[Illustration: 21 GATEWAY OF THE BRIDGE, CORDOVA]
After our visits to the mosque and the bridge and the museum there
remained nothing of our forenoon, and we gave the whole of the earlier
afternoon to an excursion which strangers are expected to make into the
first climb of hills to the eastward of the city. The road which reaches
the Huerto de los Arcos is rather smoother for driving than the streets
of Cordova, but the rain had made it heavy, and we were glad of our good
horses and their owner’s mercy to them. He stopped so often to breathe
them when the ascent began that we had abundant time to note the
features of the wayside; the many villas, piously named for saints, set
on the incline, and orcharded about with orange trees, in the beginning
of that measureless forest of olives which has no limit but the horizon.
From the gate to the villa which we had come to see it was a stiff
ascent by terraced beds of roses, zinneas, and purple salvia beside
walls heavy with jasmine and trumpet creepers, in full bloom, and orange
trees, fruiting and flowering in their desultory way. Before the villa
we were to see a fountain much favored by our guide who had a passion
for the jets that played ball with themselves as long as the gardener
let him turn the water on, and watched with joy to see how high the
balls would go before slipping back. The fountain was in a grotto-like
nook, where benches of cement decked with scallop shells were set round
a basin with the figures of two small boys in it bestriding that of a
lamb, all employed in letting the water dribble from their mouths. It
was very simple-hearted, as such things seem mostly obliged to be, but
nature helped art out so well with a lovely abundance of leaf and petal
that a far more exacting taste than ours must have been satisfied. The
garden was in fact very pretty, though whether it was worth fifteen
pesetas and three hours coming to see the reader must decide for himself
when he does it. I think it was, myself, and I would like to be there
now, sitting in a shell-covered cement chair at the villa steps, and
letting the landscape unroll itself wonderfully before me. We were on a
shore of that ocean of olives which in southern Spain washes far up the
mountain walls of the blue and bluer distances, and which we were to
skirt more and more in bay and inlet and widening and narrowing expanses
throughout Andalusia. Before we left it we wearied utterly of it, and in
fact the olive of Spain is not the sympathetic olive of Italy, though
I should think it a much more practical and profitable tree. It is not
planted so much at haphazard as the Italian olive seems to be; its
mass looks less like an old apple orchard than the Italian; its regular
succession is a march of trim files as far as the horizon or the
hillsides, which they often climbed to the top. We were in the season of
the olive harvest, and throughout the month of October its nearer lines
showed the sturdy trees weighed down by the dense fruit, sometimes
very small, sometimes as large as pigeon eggs. There were vineyards and
wheat-fields in that vast prospect, and certainly there were towns and
villages; but what remains with me is the sense of olives and ever more
olives, though this may be the cumulative effect of other such prospects
as vast and as monotonous.
While we looked away and away, the gardener and a half-grown boy were
about their labors that Sunday afternoon as if it were a week-day,
though for that reason perhaps they were not working very hard. They
seemed mostly to be sweeping up the fallen leaves from the paths, and
where the leaves had not fallen from the horse-chestnuts the boy was
assisting nature by climbing the trees and plucking them. We tried to
find out why he was doing this, but to this day I do not know why he
was doing it, and I must be content to contribute the bare fact to the
science of arboriculture. Possibly it was in the interest of neatness,
and was a precaution against letting the leaves drop and litter the
grass. There was apparently a passion for neatness throughout, which in
the villa itself mounted to ecstasy. It was in a state to be come and
lived in at any moment, though I believe it was occupied only in the
late spring and the early autumn; in winter the noble family went to
Madrid, and in summer to some northern watering-place. It was rather
small, and expressed a life of the minor hospitalities when the family
was in residence. It was no place for house-parties, and scarcely for
week-end visits, or even for neighborhood dinners. Perhaps on that
terrace there was afternoon ice-cream or chocolate for friends who rode
or drove over or out; it seemed so possible that we had to check in
ourselves the cozy impulse to pull up our shell-covered cement chairs to
some central table of like composition.
Within, the villa was of a spick-and-spanness which I feel that I have
not adequately suggested; and may I say that the spray of a garden-hose
seemed all that would be needed to put the place in readiness for
occupation? Not that even this was needed for that interior of tile and
marble, so absolutely apt for the climate and the use the place would
be put to. In vain we conjectured, and I hope not impertinently, the
characters and tastes of the absentees; the sole clue that offered
itself was a bookshelf of some Spanish versions from authors scientific
and metaphysical to the verge of agnosticism. I would not swear to
Huxley and Herbert Spencer among the English writers, but they were such
as these, not in their entire bulk, but in extracts and special essays.
I recall the slightly tilted row of the neat paper copies; and I wish I
knew who it was liked to read them. The Spanish have a fondness for
such dangerous ground; from some of their novels it appears they feel it
rather chic to venture on it.