When we walked out on the terrace of our hotel at Algeciras after
breakfast, the first morning, we were greeted by the familiar form of
the Rock of Gibraltar still advertising, as we had seen it three years
before, a well-known American insurance company. It rose beyond five
miles of land-locked water, which we were to cross every other day for
three weeks on many idle and anxious errands, until we sailed from it at
last for New York.
Meanwhile Algeciras was altogether delightful not only because of our
Kate-Greenaway hotel, embowered in ten or twelve acres of gardened
ground, with walks going and coming under its palms and eucalyptuses,
beside beds of geraniums and past trellises of roses and jasmines, all
in the keeping of a captive stork which was apt unexpectedly to meet
the stranger and clap its formidable mandibles at him, and then hop away
with half-lifted wings. Algeciras had other claims which it urged day
after day more winningly upon us as the last place where we should feel
the charm of Spain unbroken in the tradition which reaches from modern
fact far back into antique fable. I will not follow it beyond the
historic clue, for I think the reader ought to be satisfied with knowing
that the Moors held it as early as the seven hundreds and as late as the
thirteen hundreds, when the Christians definitively recaptured it and
their kings became kings of Algeciras as well as kings of Spain, and
remain so to this day. At the end of the eighteenth century one of these
kings made it his lookout for watching the movements of the inimical
English fleets, and then Algeciras slumbered again, haunted only by “a
deep dream of peace” till the European diplomats, rather unexpectedly
assisted by an American envoy, made it the scene of their famous
conference for settling the Morocco question in. 1906.
[Illustration: 31 VIEW OF ALGECIRAS]
I think this is my whole duty to the political interest of Algeciras,
and until I come to our excursion to Tarifa I am going to give myself
altogether to our pleasure in the place unvexed by any event of history.
I disdain even to note that the Moors took the city again from the
Christians, after twenty-five years, and demolished it, for I prefer to
remember it as it has been rebuilt and lies white by its bay, a series
of red-tiled levels of roof with a few church-towers topping them. It is
a pretty place, and remarkably clean, inhabited mostly by beggars, with
a minority of industrial, commercial, and professional citizens, who
live in agreeable little houses, with _patios_ open to the passer, and
with balconies overhanging him. It has of course a bull-ring, enviously
closed during our stay, and it has one of the pleasantest Alamedas
and the best swept in Spain, where some nice boys are playing in
the afternoon sun, and a gentleman, coming out of one of the villas
bordering on it, is courteously interested in the two strangers whom he
sees sitting on a bench beside the walk, with the leaves of the plane
trees dropping round them in the still air.
The Alameda is quite at the thither end of Algeciras. At the end next
our hotel, but with the intervention of a space of cliff, topped and
faced by summer cottages and gardens, is the station with a train
usually ready to start from it for Ronda or Seville or Malaga, I do not
know which, and with the usual company of freight-cars idling about,
empty or laden with sheets of cork, as indifferent to them as if
they were so much mere pine or spruce lumber. There is a sufficiently
attractive hotel here for transients, and as an allurement to the marine
and military leisure of Gibraltar, “The Picnic Restaurant,” and “The
Cabin Tea Room,” where no doubt there is something to be had beside
sandwiches and tea. Here also is the pier for the Gibraltar boats, with
the Spanish custom-house which their passengers must pass through and
have their packages and persons searched for contraband. One heard of
wild caprices on the part of the inspectors in levying duties which
were sometimes made to pass the prime cost of the goods in Gibraltar. I
myself only carried in books which after the first few declarations were
recognized as of no imaginable value and passed with a genial tolerance,
as a sort of joke, by officers whom I saw feeling the persons of their
fellow-Spaniards unsparingly over.
We had, if anything, less business really in Algeciras than in
Gibraltar, but we went into the town nearly every afternoon, and
wantonly bought things. By this means we proved that the Andalusian
shopmen had not the proud phlegm of the Castilians across their
counters. In the principal dry-goods store two salesmen rivaled each
other in showing us politeness, and sent home our small purchases as
promptly as if we had done them a favor in buying. We were indeed the
wonder of our fellow-customers who were not buying; but our pride was
brought down in the little shop where the proprietress was too much
concerned in cooking her dinner (it smelled delicious) to mind our wish
for a very cheap green vase, inestimably Spanish after we got it home.
However, in another shop where the lady was ironing her week’s wash on
the counter, a lady friend who was making her an afternoon call got such
a vase down for us and transacted the negotiation out of pure good will
for both parties to it.
Parallel with the railway was a channel where small fishing-craft lay,
and where a leisurely dredging-machine was stirring up the depths in
a stench so dire that I wonder we do not smell it across the Atlantic.
Over this channel a bridge led into the town, and offered the convenient
support of its parapet to the crowd of spectators who wished to inhale
that powerful odor at their ease, and who hung there throughout the
working-day; the working-day of the dredging-machine, that is. The
population was so much absorbed in this that when we first crossed into
the town, we found no beggar children even, though there were a few
blind beggarmen, but so few that a boy who had one of them in charge was
obliged to leave off smelling the river and run and hunt him up for us.
Other boys were busy in street-sweeping and b-r-r-r-r-ing to the donkeys
that carried off the sweepings in panniers; and in the fine large plaza
before the principal church of Algeciras there was a boy who had plainly
nothing but mischief to do, though he did not molest us farther than
to ask in English, “Want to see the cathedral?” Then he went his way
swiftly and we went into the church, which we found very whitewashed and
very Moorish in architecture, but very Spanish in the Blessed Virgins
on most of the altars, dressed in brocades and jewels. A sacristan was
brushing and dusting the place, but he did not bother us, and we went
freely about among the tall candles standing on the floor as well as on
the altars, and bearing each a placard attached with black ribbon, and
dedicated in black letters on silver “To the Repose of This or That” one
among the dead.
The meaning was evident enough, but we sought something further of the
druggist at the corner, who did his best for us in such English as he
had. It was not quite the English of Ronda; but he praised his grammar
while he owned that his vocabulary was in decay from want of practise.
In fact, he well-nigh committed us to the purchase of one of those
votive candles, which he understood we wished to buy; he all but sent to
the sacristan to get one. There were several onlookers, as there always
are in Latin pharmacies, and there was a sad young mother waiting for
medicine with a sick baby in her arms. The druggist said it had fever of
the stomach; he seemed proud of the fact, and some talk passed between
him and the bystanders which related to it. We asked if he had any of
the quince jelly which we had learned to like in Seville, but he could
only refer us to the confectioner’s on the other corner. Here was not
indeed quince jelly, but we compromised on quince cheese, as the English
call it; and we bought several boxes of it to take to America, which I
am sorry to say moulded before our voyage began, and had to be thrown
away. Near this confectioner’s was a booth where boiled sweet-potatoes
were sold, with oranges and joints of sugar-cane, and, spitted on
straws, that terrible fruit of the strawberry tree which we had tasted
at Honda without wishing to taste it ever again. Yet there was a boy
boldly buying several straws of it and chancing the intoxication which
over-indulgence in it is said to cause. Whether the excitement of these
events was too great or not, we found ourselves suddenly unwilling, if
not unable, to walk back to our hotel, and we took a cab of the three
standing in the plaza. One was without a horse, another without a
driver, but the third had both, as in some sort of riddle, and we had no
sooner taken it than a horse was put into the first and a driver ran
out and got on the box of the second, as if that was the answer to the
riddle.