Part 4 (1/2)
I.
[Ill.u.s.tration: T]
The House of Purification, as the great mosque at Cordova was called, used to be a goal of pilgrimage for the Moors in Spain, as Mecca was for Mohammedans elsewhere. Their shoes no longer repose at its doors, but other less devout pilgrims now come in a straggling procession from all quarters of the globe to rest a while within its fair demesne--hallowed, perhaps, as much by the unique flowering of a whole people's genius in shapes of singular loveliness as by the more direct religious service to which it has been dedicated and re-dedicated under conflicting beliefs.
It was with peculiar eagerness, therefore, that we set out on our way.
An American who was following the same route had joined us--a man with ruddy, bronzed cheeks and iron-gray hair, whom I at first should have taken for the great-grandson of a Spanish Inquisitor, if such a thing were possible. His iron persistence and the intensity of his prejudices were in keeping with that character--the only trouble being that the prejudices were all on the wrong side. Whetstone (as he was called) shared our eagerness in respect of Cordova, though from different motives. He hailed each new point in his journey with satisfaction, because it would get him so much nearer the end; for the reason he had come to Spain was, apparently, to get out of it again. ”I don't see what I came to Spain for,” Whetstone would observe to us, dismally; and, for that matter, we could not see either. ”If there ever _was_ a G.o.d-forsaken country--Why, look at the way a whole parcel of these men at the dinner-table get out their cigarettes and smoke right there, without ever asking a lady's leave! I'd like to see 'em try it on at home! Wouldn't they be just snaked out of that room pretty quick?” He had under his care a young lady of great sensibility, a relative by marriage, accompanied by her maid; and the maid was a colored woman of the most p.r.o.nounced pattern. Altogether our pilgrim party embraced a good deal of variety. The young American girl, being a Catholic, was really a palmer faring from shrine to shrine. Rarely a convent or a chapel escaped her; she sipped them all as if they had been flower-cups and she a humming-bird, and managed to extract some unknown honey of comfort from their bitterness. It was like having a novice with us.
[Ill.u.s.tration: WHETSTONE.]
The night journeys by rail, so much in vogue in Spain, have their advantages and their drawbacks. At Castillejo, a junction on the way to Cordova, we had to wait four hours in the evening at a distance of twenty miles from the nearest restaurant. The country around was absolutely desolate except for tufts of the _retame_--a sort of broom with slim green and silvered leaves, which grows wild, and, after drying, is used by the peasants as a subst.i.tute for rye or wheat flour.
Only two or three houses were in sight. The tracks with cars standing on them, and the unfinished look of the whole place, made us feel as if we had by mistake been carried off to some insignificant railroad station in Illinois or Missouri. The only resource available for dinner was a _cantineria_, or drinking-room, where a few blocks of tough bread lent respectability to a lot of loaferish wine-bottles, and some uninviting sausages were hung in gloomy festoons, with a suspicious air of being a permanent architectural fixture intended as a perch for flies. The Spaniards invent little rhymed proverbs about many of their villages, and of one insignificant Andalusian hamlet, Brenes, the saying is,
”If to Brenes thou goest, Take with thee thy roast.”
But Castillejo seems to be an equally good subject for this warning. We recalled how lavishly, on the way to Toledo, we had presented bread, meat, and strawberries to some country folk who were not in the habit of eating, and how ardently they had thanked us. As we pa.s.sed their house in returning it was closed and lifeless, and we were convinced that they had died of a surfeit. How willingly would we now have undone that deed!
However, after making some purchases from an extremely deaf old woman who presided over such poor supplies as the place afforded, we asked her if she could have coffee prepared. ”If there is enough in the house,”
she replied to our interrogatory shrieks. Accordingly, we carried a table out under some trees on the gravel platform, to eat _al fresco_.
[Ill.u.s.tration: COFFEE AT CASTILLEJO.]
When we found ourselves in this way for the first time thrown back on the Spanish sausage, we resisted that unsympathetic substance with all the vigor of despair. But, aided by some bad wine, an interesting conversation with the Novice, and the glow of a sunset sky that looked as if strewn with fading peony petals, we recovered from the shock caused in the beginning by a mingled flavor of garlic, raisins, and pork. In truth, there was something enjoyable about this wild supper around which our quartette gathered in the dry, dewless twilight. An ancient female, resembling a broken-down Medea, came out and kindled a fire of brushwood beyond the track, swung a kettle there, and cooked our coffee, bending over the flame-light the while with her scattered gray tresses, and wailing out doleful _peteneras_, the popular songs of Spain. The songs, the fire, the wine, the strange scene, were so stimulating that we were surprised to find all at once the dark vault overhead full of stars, the comet staring at us in its flight above the hills, and our ten-o'clock train nearly due.
The next morning we were in a region totally unlike anything we had seen before, excepting for the ever-present mountain ranges wild as the Pyrenees or Guadaramas. The light of dawn on these barren Spanish mountain-sides, drawn up into peaks as sharp as the points of a looped-up curtain, produces effects indescribable except on canvas and by a subtle colorist. The bare surfaces of rock or dry gra.s.s and moss, and the newly reaped harvest fields lower down, blend the tints of air and earth in a velvet-smooth succession of madder and faint yellow, olive and rose and gray, fading off into a reddish-violet at greater distances.
These eminences are a part of the Sierra Morena, where Don Quixote achieved some of his most noteworthy feats--the liberation of the galley-slaves, the descent into the Cave of Montesinos, the capture of Mambrino's helmet, and the famous penance. So weird is the aspect of these desolate hills, enclosing silent valleys in which narrow tracts of woods are harbored, that I suspected it would be easy to breed a few Don Quixotes of reality there. Craziness would become a necessary diversion to relieve the monotony of existence.
[Ill.u.s.tration: PRIMITIVE THRAs.h.i.+NG.]
A winding river-bed near by was bordered by tufted copses of oleander in full flower, and hedges of huge serrated aloe guarded the roads. On the hill-sides a round corral for herds would occasionally be seen. In the fields the time-honored method of thres.h.i.+ng out grain by driving a sort of heavy board sledge in a circle over the cut crop, and of winnowing by tossing up shovelfuls of the grain-dust into the breezy air, was in active operation. By-and-by the olive orchards began. As far as we could see they stretched on either side their ranks of round dusty green tree-heads. Thousands of acres of them--one grove after another: we travelled through fifty miles of almost unbroken olive plantations, until we fancied we could even smell the fruit on the boughs, and our eyes were sick and weary with the sameness of the sight. Then the river, which from time to time had shown its muddy current in curves and sweeps, moving through the land at the bottom of what might have been an enormous drain, turned out to be the famous Guadalquivir, which, as Ford vividly puts it, ”eats its dull way through loamy banks.” At last Cordova, seated in an ample plain--Cordova, in vanished ages the home of Seneca, Lucan, Averroes, and the poet Juan de Mena--Cordova, white in the dry and gritty sun-dazzled air, with square, unshadowed two-story houses, overlooked by the bell-tower of its incomparable Mezquita Cathedral: a cheerful Southern city, maintaining large gardens, abounding in palms and myrtles and orange and lemon trees; possessing, moreover, clean streets of perceptible width.
[Ill.u.s.tration: WHILE THE WOMEN ARE AT Ma.s.s.]
After the ”interpreter,” or hotel guide, the beggar: such is the order in these Spanish towns, and not seldom the guide is merely a bolder kind of beggar. Two or three of the most frantically miserable and loathsome charity-seekers I ever saw surrounded our omnibus as we awaited our baggage, and stuffed their hideous heads in at the windows and door, concentrating on us their fire of appeals. Velveteen had heard that the sovereign remedy for these pests was to treat them with consummate politeness and piety. ”Pardon me, brother, for G.o.d's sake!” was the deprecatory formula which had been recommended, and he now proceeded to recite this, book in hand. Unfortunately it took him about five minutes to get it launched in good style and pure Spanish, during which time the beggars had an opportunity entirely to miss the sense. A few grains of tobacco dropped into the hat of one of them were more efficacious, for they had the result of mystifying him and hopelessly paralyzing his a.n.a.lytical powers. Finally the guide, coming with the baggage, recognized his rivals, and drove them off.
At several places on the way we had seen our twin military persecutors waiting for us, sometimes with white havelocks, and again in glazed hat-covers and capes. ”Are they disguising themselves, so as to fall upon us unawares?” I asked my friend. We determined not to be deceived, however, by the subtle device. These Spanish police-soldiers go through more metamorphoses in the linen and water-proof line than any troops I know. It must be excessively inconvenient to run home and make the change every time a slight shower threatens; and invariably, as soon as they get on their storm-cover, the sun begins to s.h.i.+ne again. On our arrival they seemed to have made up their minds to arrest us at once; they came striding along toward us in duplicate, one the fac-simile of the other, and we gave ourselves up for lost. But just as they were within a few paces, their unaccountable policy of delay caused them to deviate suddenly, and march on as if they hadn't seen us. ”One more escape!” sighed Velveteen, fervently.
Strangely enough, the languor which we had left in the middle of the kingdom, at Toledo, was replaced in this more tropical lat.i.tude by great activity. The shop streets presented a series of rooms entirely open to the view, where men and women were busily engaged in all sorts of small manufacture--shoes, garments, tin-work, carpentering. They were happy and diligent, as if they had been animated writing-book maxims, and sung or whistled at their tasks in a most exemplary manner.
[Ill.u.s.tration: WATER-STAND IN CORDOVA.]
”Cordovan leather” still holds it own, on a petty scale, and the small cups hammered out of old silver dollars const.i.tute, with filigree silver-work, a characteristic local product. The faces of the people betrayed their gypsy blood oftentimes, and there was one street chiefly occupied by the Romany folk. Traces of blond or light chestnut hair showed that the Moorish stock had likewise left some offshoots that do not die out. The whole aspect of Cordova presents at once a reflex of the refined and enlightened spirit of the ancient caliphate. Everybody, including most of the beggars, has a fresh and cleanly appearance; the very priests undergo a change, being frequently more refined in feature and of a more tolerant expression than those of the North. The women set off their rosy brown complexions and black hair with cl.u.s.ters of rayed jasmine blossoms, flattened and ingeniously fixed in rosette form on long pins. The men, discarding those hot felt hats so obstinately worn in the central provinces, make a comfortable and festive appearance in their curling Panamas. On the Street of the Great Captain--the chief open-air resort, commemorating Gonsalvo of Cordova, who led so ably in the triumphant Christian campaigns--the people laugh and chat as if they really enjoyed life. There is a great deal of wealth in the place, and the lingering atmosphere of its past greatness is not depressing, as that of Toledo is, for it was never the home of bigotry and ignorance.
Its prosperous epoch under Abdur-rahman and his Ommeyad successors was one of brilliant civilization. It was then a nursery of science and the arts; its inhabitants numbered a million. It had mosques by the hundred, and nearly a thousand baths--for the Spanish Moors well knew the civilizing virtue of water, and kept life-giving streams of it running at the roots of their inst.i.tutions. The houses of the modern city are very plain on the exterior, and their common coat of whitewash imparts to them a democratic equality, though aristocracy is still a living thing there, instead of having sunk into pitfalls of squalor and idleness, as in the sombre city by the Tagus.
”But now the Cross is sparkling on the mosque, And bells make Catholic the trembling air.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GAY COSTER-MONGERS OF ANDALUSIA.]
Gloomy little churches crop out in every quarter, and a few convents of nuns remain, where you may hear the faint, sad litany of the unseen sisters murmured behind the grating, while a priest chants service for them in the lonely chapel. The bells of these churches and of the mosque-cathedral are hardly ever silent; the brazen jargon of their tongues echoes over the roofs at all hours, and the hollow, metallic tinkle of mule-bells from the otherwise silent streets at times strikes one as making response to them. The beauty of the cathedral--still called the Mezquita (mosque)--lies almost solely in the preservation of its original Moorish architecture.