The rain that pelted sharply into the puddle before the station at
Granada was snow on the Sierra, and the snow that fell farther and
farther down the mountainsides resolved itself over the Vega into a
fog as white and almost as cold. Half-way across the storied and fabled
plain the rain stopped and the fog lifted, and then we saw by day, as
we had already seen by night, how the Vega was plentifully dotted with
white cottages amid breadths of wheat-land where the peasants were
plowing. Here and there were fields of Indian corn, and in a certain
place there was a small vineyard; in one of the middle distances there
spread a forest of Lombardy poplars, yellow as gold, and there was
abundance of this autumn coloring in the landscape, which grew lonelier
as we began to mount from the level. Olives, of course, abounded, and
there were oak woods and clumps of wild cherry trees. The towns were far
from the stations, which we reached at the rate of perhaps two miles an
hour as we approached the top of the hills; and we might have got out
and walked without fear of being left behind by our train, which made
long stops, as if to get its breath for another climb. Before this the
sole companion of our journey, whom we decided to be a landed proprietor
coming out in his riding-gear to inspect his possessions, had left us,
but at the first station after our descent began other passengers got
in, with a captain of Civil Guards among them, very loquacious and very
courteous, and much deferred to by the rest of us. At Bobadilla, where
again we had tea with hot goat’s milk in it, we changed cars, and
from that on we had the company of a Rock-Scorpion pair whose name was
beautifully Italian and whose speech was beautifully English, as the
speech of those born at Gibraltar should rightfully be.
I
It was quite dark at Ronda when our omnibus drove into the gardened
grounds of one of those admirable inns which an English company is
building in Spain, and put us down at the door of the office, where a
typical English manageress and her assistant appointed us pleasant rooms
and had fires kindled in them while we dined. There were already fires
in the pleasant reading-room, which did not diffuse a heat too great
for health but imparted to the eye a sense of warmth such as we had
experienced nowhere else in Spain. Over all was spread a quiet and
quieting British influence; outside of the office the nature of the
service was Spanish, but the character of it was English; the Spanish
waiters spoke English, and they looked English in dress and manner;
superficially the chambermaid was as English as one could have found her
in the United Kingdom, but at heart you could see she was as absolutely
and instinctively a Spanish _camerera_ as any in a hotel of Madrid or
Seville. In the atmosphere of insularity the few Spanish guests
were scarcely distinguishable from Anglo-Saxons, though a group
of magnificent girls at a middle table, quelled by the duenna-like
correctness of their mother, looked with their exaggerated hair and eyes
like Spanish ladies made up for English parts in a play.
We had our breakfast in the reading-room where all the rest were
breakfasting and trying not to see that they were keeping one another
from the fire. It was very cold, for Ronda is high in the mountains
which hem it round and tower far above it. We had already had our first
glimpse of their summits from our own windows, but it was from the
terrace outside the reading-room that we felt their grandeur most after
we had drunk our coffee: we could scarcely have borne it before. In
their presence, we could not realize at once that Ronda itself was
a mountain, a mere mighty mass of rock, cleft in twain, with chasmal
depths where we saw pygmy men and mules creeping out upon the valley
that stretched upward to the foot of the Sierra. Why there should ever
have been a town built there in the prehistoric beginning, except that
the rock was so impossible to take, and why it should have therefore
been taken by that series of invaders who pervaded all Spain--by the
Phoenicians, by the Carthaginians, by the Romans, by the Goths, by the
Moors, by the Christians, and after many centuries by the French, and
finally by the Spaniards again--it would not be easy to say. Among its
many conquerors, the Moors left their impress upon it, though here
as often as elsewhere in Spain their impress is sometimes merely a
decoration of earlier Roman work. There remains a Roman bridge which
the Moors did not make over into the likeness of their architecture, but
built a bridge of their own which also remains and may be seen from the
magnificent structure with which the Spaniards have arched the abyss
where the river rushes writhing and foaming through the gorge three
hundred feet below. There on the steps that lead from the brink, the eye
of pity may still see the files of Christian captives bringing water up
to their Moslem masters; but as one cannot help them now, even by the
wildest throe, it is as well to give a vain regret to the architect of
the Spanish bridge, who fell to his death from its parapet, and then
push on to the market hard by.