Spanish Vistas Part 5

"AS THOU LOOKEST, SO ONCE LOOKED I: AS I LOOK NOW, SO WILT THOU APPEAR HEREAFTER.

PONDER UPON THIS, AND SIN NOT."

Shortly beyond stood a catacomb above-ground, in which a number of defunct hermits had been sealed up. It also bore a legend, but in Latin:

"THE DAY OF DEATH IS BETTER THAN THAT OF BIRTH."

In the vestibule of the house these drastic reminders of mortality were supplemented by two allegorical pictures--hanging among some portraits of evanished worthies who had ended their penitential days there--two crude paintings which exhibited "The Soul Tortured by Doubt," and "The Soul Blessed by Faith." It was not altogether in keeping with the unworldly and ascetic atmosphere of this spiritual refuge, that a tablet in the wall should record, with fulsome abas.e.m.e.nt of phrase, how her most Gracious Majesty Isabella II. had, some few years ago, deigned to visit the Desert, and how this stone had been placed there as a humble monument of her condescension. Certainly, considering the ex-Queen's character (if it may claim consideration), it is hard to see what honor the anchorites should find in her visiting their abode.

A gray-haired brother, robed in the coa.r.s.e and weighty brown serge which he is obliged to wear in winter and summer alike, received us kindly and showed us the expensively adorned plateresque chapel. He knelt and bowed nearly to the threshold before unlocking the door, crossed himself, and knelt again on the pavement within; then, advancing farther, he dropped down once more on both knees, and bent over as if he had some intention of using his good-natured, simple old head as a mop to polish the black and white marble squares, but ended by another cross, and moving his lips in noiseless prayer. The national manner of making the cross is peculiar: after the usual touching of forehead and breast, the Spanish Catholic concludes by suddenly attempting to swallow his thumb, and then as hastily pulling it out of his mouth again, to save it up for some other time. This movement, I suppose, emblemizes the eating of the consecrated wafer, but it makes a grotesque impression that is anything but solemn. At times you will also see him execute a unique triple cross, with strange pa.s.ses and dabs in the air which might easily be mistaken for preliminary strategy directed against some erring mosquito engaged in guerilla warfare on his eyebrow. We were obliged, in conformity, to do as our Catholic companions did--receiving the holy-water and making a simple cross--an act which, without being of their faith, one may perform with unsectarian reverence. Brother Esteban was on the watch to see that proper devotion was shown in this peculiarly sacred chapel, and in the midst of his adoration he turned quickly upon Manuel, asking, "Why don't you go down on _both_ your knees in the accustomed manner?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE FRUIT OF THE DESIERTA.]

Manuel, being a master of ready deception, answered, without an instant's delay, "Ah, that is my misfortune! I lately had an accident to that leg" (indicating the one which had not sunk far enough), "and that is why it is not easy to get down on both knees." However, he spread his handkerchief wider, and painfully brought the offending member into place.

Esteban frankly apologized, and then the praying went on again.

When we got out into the corridor, and our monkish friend was well in advance, black Fan's repressed heresy broke into a startling reaction.

She dipped her hand again and again into the basin of holy-water, wastefully dropping some of it on the floor, and began outlining unlimited crosses from her sable forehead downward--covering her breast with an imaginary armor of them--enough to keep her supplied for a month, and proof against every possible misfortune. Her broad grin of delight, exposing her vermilion lips and white teeth like a slice of unripe watermelon, added to the horror of the situation, and I protested against such uncouth profanity.

"Might's well keep goin' now I begun," she chuckled in reply. "I's 'fraid I'll forgit how!" She was making another plunge for the font, when our pale, gentle-featured Novice stopped her in mid-career.

Fortunately good Esteban had not observed this small orgy going on. He was as pleasant as ever when we went with him into a little room to buy rosaries and deposit some silver pieces for charity; and there he made farther and profuse apologies to Manuel. "Of course you see it was impossible I should know there was anything the matter with your leg,"

he said, quite plaintively. And Manuel accepted his contrition with double pleasure because he knew it to be wholly undeserved.

The hermits, as I have said, have their separate cottages scattered about the grounds, each with a small patch of land to be cultivated.

There they raise fruit, which their rules forbid them to eat, and so it is carried down as a present to some wealthy Cordovan families who support the hermitage by their largesses. Every day poor folk toil up from the plain, some five miles, to this airy perch, and are fed by the monks; but they themselves eat little, abstaining from meat, wine, coffee, tea--everything, indeed, except some few ounces of daily bread, a pint of _garbanzos_ (the tasteless, round yellow bean which is the universal food of the poor in Spain), and a soup made of bread, water, oil, and garlic. They live on nothing and prayer. They rise at three in the morning, and thrice a week they fast from that hour until noon.

Their step is slow, and their voices have a strange, inert, sickly sound; but they appeared cheerful enough, and joked with each other. I asked Esteban the name of a tiny yellow flower growing by the path, and he couldn't tell me; but he plucked it tenderly, and began discoursing to Manuel on its beauty. "_Tan chiquita_," he said, in his poor soft voice. "So _little, little_, and yet so precious and so finely made!"

Another brother was deeply absorbed in snipping off bits of coiled bra.s.s wire with a pair of pincers. "These are for the 'Our Fathers,'" he explained, meaning the large beads in the rosary, separated from the smaller "Ave Maria" ones by links of wire. The cottages or huts, surrounded by an outer wall, contain a cell, sometimes cut out of a bowlder lying on the spot, where there is a rude cot, a shelf for holy books and the crucifix, and a grated window, across which waves, perhaps, the broad-leaved bough of a fig-tree. An anteroom, provided with a few utensils and the disciplinary scourge hanging mildly against the wall, completes the strange interior. The lives of the hermits of the Sierra are reduced to the ghastly simplicity of a skeleton; a part of their time is spent in contemplating skulls, and they have a habit of digging their own graves, in order to keep more plainly before their minds the end of all earthly careers. Mistaken as all this seems to many of us, there was a peacefulness about the Hermitage for which many a storm-tossed soul sighs in vain; and I am glad that some few creatures can find here the repose they desire while waiting for death. Some of the hermits are men of rank, who have retired hither disheartened with the world; others are low-born--men afflicted by some form of misfortune or misdemeanor of their own, who wish to hide from life; but all a.s.semble in a pure democracy of sorrow and penitential piety, apparently contented.

We breakfasted at ten in a room hospitably put at our disposal, the windows of which admitted a delicious breeze and opened upon a magnificent view of the plain far below, where the distant city rested like a white mist--an impalpable thing. Brother Jose brought some olives, to add to the refection which our sumpter-mule had carried to this height. They had a ripe, acid, oily flavor, which made one think of homely things and of patient housewives in remote American hills, who lead lives as monotonous, as self-denying and unnoticed as those which pa.s.s on this ridge of the Sierra in Andalusia. Our Novice thought the olives had "a holy flavor;" and I could understand her feeling. Find me a site more fitted for meditation on the volatility of mundane things than this eyry on the mountain-head overlooking the historic valley!

There lies Cordova, a mere spot in the reach of soft citron and straw-tinted fields; and the Guadalquivir, winding like a neglected skein of tawny silk thrown down on the mapped landscape. The plain is calm as oblivion. It is oblivion's self; for there the earth has absorbed Cordova the Old, so that not a vestige remains where compressed ma.s.ses of human dwellings once stood. They are crumbled to an indistinguishable powder. That soft autumnal soil has swallowed up the bones of unnumbered generations, and no trace of them is left. We imagined the glittering legions of Caesar as they moved slowly through the country, flas.h.i.+ng the sun from their compact steel, at that time when they put to the sword twenty-five thousand inhabitants of the city, which had sided with Pompey. We saw the Moors once more envelop it with arms and banners and the fluttering of snowy garments. But all these vanished again like a moving cloud, or a smoke from burning stubble; and the sun still pours its uninterrupted flood of splendor over the land, bringing life and bringing death, with impartial ray.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MEMENTO MORI.]

The Spanish word for "crowded" or "populated" is still used to signify "dense" in any ordinary connection, as the phrase _barba poblada_, for a thick beard, testifies. The implication is that, when there is any population at all, it must be crowded; a direct transmission, apparently, from periods when inhabitants cl.u.s.tered in immense numbers around the centres of civil power for safety. And the word holds good to-day; for one finds, in the present shrunken human force of the Peninsula, closely packed a.s.semblages of people in the towns and cities, with wide domains of comparatively untenanted country around.

When night closed above us again in the city; when mellow lamps glowed, and a tropical fragrance flowed in from the gardens; when in the long dusky pauses of warm nocturnal silence the watchman's weary and pathetic cry resounded, or hollow-toned church-bells rung the hour, the romance of Cordova seemed to concentrate itself, and fell upon me, as I listened, in chords that took this form:

FLOWER OF SPAIN.

Like a throb of the heart of midnight I hear a guitar faintly humming, And through the Alcazar garden A wandering footstep coming.

A shape by the orange bower's shadow-- Whose shape? Is it mine in a dream?

For my senses are lost in the perfumes That out of the dark thicket stream.

'Mid the tinkle of Moorish waters, And the rush of the Guadalquivir, The rosemary breathes to the jasmine, That trembles with joyous fear.

And their breath goes silently upward, Far up to the white burning stars, With a message of sweetness, half sorrow, Unknown but to souls that bear scars.

Here, midway between stars and flowers, I know not which draw me the most: Shall my years yield earthly sweetness?

Shall I s.h.i.+ne from the sky like a ghost?

A spirit I cannot quiet Bids me bow to the unseen rod; I dream of a lily transplanted, To bloom in the garden of G.o.d.

Yet the footsteps come nearer and nearer; Still moans the soft-troubled strain Of the strings in the dusk. Well I know it: 'Twas called for me "Flower of Spain."

Ah, yes! my lover he made it, And called it by my pet name: I hear it, and--I'm but a woman-- It sweeps through my heart like a flame.

The night's heart and mine flow together; The music is beating for each.

The moon's gone, the nightingale silent; Light and song are both in his speech.

As the musky shadows that mingle, As star-s.h.i.+ne and flower-scent made one, Our spirits in gladness and anguish Have met: their waiting is done.

But over the leaves and the waters What echoes the strange clanging bells Send afloat from the dim-arched Mezquita!

How mournful the cadence that swells

From the lonely roof of the convent Where pale nuns rest! On the hill, Far off, the hermits in vigil Are bowed at the crucifix still;

And the brown plain slumbers around us....

O land of remembrance and grief, If I am truly the flower, How withered are you, the leaf!

[Ill.u.s.tration: DIFFICULT FOR FOREIGNERS.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE JASMINE GIRL.]

There was a good deal of discussion among our group of pilgrims as to the propriety of a foundation like the Hermitage of the Sierra continuing to exist in an age like the present one. Whetstone, who had declined to visit it, was of opinion that men who led such idle lives should be suppressed by law, and even went so far as to talk about hanging them. So singular a theory, emanating from a citizen of a free republic, met with some opposition; but this was not pushed too far, because we understood that Whetstone kept a hotel at home, and dreaded lest some day we should be at his mercy. As for the rest of us, it was not easy to p.r.o.nounce that we were of much more value than the hermits; and a.s.suredly those earnest ascetics compared favorably with our mule-driver, who was remarkable only for an expression of incipient humor that was never able to attain the height of actual expression. I was sure that, as he sighed out his final "Arre" in this world, he would pa.s.s into the next with that vacant smile on his face, and the joke which he might have perpetrated under fortunate circ.u.mstances still unuttered. Nor did the average life of Cordova strike us as signally indispensable to the world's progress. It was doubtless a very pleasant, lazy life so far as it went, and we did not decide to hang the inhabitants! They have a charming fas.h.i.+on there of building houses with pleasant interior courts, in which the _sclinda_, a vine with pale lavender cl.u.s.ters of blossoms suggesting the wistaria, droops amid matted foliage, and lends its grace alike to crumbling architecture or modern masonry. In these courts, separated from the street by gates of iron grating beautifully designed, you will see pleasant little domestic groups, and possibly a whole dinner-party going on in the fresh air. It was likewise agreeable to repair to a certain restaurant--restored in the Moorish manner--and there, while clapping hands echoed through the light arcades, drink iced beer and lemon--a refres.h.i.+ng beverage, which might reasonably take the place of fiery punches (in America) for hot weather. "Neither will I deny," said Velveteen, "that it is a wonderful sensation to stray into the Plaza de Geron Paez and come up suddenly against that glorious old Roman gate--growing up as naturally as the trees in front of it, but so much more wonderful than they--with its fine crumbling yellow traceries. How nicely it would tell in a sketch, eh, with some of the royal grooms--the _remontistas_--walking through the foreground in their quaint costumes!"

The men to whom he referred wear, in the best sense, a thoroughly theatrical garb of scarlet and black, finished off by boots of Cordovan leather in the style of sixteenth-century Spain, turned down at the top, laced, ta.s.selled, and slashed open by a curve that runs from the side down to the back of the heel. This shows the white stocking under short trousers, giving to the masculine calf and ankle a grace for which they are usually denied all credit.

For the rest, dwellers in modern Cordova attend ma.s.s and vespers, stroll around to the confectioners' of an afternoon to eat sweetmeats, especially sugared _higochumbos_ (the unripe p.r.i.c.kly-pear boiled in syrup), or the famed and fragrant preserve of budding orange-blossoms known as _dulces de alzahar_; and the remainder of the time they while away pleasantly in loitering on the Street of the Great Captain, or in peering from their windows at whatever pa.s.ses beneath. Throughout the kingdom, it should be said, a most extraordinary persistence will be observed in dawdling, strolling, and general contemplation. The Spaniard appears to be born with his legs in a walking position, and with loaded eyes that compel him to look out of the window whether he wants to or not.

One of the more remarkable observations, finally, that I collected in Cordova came from Manuel. It was his reflection as he gazed down from the Desierta into the plain: "Ah, that was where John Dove (Juan Palom) did such splendid things!" he sighed. "You don't know about John Dove?

Well, he was one of the _very greatest_ men Spain ever had; he was a robber--and oh, what a beautiful robber!"

_ANDALUSIA AND THE ALHAMBRA._

I.

[Ill.u.s.tration: S]

Seville--why should we not keep the proper and more euphonious form, Sevilla?--the home of that Don Juan on whom Byron and Mozart have shed a l.u.s.tre more enviable than his reputation, has been made familiar to every one by melodious Figaro as well; and more lately Merimee's Carmen, veiled in the music of Bizet, has brought it into the foreign consciousness again.

To me it is memorable as the place where I saw the jars in which the Forty Thieves were smothered. Worried by a painfully profuse odor that filled the whole street, one day I sought the cause, and found it in an olive-oil merchant's _tienda_, where there were some terra-cotta jars of the exact form given in the story-books, and afflicted with elephantiasis to such a degree that one or two men could easily have hidden in each. I am sure they were the same into which Morgiana poured the boiling oil, though why it should have been heated is inexplicable: the smell alone ought to have been fatal.