We passed a convent turned into a prosperous-looking manufactory and we
met a troop of merry priests talking gayly and laughing together, and
very effective in their black robes against the white road. When we came
to the village that was a _municipium_ under Augustus and a _colonia_
under Hadrian, we found it indeed scanty and poor, but very neat and
self-respectful-looking, and not unworthy to have been founded by Scipio
Africanus two hundred years before Christ. Such cottage interiors as
we glimpsed seemed cleaner and cozier than some in Wales; men in wide
flat-brimmed hats sat like statues at the doors, absolutely motionless,
but there were women bustling in and out in their work, and at one place
a little girl of ten had been left to do the family wash, and was doing
it joyously and spreading the clothes in the dooryard to dry. We did not
meet with universal favor as we drove by; some groups of girls mocked
our driver; when we said one of them was pretty he answered that he had
seen prettier.
At the entrance to the ruins of the amphitheater which forms the
tourist’s chief excuse for visiting Italica the popular manners softened
toward us; the village children offered to sell us wild narcissus
flowers and were even willing to take money in charity. They followed us
into the ruins, much forbidden by the fine, toothless old custodian
who took possession of us as his proper prey and led us through
the moldering caverns and crumbling tiers of seats which form the
amphitheater. Vast blocks, vast hunks, of the masonry are broken off
from the mass and lie detached, but the mass keeps the form and dignity
of the original design; and in the lonely fields there it had something
august and proud beyond any quality of the Arena at Verona or the
Colosseum at Rome. It is mostly stripped of the marble that once faced
the interior, and is like some monstrous oval shaped out of the earth,
but near the imperial box lay some white slabs with initials cut in them
which restored the vision of the “grandeur that was Rome” pretty
well over the known world when this great work was in its prime. Our
custodian was qualified by his toothlessness to lisp like any old
Castilian the letters that other Andalusians hiss, but my own Spanish
was so slight and his _patois_ was so dense that the best we could do
was to establish a polite misunderstanding. On this his one word of
English, repeated as we passed through the subterranean doors, “Lion,
lion, lion,” cast a gleam of intelligence which brightened into a vivid
community of ideas when we ended in his cottage, and he prepared to sell
us some of the small Roman coins which formed his stock in trade. The
poor place was beautifully neat, and from his window he made us free
of a sight of Seville, signally the cathedral and the Giralda, such as
could not be bought for money in New York.
Then we set out on our return, leaving unvisited to the left the church
of San Isidore de Campo, with its tombs of Guzman the Good and that
Better Lady Dona Urraca Osorio, whom Peter the Cruel had burned. I say
better, because I hold it nobler in Urraca to have rejected the love of
a wicked king than in Guzman to have let the Moors slay his son rather
than surrender a city to them. But I could only pay honor to her
pathetic memory and the memory of that nameless handmaid of hers who
rushed into the flames to right the garments on the form which the wind
had blown them away from, and so perished with her. We had to take on
trust from the guide-books all trace of the Roman town where the three
emperors were born, and whose “palaces, aqueducts, and temples and
circus were magnificent.” We had bought some of the “coins daily dug
up,” but we intrusted to the elements those “vestiges of vestiges” left
of Trajan’s palaces after an envious earthquake destroyed them so lately
as 1755.
The one incident of our return worthy of literature was the dramatic
triumph of a woman over a man and a mule as we saw it exhibited on the
parapet of a culvert over a dry torrent’s bed. It was the purpose of
this woman, standing on the coping in statuesque relief and showing
against the sky the comfortable proportions of the Spanish housewife, to
mount the mule behind the man. She waited patiently while the man slowly
and as we thought faithlessly urged the mule to the parapet; then, when
she put out her hands and leaned forward to take her seat, the mule
inched softly away and left her to recover her balance at the risk of a
fall on the other side. We were too far for anything but the dumb show,
but there were, no doubt, words which conveyed her opinions unmistakably
to both man and mule. With our hearts in our mouths we witnessed the
scene and its repetitions till we could bear it no longer, and we had
bidden our cabman drive on when with a sudden spring the brave woman
launched herself semicircularly forward and descended upon the exact
spot which she had been aiming at. There solidly established on the
mule, with her arms fast round the man, she rode off; and I do not think
any reader of mine would like to have been that mule or that man for the
rest of the way home.
We met many other mules, much more exemplary, in teams of two, three,
and four, covered with bells and drawing every kind of carryall and
stage and omnibus. These vehicles were built when the road was, about
1750, and were, like the road, left to the natural forces for keeping
themselves in repair. The natural forces were not wholly adequate in
either case, but the vehicles were not so thick with dust as the road,
because they could shake it off. They had each two or four passengers
seated with the driver; passengers clustered over the top and packed the
inside, but every one was in the joyous mood of people going home for
the day. In a plaza not far from the Triana bridge you may see these
decrepit conveyances assembling every afternoon for their suburban
journeys, and there is no more picturesque sight in Seville, more
homelike, more endearing. Of course, when I say this I leave out of the
count the bridge over the Guadalquivir at the morning or evening hour
when it is covered with brightly caparisoned donkeys, themselves covered
with men needing a shave, and gay-kerchiefed women of every age, with
boys and dogs underfoot, and pedestrians of every kind, and hucksters
selling sea-fruit and land-fruit and whatever else the stranger would
rather see than eat. Very little outcry was needed for the sale of these
things, which in Naples or even in Venice would have been attended by
such vociferation as would have sufficed to proclaim a city in flames.
On a day not long after our expedition to Italica we went a drive with a
young American friend living in Seville, whom I look to for a book about
that famous city such as I should like to write myself if I had the time
to live it as he has done. He promised that he would show us a piece of
the old Roman wall, but he showed us ever so much more, beginning with
the fore court of the conventual church of Santa Paula, where we found
the afternoon light waiting to illumine for us with its tender caress
the Luca della Robbia-like colored porcelain figures of the portal and
the beautiful octagon tower staying a moment before taking flight for
heaven: the most exquisite moment of our whole fortnight in Seville.
Tall pots of flowers stood round, and the grass came green through the
crevices of the old foot-worn pavement. When we passed out a small boy
scuffled for our copper with the little girl who opened the gate for us,
but was brought to justice by us, and joined cheerfully in the chorus of
children chanting “Mo-ney, mo-ney!” round us, but no more expecting an
answer to their prayer than if we had been saints off the church door.
We passed out of the city by a gate where in a little coign of vantage
a cobbler was thoughtfully hammering away in the tumult at a shoe-sole,
and then suddenly on our right we had the Julian wall: not a mere
fragment, but a good long stretch of it. The Moors had built upon it
and characterized it, but had not so masked it as to hide the perdurable
physiognomy of the Roman work. It was vastly more Roman wall than you
see at Rome; but far better than this heroic image of war and waste was
the beautiful old aqueduct, perfectly Roman still, with no visible touch
from Moor, or from Christian, before or after the Moor, and performing
its beneficent use after two thousand years as effectively as in the
years before Christ came to bless the peacemakers. Nine miles from its
mountain source the graceful arches bring the water on their shoulders;
and though there is now an English company that pipes other streams to
the city through its underground mains, the Roman aqueduct, eternally
sublime in its usefulness, is constant to the purpose of the forgotten
men who imagined it. The outer surfaces of the channel which it lifted
to the light and air were tagged with weeds and immemorial mosses, and
dripped as with the sweat of its twenty-centuried toil.
We followed it as far as it went on our way to a modern work of peace
and use which the ancient friend and servant of man would feel no
unworthy rival. Beyond the drives and gardens of the Delicias, where we
lingered our last to look at the pleasurers haunting them, we drove far
across the wheat-fields where a ship-canal five miles long is cutting
to rectify the curve of the Guadalquivir and bring Seville many miles
nearer the sea than it has ever been before; hitherto the tramp steamers
have had to follow the course of the ships of Tarshish in their winding
approach. The canal is the notion of the young king of Spain, and the
work on it goes forward night and day. The electric lights were
shedding their blinding glare on the deafening clatter of the excavating
machinery, and it was an unworthy relief to escape from the intense
modernity of the scene to that medieval retreat nearer the city where
the _aficionados_ night-long watch the bulls coming up from their
pastures for the fight or the feast, whichever you choose to call it, of
the morrow. These amateurs, whom it would be rude to call sports, lurk
in the wayside cafe over their cups of chocolate and wait till in that
darkest hour before dawn, with irregular trampling and deep bellowing,
these hapless heroes of the arena pass on to their doom. It is a great
thing for the _aficionados_ who may imagine in that bellowing the the
gladiator’s hail of _Morituri salutant._ At any rate, it is very chic;
it gives a man standing in Seville, which disputes with Madrid the
primacy in bull-feasting. If the national capital has bull-feasting
every Sunday of the year, all the famous _torreros_ come from Andalusia,
with the bulls, their brave antagonists, and in the great provincial
capital there are bull-feasts of insurpassable, if not incomparable,
splendor.
Before our pleasant drive ended we passed, as we had already passed
several times, the scene of the famous Feria of Seville, the cattle show
which draws tens of thousands to the city every springtime for business
and pleasure, but mostly pleasure. The Feria focuses in its greatest
intensity at one of the entrances to the Delicias, where the street is
then so dense with every sort of vehicle that people can cross it only
by the branching viaduct, which rises in two several ascents from each
footway, intersecting at top and delivering their endless multitudes on
the opposite sidewalk. Along the street are gay pavilions and cottages
where the nobility live through the Feria with their families and
welcome the public to the sight of their revelry through the open doors
and windows. Then, if ever, the stranger may see the dancing, and hear
the singing and playing which all the other year in Seville disappoints
him of.