Southern Spain Part 8

This was evidence enough, and in the thirty-first year of her age this beautiful and accomplished woman suffered a shameful death. A few years later, when the nation had recovered its sanity, the magistrate who had condemned her was shot, and her remains were transported with great pomp to the Cathedral, where they have been interred close to Alonso Cano's.

A monument has also been raised to her memory in the Campillo Square.

There is another story connected with the Triunfo worth telling, though it is not very well authenticated. The remains of royal personages on their way to the Capilla Real were here identified by the officers of the court. The Duke of Gandia was present on such an occasion, and was so impressed by the evidences of mortality when the coffin was opened that he vowed he would never again serve an earthly master. He entered the Society of Jesus, and after his death was canonized under the name of St. Francis Borgia. The story is a curious and suggestive one, as also is that of the duke praying that his wife might die if it were for his soul's good. St. Francis Borgia has always seemed to me an extreme example of other-worldliness.

A dusty road through most uninviting surroundings leads to the Cartuja, or Charterhouse, founded in 1516 by the Great Captain. The cloisters are painted with scenes of the martyrdom of the Carthusian monks in London by the minions of Henry VIII.

The church is an extraordinary edifice. Its style is d.a.m.nable, but it is gorgeous and dazzling to a degree which compels admiration. The doors of the choir are exquisitely inlaid with ebony, cedar, mother-of-pearl, and tortoisesh.e.l.l. The statue of Bruno is by Cano. In the sanctuary behind the altar coloured marbles, twisted and fluted, are combined in extravagant magnificence. Some of the slabs are richly veined with agate, and the hand of nature has traced some semblances of human and animal forms. In the adjoining sacristy are some wonderful inlaid doors and presses. They must surely be the finest works of their kind in the world. It is strange that so much genius for detail and so much costly material should have been combined to produce so tasteless a building.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GRANADA--STREET IN THE OLD QUARTER]

Outside this church there are not many places in the vicinity of Granada worth a visit. The church of Sacramonte looms rather prominently in the landscape, and you are to some extent rewarded for the trouble of a pilgrimage thither by the fine view of the city. The hill contains some caves in which, in the year 1594, one Hernandez professed to have discovered certain books written in Arabic characters on sheets of lead.

The find was reported to the archbishop, Don Pedro Vaca de Castro, who examined the books and declared them to contain the acts of the martyrs, Mesito and Hiscius, Tesiphus and Cecilius, put to death by the Romans and buried in the caves. His grace's p.r.o.nouncement was not considered final, and theological opinion was sharply divided on the subject for many years. At last the continuance of the controversy was forbidden by Papal decree. It seems that doubt is now thrown even on the existence of the martyrs. The church built over the place of their supposed sepulchre was for a time famous as a shrine of pilgrims. The usual rock worn away by the kisses of the devout is shown. There is a superst.i.tion that a person kissing the stone for the first time will be married within the year, if single, and released from the conjugal tie if already married.

As divorce does not exist in Spain it is to be hoped that few discontented Benedicts have recourse to this stone.

St. Cecilius, at all events, was known to fame before the alleged discovery of his grave; for in the Antequeruela quarter an oratory dedicated to him existed throughout the Moorish domination, and was the only Christian place of wors.h.i.+p within the city. I do not think that any trace of it is to be detected now. In that part of the city is the Casa de los Tiros, where you must apply for tickets for the Generalife; it is worth seeing on its own account, and it is the repository of the sword of Boabdil, which seems to have more claims to authenticity than most of the relics of the Little King. Descending towards the Puerta Real we pa.s.s the Cuarto de Santo Domingo, a private villa in which is incorporated all that remains of an Almohade palace. Near by, against the church of Santo Domingo, is an exceedingly picturesque little archway where one can fancy a bravo waiting, stiletto in hand. The Campillo, in the centre of which rises the statue of Mariana Pineda, is a quiet little square enough, referred to (as the Rondilla) by Cervantes as a resort of adventurers and desperadoes. These gentry are now more likely to be found in the immediately adjacent Alameda, outside the hotel of the same name, where the cafes and tables spread in front of them seem exceedingly well patronized.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GRANADA--THE GENERALIFE: PATIO DE LA ACEQUIA]

Following the Genil, and leaving the unimpressive monument of Columbus and Isabella to the left, you reach, after a walk overpoweringly fatiguing in summer, the little Ermita de San Sebastian. This was a Moorish oratory in old days, and outside it took place the surrender of the keys by Boabdil on the memorable 2nd of January, 1492. If you go farther on--and I doubt if you will be tempted to--you will come to a very old Moorish palace called the Alcazar Genil, now the property of the Duke of Gor. Here, says Simonet, were lodged the Christian princes and knights who so often found an asylum at the court of Granada. In the gardens are tanks once used, it is believed, for mimic naval fights. In the same direction, I understand, is Zubia. Here Isabella the Catholic, reconnoitring the city during the siege, narrowly escaped capture by a Moorish patrol. She concealed herself behind a laurel bush, which is still pointed out. Another instance of the small chances that determine the fate of kingdoms! To commemorate her escape the queen built near by a convent, which has long since disappeared.

You may return to the city by the Puerta Verde, near the Bab-en-Neshti or Puerta de los Molinos, through which the Spaniards entered after Boabdil's submission.

Apart from the Alhambra and the Cathedral buildings, it will have been seen that Granada has not many claims on the stranger's interest.

Considering the expectations formed of it after reading Prescott and Irving, most English people will p.r.o.nounce it to be a disappointment.

From certain points of view it remains the pleasantest place for a protracted stay in Andalusia during the summer. It is only when you come to it from Seville or Cordova or Cadiz, that you realize how cool, in comparison, is this city on the plateau between the snow-clad mountains.

Even before the sun has gone down, you can dine very pleasantly in the open, hearkening to the splash of the fountains, and inhaling the fragrance of the rose. There is no need here, as at Seville, to shut yourself, till nightfall, within walls three feet thick. By night we stroll across the Plaza of the Alhambra, and see the white city gleaming with a s.h.i.+mmer reflected in the luminous sky above. Granada resumes her aspect of an Oriental city beneath the crescent moon riding triumphant over Andalusia.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GRANADA--A CORNER IN THE OLD QUARTER]

CHAPTER V

MALAGA

Second in size among Andalusian cities, Malaga is the least interesting.

Were it not for the sea, its position would be one of singular remoteness. On the extreme verge of Europe, the mighty Sierra Nevada rises behind it, and cuts it off from the rest of Spain. Yet as a flouris.h.i.+ng port it is one of the towns in the Peninsula best known among Englishmen. It is beloved by our sailors. From the odd phases of life to be seen in and around the harbour, they derive their notions of the people and the country. With that utter absence of curiosity noticeable in their kind, they never penetrate inland, or even into the outskirts of the town. But nothing can dispel Jack's conviction that his knowledge of Spain and the Spaniards is intimate and profound.

Malaga is not, as its appearance suggests, a city of purely modern growth. It was known to the Phnicians and the Romans, and before it became subject to the Almoravides was an independent princ.i.p.ality under the Hammudiya dynasty. Later it shared the fortunes of the Sultanate of Granada, and its siege and capture by Ferdinand and Isabella contributed to bring about the fall of the capital. This part of its history is dealt with in great detail by Prescott. Among the numerous incidents of the siege was a determined attempt on the part of a Moor named Ibrahim al Gherbi to a.s.sa.s.sinate the Spanish sovereign. The defence was conducted by the indomitable Hemet el Zegri, who yielded to famine rather than to the arms of the besiegers. The treatment of the fallen city leaves an indelible blot on the fame of the conquerors. The population, with the exception of a few hundreds, were sold into slavery, presents of the fairest maidens being made to the various courts of Europe. A worse fate was reserved for the Jews and renegades, who were committed to the flames.

The old Moorish fortress of Gibralfaro still frowns down on the lively city to remind us of those days. Some of the walls and towers are believed to be of Phnician origin. The stronghold has undergone repeated restorations and adaptations to military requirements, but a great deal of Moorish work may still be detected. A horseshoe arch behind the Paseo de la Alameda serves to identify the Moslems' dockyard or Atarazanas, and to indicate how far the sea has receded in the wake of the banished race southwards towards Africa.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MALAGA--THE HARBOUR]

The Cathedral towers high above all the other buildings of the city. It is in the Cla.s.sical style, and though designed by Diego de Siloe in 1528, was built for the most part in the early eighteenth century. It must be confessed that it looks better at a distance than near. The interior is solemn and cold. It is worth visiting for some specimens of Cano's art which it contains, and for Mena's magnificent carving in the choir. As at Granada, the edifice is adjoined by a smaller church called the Sagrario, founded by the Catholic Sovereigns in 1488 as the cathedral of the conquered city.

But it is not for its monuments or historical a.s.sociations that Malaga is to be visited. Its interest is of to-day. And in truth it needed not the hand of man to embellish a spot where Nature has been so lavish of her choicest gifts. The gardens round Malaga abound in the finest specimens of tropical flora. Tall india-rubber plants, gigantic eucalyptus, great bamboos, the rarest exotics, such as the _Pritchardia folifera_, the araucaria, and the _Scaforthia elegans_, flourish on this favoured sh.o.r.e. The villas of the wealthier cla.s.ses stand each in a veritable Paradise. And everywhere the white flower of the orange, the oleander, the vine, and tree-high ferns!

This luxuriant vegetation is the less to be expected since want of water is the great drawback to the prosperity of the district. Through the middle of the town runs the Guadalmedina--a broad channel, without a drain of water! The new and magnificent promenade, planted with palms, sweeps round the sea-front, as fine as anything on the Riviera. To drive along it in the sensuous southern night is to drink a deep draught of the joy of life. At one point the drive descends into the bed of the river, along which you may proceed for a mile or more. And yet at times the Guadalmedina becomes a roaring torrent, bursting its banks and sweeping away farmsteads and stock. It is difficult to say whether flood or drought has done most damage to the province.

As at Seville, you find life here focussing in lane-like streets, closed to vehicles, and lined with cafes and casinos, among the finest I have seen in Spain. Here to an early hour of the morning the men of the city gossip in garrulous, intimate groups of nine and ten, all, as it seemed to me, talking together. The number of cigarettes smoked during the progress of these tremendous conversations must be stupendous. As you will see the same group meeting night after night, you wonder what there can be in the outwardly uneventful round of life of Malaga to supply topics for conversation. To an Englishman there is a mystery about this ability to talk for five or six hours about nothing at all. You will see the same thing in the dullest provincial towns in France and Italy--the same groups of stout, bald-headed citizens talking with frantic animation every evening. Their newspapers afford the slenderest mental pabulum--their contents could be dismissed in ten minutes--and the respectable gentlemen in question are never seen to read books. How then do they recruit their stock of ideas and find an inexhaustible stock of topics for conversation?

[Ill.u.s.tration: MALAGA--THE GUADALMEDINA]

Women are, of course, conspicuous by their absence. Here we have another ill.u.s.tration of the utterly false ideas Englishmen usually entertain concerning Latins. To judge from novels written fifty or even thirty years ago, John Bull appears to have regarded the foreigner with pitying contempt as a mere philanderer, always running after a petticoat; yet no one can be in Spain a fortnight without noticing the Spaniard's disinclination for female society, or at any rate how perfectly content he is without it.

I do not fancy the ladies of Malaga care very much for society either, in our acceptation of the word. Looking out of the window appears to be their favourite recreation. They do not inherit the habit from the Moors, for that people, as I have said, were nearly all expelled at the Reconquest, and the town was resettled. All the Andalusian towns were wholly or in part emptied of their Mohammedan population when taken by the Christians, and repeopled with Castilians and others from Northern Spain. This fact is forgotten by those who recognize in every trait of the Andalusian a heritage from the Moor. We might as well think we derive our chief national characteristics from the Britons or the Normans.

East of Malaga lie several coast towns of importance, within whose gates the traveller rarely sets foot. Motril, Adra, Almeria--what is there in them to reward the fatigue of a journey in a diligence along the parched sh.o.r.e, or in some crazy coasting craft, with timbers straining and creaking before the lightest breeze? Almeria is now connected directly by rail with Madrid and Granada. The prosperity of the whole district is bound to be greatly increased by the construction of the line so long promised from Guadix to Baza. This short link in the railway system would save the traveller from Malaga to Valencia nearly 180 miles, or its alternative--a long and exhausting diligence journey. It would also bring the southern parts of Andalusia into direct communication with the great commercial centres of eastern Spain and with Ma.r.s.eilles. It would supply us with a new route to Gibraltar, moreover. This, with a line from Jaca across the Pyrenees into France, and another from Huelva to connect with the Portuguese system Villa Real de So Antonio, are links of which Spain stands vitally in need.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MALAGA--A MARKET]

CHAPTER VI

THE WAY SOUTH

At Bobadilla--the Clapham Junction of Andalusia--the Spanish railway system is joined by the line of that purely British undertaking, the Algeciras Railway Company. A Spaniard told me that this line would never have been built by one of his countrymen, as no one in Spain had any desire to facilitate Gibraltar's communication with England, and the country it traversed had been sufficiently opened up. I do not think it would be difficult to demonstrate that the line may prove of very substantial benefit to Spain, but I will confine myself to thanking the promoters for having rendered accessible certainly the most beautiful part of Andalusia, and in my opinion one of the most wildly picturesque regions of Europe. The country between Ronda and Algeciras is the Andalusia dreamt of by the romancers. It is a savage, silent country, of warmer browns and greens than the rest of Spain. Here the train takes you no longer across the scorched sky-rimmed plains, but along the very edge of dizzy ravines, at the foot of which, hundreds of feet below, angry white torrents foam and froth. Now you are climbing with obvious effort the steep shoulder of a mountain, now you are racing headlong down into a valley which seems to lie almost vertically beneath you. Now you plunge into the bowels of the Sierra and emerge with a shriek of triumph in a cauldron-shaped valley, from which Nature has provided no egress. There is no want of verdure; the cork-woods, vineyards, and olives dot the lower slopes of the tawny hills. And far up against the sky-line loom shattered towers and crumbling castles, whence you seem to see trains of steel-clad knights issuing forth to do battle with the Moor.

The country is reminiscent essentially of the days of chivalry. Perhaps the ruined strongholds and the dark gorges are still haunted by the knights, who have driven away all other ghosts and will not let us think of anyone but them. The Romans were once here, and at Munda, as every schoolboy knows, Caesar defeated with great slaughter the army led by the sons of Pompey. That town has now been identified with Ronda, the romantic capital of this most romantic region. Here the people have not forgotten Rome. They will show you a cave where in the semi-darkness you descry awful forms in stone, seeming like a ghostly and gigantic choir of monks. These are the Roman priests turned to stone upon the downfall of their G.o.ds, those of the people who cherish tradition will tell you.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MALAGA--PACKING LEMONS]

The town itself you will not find very interesting, though the escutcheons displayed over every second or third house in one quarter will evoke some reflections on departed glory and the fall of the mighty. In some such _solar_ our novelists Seton Merriman and Mr. Mason have laid the scenes of leading episodes in their two charming romances.

Ronda has had a stirring past. She shared in all the vicissitudes of Granada, and towards the end of the long agony of the Reconquest was the scene of constant and ferocious border warfare.

It was here that Mohammed V. received the head of his rival Abu Sad, who had been put to death at Seville by Pedro the Cruel. The town was taken by the army of Ferdinand and Isabella on May 22, 1485. The people of the surrounding mountains were deeply attached to the creed of Islam, and rose in revolt in 1501 against their Christian oppressors. Before they were crushed they inflicted a severe blow on their adversaries, completely wiping out a force under Don Alonso de Aguilar. Westward, on the other side of the high mountains, lies Zahara, the capture of which one December night by Mulai Hasan was the signal for the last crusade against the Spanish Moors of Granada.

But it is to its striking situation that Ronda owes its interest. Fitted rather to be the eyrie of eagles than the abode of men, it looks down from the verge of precipitous cliffs nearly three thousand feet above sea level. Midway, town and rocky hill are cleft asunder by the Tajo, an awful gorge, two hundred feet across, and twice as much in depth.

Gazing down into the abyss, you realize with something of a shudder that a pebble dropped over the edge of the precipice would fall sheer and plumb, without rebound or ricochet, into the river Guadalevin, which rushes below, filling the chasm with foam and spray. The ravine is spanned by a bridge built in the eighteenth century, a wonderful construction, from which when it was near completion its architect fell headlong. Access to the river may be obtained by a flight of 365 steps called the Mina, hewn through the rock. This singular work was executed by the Moors, who thus ensured themselves a supply of water against the dangers of a siege. Numerous subterranean chambers are also ascribed to them, or rather to their Christian captives.

But the most delightful spot in Ronda is the little Alameda laid out on the edge of a perpendicular cliff. Leaning on the railing you may drink in the beauty and grandeur of a prospect hardly surpa.s.sed in Europe. The fair fertile country below is shut in by an amphitheatre of mountains which soar upwards to heights of five and six thousand feet. The eye seeks in vain for an outlet from the valley, till it discerns the white, dusty high-road winding, doubling, and finally disappearing over a dip between the ranges. The river, a thousand feet below, swirls and gurgles among the rocks, glad to have escaped from the dark gorge to which it has so long been confined.

[Ill.u.s.tration: RONDA--THE TAJO]

In the evenings the air is keen at Ronda, and in summer you may often hear English spoken by officers of the garrison of Gibraltar and their families, who come here to escape the torrid heat of the Rock. With a little capital and energy the place might be developed into a flouris.h.i.+ng health resort.

But now the way lies south and seaward. Ever downwards slowly travels the train. The night gathers over the castled crags and the mysterious forests. We detect by their gleam the rivers over which we pa.s.s. But now a bright starlike light is seen to the southward. It flashes and is gone, to reappear the next instant. We are nearing the strait, and the searchlight tells us that Britannia watches here with unsleeping eyes over the fortunes of her children in two seas and two continents.

CHAPTER VII