban station, helped me with our bags and bundles quite as if

they had been two young Americans.

V

Somewhere at a junction our train had been divided and our car, left

the last of what remained, had bumped and threatened to beat itself to

pieces during its remaining run of fifteen miles. This, with our long

retard at Santa Elena, and our opportune defense from the depraved

descendants of the reforming German colonists by the Guardias Civiles,

had given us a day of so much excitement that we were anxious to have

it end tranquilly at midnight in the hotel which we had chosen from, our

Baedeker. I would not have any reader of mine choose it again from

my experience of it, though it was helplessly rather wilfully bad;

certainly the fault was not the hotel’s that it seemed as far from the

station as Cordova was from Madrid. It might, under the circumstances,

have, been _a_ merit in it to be undergoing a thorough overhauling of

the furnishing and decoration of the rooms on the _patio_ which had

formed our ideal for a quiet night. A conventionally napkined waiter

welcomed us from the stony street, and sent us up to our rooms with the

young interpreter who met us at the station, but was obscure as to their

location. When we refused them because they were over that loud-echoing

alley, the interpreter made himself still more our friend and called

mandatorially down the speaking-tube that we wished _interiores_ and

would take nothing else, though he must have known that no such rooms

were to be had. He even abetted us in visiting the rooms on the _patio_

and satisfying ourselves that they were all dismantled; when the waiter

brought up the hot soup which was the only hot thing in the house beside

our tempers, he joined with that poor fellow in reconciling us to the

inevitable. They declared that the people whom we heard uninterruptedly

clattering and chattering by in the street below, and the occasional

tempest of wheels and bells and hoofs that clashed up to us would be the

very last to pass through there that night, and they gave such good and

sufficient reasons for their opinion that we yielded as we needs must.

Of course, they were wrong; and perhaps they even knew that they were

wrong; but I think we were the only people in that neighborhood who got

any sleep that night or the next. We slept the sleep of exhaustion, but

I believe those Cordovese preferred waking outdoors to trying to sleep

within. It was apparently their custom to walk and talk the night away

in the streets, not our street alone, but all the other streets of

Cordova; the laughing which I heard may have expressed the popular

despair of getting any sleep. The next day we experimented in listening

from rooms offered us over another street, and then we remained

measurably contented to bear the ills we had. This was after an

exhaustive search for a better hotel had partly appeased us; but there

remained in the Paseo del Gran Capitan one house unvisited which has

ever since grown upon my belief as embracing every comfort and advantage

lacking to our hotel. I suppose I am the stronger in this belief because

when we came to it we had been so disappointed with the others that we

had not the courage to go inside. Smell for smell, the interior of that

hotel may have harbored a worse one than the odor of henhouse which

pervaded ours, I hope from the materials for calcimining the rooms on

the _patio._

By the time we returned we found a guide waiting for us, and we agreed

with him for a day’s service. He did not differ with other authorities

as to the claims of Cordova on the tourist’s interest. From being the

most brilliant capital of the Western world in the time of the Caliphs

it is now allowed by all the guides and guide-books and most of the

travelers, to be one of the dullest of provincial towns. It is no longer

the center of learning; and though it cannot help doing a large business

in olives, with the orchards covering the hills around it, the business

does not seem to be a very active one. “The city once the abode of

the flower of Andalusian nobility,” says the intelligent O’Shea in

his _Guide to Spain, “_is inhabited chiefly by administradores of the

absentee senorio; their ‘solares’ are desert and wretched, the streets

ill paved though clean, and the whitewashed houses unimportant, low, and

denuded of all art and meaning, either past or present.” Baedeker gives

like reasons for thinking “the traveler whose expectation is on

tiptoe as he enters the ancient capital of the Moors will probably be

disappointed in all but the cathedral.” _Cook’s Guide,_ latest but not

least commendable of the authorities, is of a more divided mind and

finds the means of trade and industry and their total want of visible

employment at the worst anomalous.

[Illustration: 19 THE ANCIENT CITY OF CORDOVA]

Vacant, narrow streets where the grass does not grow, and there is only

an endless going and coming of aimless feet; a market without buyers or

sellers to speak of, and a tangle of squat white houses, abounding in

lovely _patios,_ sweet and bright with flowers and fountains: this

seems to be Cordova in the consensus of the manuals, and with me in

the retrospect a sort of puzzle is the ultimate suggestion of the dead

capital of the Western Caliphs. Gautier thinks, or seventy-two years ago

he thought (and there has not been much change since), that “Cordova has

a more African look than any other city of Andalusia; its streets, or

rather its lanes, whose tumultuous pavement resembles the bed of dry

torrents, all littered with straw from the loads of passing donkeys,

have nothing that recalls the manners and customs of Europe. The Moors,

if they came back, would have no great trouble to reinstate themselves.

... The universal use of lime-wash gives a uniform tint to the

monuments, blunts the lines of the architecture, effaces the

ornamentation, and forbids you to read their age.... You cannot know

the wall of a century ago from the wall of yesterday. Cordova, once the

center of Arab civilization, is now a huddle of little white houses with

corridors between them where two mules could hardly pass abreast. Life

seems to have ebbed from the vast body, once animated by the active

circulation of Moorish blood; nothing is left now but the blanched

and calcined skeleton.... In spite of its Moslem air, Cordova is very

Christian and rests under the special protection of the Archangel

Raphael.” It is all rather contradictory; but Gautier owns that the

great mosque is a “monument unique in the world, and novel even for

travelers who have had the fortune to admire the wonders of Moorish

architecture at Granada or Seville.”

De Amicis, who visited Cordova nearly forty-five years later, and in the

heart of spring, brought letters which opened something of the intimate

life of that apparently blanched and calcined skeleton. He meets young

men and matches Italian verses with their Spanish; spends whole nights

sitting in their cafes or walking their plazas, and comes away with his

mouth full of the rapturous verses of an Arab poet: “Adieu, Cordova!

Would that my life were as long as Noah’s, that I might live forever

within thy walls! Would that I had the treasures of Pharaoh, to spend

them upon wine and the beautiful women of Cordova, with tho gentle

eyes that invite kisses!” He allows that the lines may be “a little too

tropical for the taste of a European,” and it seems to me that there may

be a golden mean between scolding and flattering which would give the

truth about Cordova. I do not promise to strike it; our hotel still

rankles in my heart; but I promise to try for it, though I have to say

that the very moment we started for the famous mosque it began to rain,

and rained throughout the forenoon, while we weltered from wonder to

wonder through the town. We were indeed weltering in a closed carriage,

which found its way not so badly through the alleys where two mules

could not pass abreast. The lime-wash of the walls did not emit the

white heat in which the other tourists have basked or baked; the houses

looked wet and chill, and if they had those flowered and fountained

_patios_ which people talk of they had taken them in out of the rain.