Part 10 (1/2)

We took the rail from Alicante in the evening; but a ma.s.s of Oran fugitives, escorted by a company of soldiers (for the most part drunk), enc.u.mbered our train, and delayed its starting for an hour or two. Then followed a slow, wearisome ride through the black night, with a change at the junction of La Encina about twelve o'clock, involving much tribulation in the re-weighing and renewed registering of baggage; after which we were stowed into a totally dark compartment of the other train, and made to wait three hours longer. With the first rays of dawn our locomotive began to creep, and we fell into a doze, from which I was awakened after a while by the loud irruption of somebody into our carriage, accompanied by a jangle like that of sleigh-bells. It turned out to be a peasant, who, in consequence of the general over-crowding, had been ushered into the first-cla.s.s carriage, bringing with him a couple of children and some mule-harness provided with bells. I was inclined to be indignant with him for his disturbing intrusion; but, as it was now broad daylight, I began to look out of the window, and soon had cause to consider the peasant a benefactor; for we were just leaving Jativa, a most picturesque old town, with a castle famous even in Roman times; the native place, also, of the Borgias (Pope Calixtus III., and Rodrigro, the father of Caesar Borgia). Immediately afterward we entered the garden region. Miles of carefully-tended growth, thousands of orchards linked together in one series, acres upon acres of fields where every square inch is made to yield abundantly--such is the Huerta of Valencia. We pa.s.sed endless orange-groves, each single tree in which had its circle of banked earth to hold the water when let on from the ca.n.a.ls of tile that coursed everywhere like veins of silver, carrying life to the harvests. Then came vast fields dotted with the yellow blossom of the pea-nut, on low vine-like plants. Again, breadths of citron and lemon, followed by extensive rice farms, where the cultivators stood dressing the unripe plantations, up to their ankles in the water of a feathery green swamp. Not a rood of earth is unimproved, excepting where some thriving red-roofed village is hemmed in by the fragrant paradise.

In one place you will see, perhaps, a mouldering red tower like those of the Alhambra, or a church spire lifted amid the trees, and, high above the other greenery, cl.u.s.ters of date-palms leaning together, as if they whispered among themselves of other days. Near by is the Lake of Albufera, close to the sea and twenty-seven miles in circ.u.mference--nourished both from the sea and from the river Turia, so that it becomes an immense reservoir of fish and game. Its marshy edges once offered shelter to numerous smugglers, and it is said that General Prim, who was on good terms with them, found a hiding-place there while in danger and before he came to power. No wonder that the Cid fought gallantly to win this land from the infidel, and when he had gained it sent for his wife and daughter from distant Burgos to come and see the prize! Its fertility to-day, however, is due to the irrigation introduced by the Moors, and since maintained. The same thing could be done with the Tagus and Ebro rivers, but the Spaniard having had the example before him for only about six centuries, has not yet found time to follow it. The water supply is so precious that proprietors are allowed to use it for their own crops only on fixed days, and for so many hours at a time. Disputes of course arise, but they are settled by the Water Court--a tribunal without appeal, consisting of twelve peasant proprietors, who meet once a week in Valencia; and I saw them there holding their session in very primitive style, on a long pink sofa set in an arched door-way of the cathedral.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A VALENCIA CAB.]

Valencia was in the midst of its annual festival when we arrived; a bright, gay, spirited, and busy town, more cheerful than ever just then.

There were to be three days of bull-fighting--”bulls to the death!”--with eight taurian victims each day; the best swordsmen in Spain; and horses and mules displaying gilded and silvered hoofs. The theatres were perfumed. There were match games of _pelota_--rackets--the national subst.i.tute for cricket or base-ball; and a week's fair was in progress on the other side of the river Turia, with bannered pavilions, thousands of painted lanterns; lotteries, concerts, and booth shows, to which the admission was ”half price for children and soldiers.” Trade was brisk also in the city; brisk in the Mercado, that quaint business street crowded with little stalls, and with peasants in blue, red, yellow, mantled and cothurned, their heads topped with pointed hats or wrapped with variegated handkerchiefs deftly knotted into a high crown; brisk, likewise, in those peculiar shops behind the antique Silk Exchange, which are named from the signs they hang out, representing the Blessed Virgin, Christ, John the Baptist, or the Bleeding Heart. One had for its device a rose, and another, distinguished by two large toy lambs placed at its door, was known without other distinction as the Lamb of G.o.d. But in the more modern quarter the shop-keepers ventured on a Parisian brilliancy which we did not encounter anywhere else. Their arrangement of wares was prettily effective, and the fas.h.i.+on prevailed of having curtains for the show-windows painted with figures in modern dress, done in exceedingly clever, artistic style, well drawn, full of humor and fine realistic characterization.

Altogether, Valencia is the cheeriest of Spanish cities, unless one excepts Barcelona, which is half French, and in its present estate wholly modern. Moreover, Valencia abounds in racy and local traits, both of architecture and humanity. The Street of the Cavaliers is lined with sombre, strange, shabbily elegant old mansions of the n.o.bility, with Gothic windows and open arcades in the top story; the new houses are gayly tinted in blue and rose and cream-color; and the gourd-like domes of the cathedral and other large buildings glisten with blue tiles and white, set in stripes. You find yourself continually, as you come from various quarters, bringing up in sight of the octagonal tower of Santa Catalina, strangely suggestive of a paG.o.da, without in the least being one. The Silk Exchange, from which the s.h.i.+ning web that wealth is woven out of has long since vanished, contains one of the most beautiful of existing Gothic halls under a roof sustained by fluted and twisted pillars, themselves light as knotted skeins; while from the outer cornice grotesque shapes peer out over the life of to-day; a grinning monk, an imp playing a guitar, a crumbling buzzard, serving as gargoyles. Just opposite is the market, where you may buy enormous bunches of luscious white grapes for a penny, or pry into second-hand shops rich in those brilliant mantles with the ”cat” fringe of b.a.l.l.s, for which the town is as noted as for its export of oranges. The old battlemented walls of the city, it is true, have been torn down: it was done simply to give employment to the poor a few years since. But there are some fine old gates remaining--those of Serranos and Del Cuarte. We drove out of one and came in by the other, about half a mile away--a diversion that brought us under a rigid examination from the customs guard, which levies a tax on every basket of produce brought in from the country, and was inclined to regard us as a dutiable importation.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BARCELONA FISHERMEN.]

One may go quite freely to the port, however--the Grao--which is two miles distant. A broad boulevard hedged with sycamores leads thither, which in summer is crowded by _tartanas_--bouncing little covered wagons lined with crimson curtains, and usually carrying a load of pretty senoritas--and by more imposing equipages adorned with footmen in the English style. Everybody goes to the sh.o.r.e to bathe toward evening, for Valencia is the Brighton of the Madrilenos. The little bathing establishments extend for a long distance on the sands, and are very neat. Each has its fanciful name, as ”The Pearl,” or ”The Madrid Girl,”

and the proprietors stand in front vociferously soliciting your custom.

Between these and the water are refreshment sheds with tables, and every one eats or drinks on coming out of the sea. Farther down the sh.o.r.e the women have their own houses, and a fence of reeds protects them from intrusion while they are running to or from the surf; but it is my duty to record that the men formed a line at this fence, and systematically gazed through the breaks in it, which was the more embarra.s.sing, perhaps, because the fair Valencians bathe in very plain, baggy, and ugly gowns. On the streets or in the Glorieta Garden, and in their proper habiliments, they are the n.o.blest looking and most beautiful of Spanish women, often possessing flaxen hair and dark-blue eyes which recall a Gothic ancestry, together with something simple and regular about the features that is perhaps due to the ancient Greek colonization. At still another part of the beach horses were allowed to go into the waves; and this was a sight also eminently Greek in its suggestion. Naked boys bestrode the animals, and urged them forward into the spray-fringed tide. The arched necks, the prancing movement of the horses, the sportive shock of foam against their broad chests, and the pressing knees of the nude riders in full play of muscle to keep their seats, were like a breathing and stirring relief on some temple frieze, clear-cut in the pure and sparkling sunlight. There was once a Valencian school of painters, but we saw nothing of this in their work. The museum offers what our newspapers would call a ”carnival” of rubbish, but it also contains some striking, shadowy, startlingly lighted canvases of Ribalta--saints and martyrs and ascetics vividly but not joyously portrayed; a few wonderful portraits by Goya, fresh as if only just completed; and one of Velasquez's three portraits of himself.

From Valencia to Barcelona the valleys along the coast are fertile.

Vineyards, spreading their long files of green over a warm red soil that seems tinged with the blood of the grape, vie with the olive in that picturesque, productive belt between the hills and the blue, swelling sweep of the Mediterranean. Here is Murviedro, the old Saguntum, once the scene of a fierce siege and horrible sufferings, now basking quietly in the hot light--a time-worn, sun-tanned, beggared old city, which is not ashamed to make a show of its decayed Roman theatre; and farther on Tarragona, which professes to have had at one time a million inhabitants, and is now a little wine-producing town. Churches and castles, rich in delicate workmans.h.i.+p and all manner of historic a.s.sociation, crop up everywhere. The very shards in the fields, you fancy, may suddenly unfold something of that full and varied past which was once as real as to-day's meridian glow. Yet at any moment you may lose sight of all this in the brilliant, stimulating, yet softly modified beauty of the landscape's colors, and your whole mind is absorbed by the vague neutral hues of a treeless hill-side, or the rich, positive blue of the sea, in which the white sail of a _chalupa_ seems to be inlaid like a bit of ivory.

All the while, as you go northward, Spain--the real Spain--is slipping from you. The palms disappear as if a noiseless earthquake had swallowed them up; even the olive becomes less frequent, and by-and-by you are in piny Catalonia. You reach Barcelona, the greatest commercial city of the kingdom, and you find it the boast of the citizens that they are not Spaniards. They are Spanish mainly in their love of revolt. So prompt are they to join in every uprising, that the garrison quartered there has to be kept as high as ten thousand men; but for the most part it is rather a French maritime depot than a thing of ancient or peculiar Spain. There is a large and artificial park on one side, and the fort of Monjuich on the other, and a lot of s.h.i.+pping in the harbor; and a glorious embowered avenue, called the Rambla, where pale-faced, long-lashed, coquettishly smiling women walk in great numbers, carrying out the usual national custom of a peripatetic reception and conversation party. It was the feast of Santiago when we came--it is always a feast of something everywhere in that pious country--and the theatres were doing a great business with trifling plays and charming ballets. Barcelona is not only the industrious city, it is also the cultivated one of the Peninsula. The opera there is one of the best in the world, and was once carried off bodily to Madrid by an ardent manager, who for his pains received the scorn of the envious Madrid people: they would not come to his performances, and he was almost ruined in consequence.

The old cathedral of the city is a temple singularly impressive by simple means--a sober Spanish-Gothic structure bathed in a perpetual gloom, through which the stained windows show with a jewelled splendor almost supernatural. The weirdness of the interior effect is farther intensified by the dark pit of Santa Eulalia's shrine opening under the altar, and set with a row of burning lamps, on which the darkness seems to hang like a cloak depending from a chain of gold. The invariable rule in Spanish cathedrals is that the choir should be placed in the central nave, like that at Westminster Abbey, and elaborated into a complete enclosure by itself--which, although it interferes with the total effect of the interior, is frequently very striking in its lavish agglomeration of carved wood and stone, metal railings, gilding, and similar details.

It was in the peculiarly picturesque choir of this cathedral of Santa Eulalia that the order of the Golden Fleece was once convened by Charles V., and the panels over the stalls are blazoned with the bearings of the various nations and n.o.bles represented in that body. Being discovered only after one has grown accustomed to the dark, these fading glories of heraldry steal gradually upon the eye, as if through the obscuring night of time. I found the ancient cloister, without, on the south-west side, a delightful, shadowy, suggestive place: there, too, may be seen a fountain surmounted by a small equestrian statue of St. George, which reminds one of a fabulous story in Munchausen; for the tail of the horse is formed by a jet of water flowing out of the body at the rear. Inside the church again hangs, under the organ-loft, an enormous wooden and painted Saracen's head--a species of relic not uncommon, I believe, in Catalonian temples. It may be added here that the custom of the ”historical giants” at Corpus Christi is maintained in Barcelona as we had seen it at Burgos, and those effigies are stowed away somewhere in the sacred precincts. There is a curious mingling of the nave and the sophisticated in the fact that some of the giants, wearing female attire, have new dresses for each year, and thereby set the fas.h.i.+ons for the ensuing twelvemonth for all the womankind of the city. And however advanced the urban society may be, with its trade, its opera, its books, gilded cafes and superb clubs, the spirit of progress does not spread very far into the country. When a piece of railroad was built, not very long ago, opening up a new rural section in the neighborhood, the peasants watched the advance of the locomotive along the rails with profound interest. Finally, one old man asked, ”But where is the _mule_ kept?--inside?”

He was willing to admit that the engine worked finely, but no power could convince him that it was possible for it to go by other impulsion than that of a mule's legs.

Another relic of by-gone times is the cap universally worn in this region by the longsh.o.r.emen, the fishers, and the male portion of the lower orders generally; for it is nothing less than the old Phrygian liberty cap, imported hither by the Paul Pry Phoenicians ages ago. Woven in a single piece, it appears at first sight to be a long, soft, commodious bag, tinted with vermilion or violet or brown as the case may be. Into the aperture the native inserts his head and then pulls the rest of the flapping contrivance down as far as he pleases, letting the end float loose in the wind, or more commonly bringing it round to the front, curling it over and tucking it in upon itself in such a way as to make an overhanging protection for the eyes, and to give the whole a look that recalls the top of an Oxford student's cap. With this head-gear, and wearing sandals made of fine hempen cord tied by long black tapes, the men presented a free, half barbarous and sufficiently picturesque appearance. I don't know how long we might have continued to roam the streets of Barcelona, listening to the uncouth _patois_ of the locality, in which French and Spanish words are so outlandishly mingled, nor how long we should have clung to the remnants of architecture and history that jutted seductively above the surface of the modern here and there, if it had not been that cold necessity limited our time and propelled us relentlessly northward. Even now I find that my pen is reluctant to leave the tracing of those vanished scenes, and hesitates to write the last word as much as if it were an enchanter's wand, instead of a plain, business-like little instrument.

With its usual fatuity the railroad obliged us to start so early that at the first dusky gray streak of dawn we were dismally taking our coffee in the _patio_ of the hotel. The _dueno_ was sleeping by sections on two hard chairs, considerately screened from us by a clump of orange shrubs, and murmuring now and then some direction to the half-invisible waiter floating about in a dark arcade; but he roused himself, and woke up wholly for a minute or two while perpetrating a final extortion.

Otherwise the silence was profound. It was the silence of the past, the unseen current of oblivion that sets in and begins to eddy round the facts of to-day, in such a country, the moment human activity is suspended or the reality of the present is at all dimmed. Silence here leads at once to retrospection; differing in this from the mute solitude of American places, which somehow always tingles with antic.i.p.ation. And the _dueno_, in overcharging us, became only the type of a long line of historic plunderers that have infested the Peninsula from the date of the Roman rule down to the incursion of Napoleon and the most recent period. His little game was invested with all the dignity of history and tradition. The sickly light of day above the court struggled feebly and dividedly with the waning yellow of the candle-flame on our table.

”After all,” said Velveteen, ”I'm glad to be going, for this is no longer Spain.”

And yet, at the instant of leaving, we discovered that it was indeed Spain, and a pang of regret followed those words.

As we issued from the hotel we saw, crossing the street in the increased dawn-light, and striding toward the depot, the two Civil Guards. It looked as if we should be captured on the very threshold of liberty. The thought lent wings to our haste.... Some hours afterward, when we were pa.s.sing through the tunnels of the Pyrenees, we congratulated ourselves on our escape; and, indeed, as we looked back to the mountain-wall from France, we could fancy we saw two specks on the summit which might have been our pursuers. They were too late! Their own excess of mystery had baffled them. They had dogged us every league of the way, and yet we had traversed Spain without being detected as--what? I really don't know, but I'm sure those Civil Guards must. If not, their military glare, their guns, and their secrecy are the merest mockeries.

How softly the waves broke along the Mediterranean sands that morning, close to the rails over which we were flying! Green and white, or violet, and s.h.i.+mmered over by the crimson splendor of the illumined East, they surged one after another upon the golden sh.o.r.e and spent themselves like wasted treasure. There was something mournful in their movement--something very sad in the presence of this beauty which I was never to see again. Did I not hear mingled with the sparkling flash and murmur of those waves a long-drawn ”_A-a-ay!_”--the most pathetic of Spanish syllables, which had thrown its shadow across the fervid little songs heard so often by the way?

”Bird, little bird that wheelest Through G.o.d's fair worlds in the sky”--

the strain came back again, with the memory of a low-tuned guitar; and the waves went on, arriving and departing; and the land of our pilgrimage steadily receded. The waves are breaking yet on that windless coast; but, for us, Spain--brilliant, tawny, bright-vestured Spain, with all its ruins and poetry, its desolation and beauty and gaudy semi-barbarism--has been rapt away once more into the atmosphere of distance and of dreams!

[Ill.u.s.tration]

HINTS TO TRAVELLERS.

Spain is by no means so difficult a country to reach, nor so inconvenient to travel in after one has got there, as is generally supposed. Doubtless the obstacles which it presented to the tourist until within a few years were great; and much that is disagreeable still remains to vex those who are accustomed to the smoother ways, and carefully-oiled machinery for travel, of regions more civilized. But the establishment of a system of railroads, describing an outline that pa.s.ses through nearly all the places which it is desirable to visit, has supplied a means of transit sufficient, safe, and pa.s.sably comfortable.

The other disadvantages formerly opposed to the inquiring stranger are likewise in process of diminution. In order to make clear the exact state of things likely to be encountered by those who, having followed the present writer in his account of a rapid journey, may determine to take a similar direction themselves, this chapter of suggestion is added, which it is hoped will have value in the way of a practical equipment for the voyage.