The train which leaves Seville at ten of a sunny morning is supposed to
arrive in Granada at seven of a moonlight evening. This is a mistake;
the moonlight is on time, but the train arrives at a quarter of nine.
Still, if the day has been sunny the whole way and the moonlight is
there at the end, no harm has really been done; and measurably the
promise of the train has been kept.
I
There was not a moment of the long journey over the levels of Andahisia
which was not charming; when it began to be over the uplands of the last
Moorish kingdom, it was richly impressive. The only thing that I can
remember against the landscape is the prevalence of olive orchards. I
hailed as a relief the stubble-fields immeasurably spread at times,
and I did not always resent the roadside planting of some sort of tall
hedges which now and then hid the olives. But olive orchards may vary
their monotony by the spectacle of peasants on ladders gathering
their fruit into wide-mouthed sacks, and occasionally their ranks of
symmetrical green may be broken by the yellow and red of poplars and
pomegranates around the pleasant farmsteads. The nearer we drew to
Granada the pleasanter these grew, till in the famous Vega they thickly
dotted the landscape with their brown roofs and white walls.
We had not this effect till we had climbed the first barrier of hills
and began to descend on the thither side; but we had incident enough to
keep us engaged without the picturesqueness. The beggars alone, who
did not fail us at any station, were enough; for what could the most
exacting tourist ask more than to be eating his luncheon under the eyes
of the children who besieged his car windows and protested their famine
in accents which would have melted a heart of stone or of anything
less obdurate than travel? We had always our brace of Civil Guards,
who preserved us from bandits, but they left the beggars unmolested by
getting out on the train next the station and pacing the platform, while
the rabble of hunger thronged us on the other side. There was especially
a hoy who, after being compassionated in money for his misfortune,
continued to fling his wooden leg into the air and wave it at our
window by some masterly gymnastics; and there was another boy who kept
lamenting that he had no mother, till, having duly feed and fed him, I
suggested, “But you have a father?” Then, as if he had never seen
the case in that light before, he was silent, and presently went away
without further insistence on his bereavement.
The laconic fidelity of my note-book enables me to recall here that
the last we saw of Seville was the Cathedral and the Giralda, which the
guide-books had promised us we should see first; that we passed some
fields of alfalfa which the Moors had brought from Africa and the
Spanish have carried to America; that in places men were plowing and
that the plowed land was red; that the towns on the uplands in the
distance were white and not gray, or mud-colored, as in Castile; that
the morning sky was blue, with thin, pale clouds; that the first station
out was charmingly called Two Brothers, and that the loungers about it
were plain, but kind-looking men-folk with good faces, some actually
clean-shaven, and a woman with a white rose in her hair; that Two
Brothers is a suburb of Seville, frequented in the winter, and has
orange orchards about it; that farther on at one place the green of
the fields spread up to the walls of a white farm with a fine sense of
color; that there were hawks sailing in the blue air; that there were
grotesque hedges of cactus and piles of crooked cactus logs; that there
were many eucalyptus trees; that there were plantations of young olives,
as if never to let that all-pervading industry perish; that there were
irregular mountain ranges on the right, but never the same kind of
scenery on both sides of the track; that there was once a white cottage
on a yellow hill and a pink villa with two towers; that there was a
solitary fig tree near the road, and that there were vast lonely fields
when there were not olive orchards.
Taking breath after one o’clock, much restored by our luncheon, my
note-book remembers a gray-roofed, yellow-walled town, very suitable
for a water-color, and just beyond it the first vineyard we had come
to. Then there were pomegranate trees, golden-leaved, and tall poplars
pollarded plume fashion as in southern France; and in a field a herd of
brown pigs feeding, which commended itself to observance, doubtless, as
color in some possible word-painting. There now abounded pomegranates,
figs, young corn, and more and more olives; and as if the old olives and
young olives were not enough, the earth began to be pitted with holes
dug for the olives which had not yet been planted.