It was then too late for them to share our custom, but I am not sure
that it was not one of these very horses or drivers whom we got another
day for our drive about the town and its suburbs, and an excursion to
a section of the Moorish aqueduct which remains after a thousand years.
You can see it at a distance, but no horse or driver in our employ could
ever find the way to it; in fact, it seemed to vanish on approach, and
we were always bringing up in our hotel gardens without having got to
it; I do not know what we should have done with it if we had. We were
not able to do anything definite with the new villas built or building
around Algeciras, though they looked very livable, and seemed proof of a
prosperity in the place for which I can give no reason except the great
natural beauty of the nearer neighborhood, and the magnificence of
the farther, mountain-walled and skyed over with a September blue in
November. I think it would be a good place to spend the winter if one
liked each day to be exactly like every other. I do not know whether it
is inhabited by English people from Gibraltar, where there are of course
those resources of sport and society which an English colony always
carries with it.
The popular amusements of Algeciras in the off season for bull-feasts
did not readily lend themselves to observance. Chiefly we noted two
young men with a graphophone on wheels which, being pushed about,
wheezed out the latest songs to the acceptance of large crowds. We
ourselves amused a large crowd when one of us attempted to sketch
the yellow facade of a church so small that it seemed all facade; and
another day when that one of us who held the coppers, commonly
kept sacred to blind beggars, delighted an innumerable multitude of
mendicants having their eyesight perfect. They were most of them in
the vigor of youth, and they were waiting on a certain street for the
monthly dole with which a resident of Algeciras may buy immunity for all
the other days of the month. They instantly recognized in the stranger
a fraudulent tax-dodger, and when he attempted tardily to purchase
immunity they poured upon him; in front, behind, on both sides, all
round, they boiled up and bubbled about him; and the exhaustion of his
riches alone saved him alive. It must have been a wonderful spectacle,
and I do not suppose the like of it was ever seen in Algeciras before.
It was a triumph over charity, and left quite out of comparison the
organized onsets of the infant gang which always beset the way to the
hotel under a leader whose battle-cry, at once a demand and a promise,
was “Penny-go-way, Penny-go-way!”
Along that pleasant shore bare-legged fishermen spread their nets, and
going and coming by the Gibraltar boats were sometimes white-hosed,
brown-cloaked, white-turbaned Moors, who occasionally wore Christian
boots, but otherwise looked just such Moslems as landed at Algeciras
in the eighth century; people do not change much in Africa. They were
probably hucksters from the Moorish market in Gibraltar, where they had
given their geese and turkeys the holiday they were taking themselves.
They were handsome men, tall and vigorous, but they did not win me to
sympathy with their architecture or religion, and I am not sure but,
if there had been any concerted movement against them on the landing at
Algeciras, I should have joined in driving them out of Spain. As it
was I made as much Africa as I could of them in defect of crossing to
Tangier, which we had firmly meant to do, but which we forbore doing
till the plague had ceased to rage there. By this time the boat which
touched at Tangier on the way to Cadiz stopped going to Cadiz, and if
we could not go to Cadiz we did not care for going to Tangier. It was
something like this, if not quite like it, and it ended in our seeing
Africa only from the southernmost verge of Europe at Tarifa. At that
little distance across it looked dazzlingly white, like the cotton
vestments of those Moorish marketmen, but probably would have been no
cleaner on closer approach.