Spanish Highways and Byways

But that teeth-chattering cold, "un frio de todos los demonios," eased our farewells to Burgos, and night found us dividing the privileges of a second-class carriage with two black-bearded Castilians, who slept foot to foot along the leather-cushioned seat on the one side, while we copied their example on the other. I started from my first doze at some hubbub of arrival to ask drowsily, "Is this Madrid?" "Be at peace, señora!" cooed one of these sable-headed neighbors, in that tone of humorous indulgence characteristic of the dons when addressing women and children. "It is twelve hours yet to Madrid. Slumber on with tranquil heart." So we lay like warriors taking our rest, with our travelling rugs, in lieu of martial cloaks, about us, until the east began to glow with rose and fire, revealing a bleak extent of treeless, tawny steppe.

We had only a few days to give to "the crowned city" then, but those sufficed for business, for a first acquaintance with the Puerta del Sol and its radiating avenues, a first joy in the peerless Museo del Prado, and a brilliant glimpse of Carnival. We found the great drive of the Prado, on Ash Wednesday afternoon, reserved for carriages and maskers. Stages were erected along one side of the way, and on the other the park was closely set with chairs. Stages and chairs were filled with a well-clad, joyous multitude, diverted awhile from their pretty labors of shooting roses and showering confetti by the fascinating panorama before their eyes. The privileged landaus that held the middle of the road were laden with the loveliest women of Castile. Carriages, horses, and coachmen were all adorned, but these showy equipages only served as setting to the high-bred beauty of the occupants. The cream of Madrid society was there. The adults were elegantly dressed, but not as masqueraders. The children in the carriages, however, were often costumed in the picturesque habits of the provinces – the scarlet cap and striped shawl of the Catalan peasant, the open velvet waistcoat, puffed trousers, and blue or red sash of the Valencian, the gayly embroidered mantle of the Andalusian mountaineer, the cocked hat and tasselled jacket of the gypsy. Moors, flower girls, fairies, French lords and ladies of the old régime, even court fools with cap and bells, were brightly imaged by these little people, to whom the maskers on foot seemed to have left the monopoly of beauty. The figures darting among the landaus, in and out of which they leaped with confident impudence, were almost invariably grotesques – smirking fishwives, staring chimney-sweeps, pucker-mouthed babies, and scarecrows of every variety. Political satires are sternly forbidden, and among the few national burlesques, we saw nowhere any representation of Uncle Sam. He was hardly a subject of the King of Nonsense then.

Squeaking and gibbering, the maskers, unrebuked, took all manner of saucy liberties. A stately old gentleman rose from his cushion in a crested carriage to observe how gallantly a bevy of ladies were beating off with a hail of confetti and bonbons an imploring cavalier who ran by their wheels, and when he would have resumed his seat he found himself dandled on the knees of a grinning Chinaman. Sometimes a swarm of maskers would beset a favorite carriage, climbing up beside the coachman and snatching his reins, standing on the steps and throwing kisses, lying along the back and twitting the proudest beauty in the ear or making love to the haughtiest. This all-licensed masker, with his monstrous disguise and affected squeal, may be a duke or a doorkeeper. Carnival is democracy.

Meanwhile the inevitable small boy, whose Spanish variety is exceptionally light of heart and heels, gets his own fun out of the occasion by whisking under the ropes into this reserved avenue and dodging hither and thither among the vehicles, to the fury of the mounted police, whose duty it is to keep the public out. One resplendent rider devoted his full energies for nearly an hour to the unavailing chase of a nimble little rogue who risked ten of his nine lives under coaches and in front of horses' hoofs, but always turned up laughing with a finger at the nose.

Yet this jocund day did not set without its tragedy. A hot-tempered Madrileño, abroad with his wife, resented the attentions paid her by one of the maskers and shot him down. The mortally wounded man was found to be a physician of high repute. This was not the only misadventure of the afternoon, a lady losing one eye by the blow of a flying sugar-plum.

Our next night journey was less fortunate than our first, though it should be remembered that our discomforts were partly due to our persistency in travelling second-class. The carriage had its full complement of passengers, and each of our eight companions brought with him an unlawful excess of small luggage. Valises, boxes, bundles, sacks, cans, canes, umbrellas wedged us in on every side, while our own accumulation of grips, shawl-straps, hold-alls, and sketching kit denied us even the relief of indignation. We all sat bolt upright the night through in an atmosphere that sickens memory. Not a chink of window air would those sensitive caballeros endure, while the smoke of their ever puffing cigarettes clouded the compartment with an uncanny haze that grew heavier hour by hour. Conversation, which seldom flagged, became a violent chorus at those intervals when the conductor burst in for another chapter of his serial wrangle with a fiery gentleman who refused to pay full fare. Every don in the carriage, even to the chubby priest nodding in the coziest corner, had an unalterable conviction as to the rights and wrongs of that question, and men we had supposed, from their swaying and snoring, fast asleep, would leap to their feet when the conductor entered, fling out their hands in vehement gestures, and dash into the midst of the vociferous dispute. Lazy Spaniards, indeed! We began to wish that the Peninsula would cultivate repose of manner. Our tempers were sorely shaken, and when, in the pale chill of dawn, we arrived at Cordova, sleepless, nauseated, and out of love with humanity, we had every prospect of passing a wretched forenoon.

Thus it is I am inclined to believe we lay down under an orange tree and dreamed a dream of the "Arabian Nights." Or perhaps it was only another freak of the Carnival. At all events, a cup of coffee, and the world was changed. Cordova! A midsummer heat, a land of vineyards and olive groves, palms and aloes, a white, unearthly city, with narrow, silent, deathlike streets, peopled only by drowsy beggars and by gliding maskers that seemed more real than this Oriental picture in which they moved, high walls with grated, harem-like windows, and an occasional glimpse, through some arched doorway, into a marble-floored, rose-waving, fountain-playing patio, enchanted and mysterious, a dream within a dream. Cordova is more than haunted. It is itself a ghost. The court of the Spanish caliphs, at once the Mecca and the Athens of the West, a holy city which counted its baths and mosques by hundreds, a seat of learning whose universities were renowned for mathematics and philosophy, chemistry, astronomy, and medicine, and within whose libraries were treasured manuscripts by hundreds of thousands, a star of art and poetry, it ever reproaches, by this lovely, empty shadow, the Christian barbarism that spurned away the Moors.

The insulted Mosque of Cordova well-nigh makes Mohammedans of us all. Entering by the studded Door of Pardon into the spacious Court of Oranges, with its ancient trees and sparkling quintette of fountains, one passes onward under the Arch of Blessings into a marble forest of slender, sculptured pillars. The wide world, from Carthage to Damascus, from Jerusalem to Ephesus and Rome, was searched for the choicest shafts of jasper, breccia, alabaster, porphyry, until one thousand four hundred precious columns bore the glory of rose-red arches and wonder-roof of gilded and enamelled cedar. More than seven thousand hanging lamps of bronze, filled with perfumed oil, flashed out the mosaic tints, – golds, greens, violets, vermilions, – of ceiling, walls, and pavement. All this shining sanctity culminated in the Mihrâb, or Prayer-Niche, an octagonal recess whose shell-shaped ceiling is hollowed from a single block of pure white marble. This Holy of Holies held the Koran, bound in gold and pearls, around which the Faithful were wont to make seven turns upon their knees, an act of devotion that has left indisputable grooves in the marble of the pavement.

The Christian conquerors splashed whitewash over the exquisite ceiling, hewed down the pillars of the outer aisles to give space for a fringe of garish chapels, and even chopped away threescore glistening columns in the centre to make room for an incongruous Renaissance choir, with an altar of silver gilt and a big pink retablo. We could have wandered for endless hours among the strange half-lights and colored shadows of that petrified faith of Islam, marvelling on the processes of time. It is claimed that the Arab mosque rose on the site of a Roman temple, whence Mahomet drove forth Janus, to be in his own turn expelled by Christ. The race of those who bowed themselves in this gleaming labyrinth has fared ill at Spanish hands. Even now a Moor, however courteous and cultured, is refused admission to certain Castilian churches, as the Escorial.

How did we ever part from Cordova, from her resplendent, desecrated mosque, her stone lanes of streets, her hinted patios, the Moorish mills and Roman bridge of her yellow Guadalquivír? It must all have been a morning dream, for the early afternoon saw us tucked away in another second-class carriage speeding toward Granada.

We were in beautiful Andalusia, la tierra de Maria Santisima. The green slopes of the Sierra Morena, planted to the top with olive groves, watched the beginnings of our journey, and banks of strange, sweet flowers, with glimpses of Moorish minarets and groups of dark-faced, bright-sashed peasants, looking as if they had just stepped down from an artist's easel, beguiled us of all physical discomforts save heat and thirst. When the sun was at its sorest, the train drew up at a tumble-down station, and we looked eagerly for the customary water seller, with his cry of "Water! Fresh water! Water cooler than snow!" But it was too warm for this worthy to venture out, and our hopes fastened on a picturesque old merchant seated in a shaft of cypress shade beside a heap of golden oranges. Those juicy globes were a sight to madden all the parched mouths in the train, and imploring voices hailed the proprietor from window after window. But our venerable hidalgo smoked his cigarette in tranquil ease, disdaining the vulgarities of barter. At the very last moment we persuaded a ragged boy in the throng of bystanders to fetch us a hatful of the fruit. Then the peasant languidly arose, followed the lad to our window, named an infinitesimal price, and received his coin with the bow of a grandee. He was no hustler in business, this Andalusian patriarch, but his dignity was epic and his oranges were nectar.

We shall never know whether or not we had an adventure that evening. A wild-eyed tatterdemalion swung himself suddenly into our compartment and demanded our tickets, but as all the Andalusians looked to our unaccustomed view like brigands, we did not discriminate against this abrupt individual, but yielded up our strips of pasteboard without demur. A swarthy young Moor of Tangier, the only other occupant of the carriage, sharply refused to surrender his own until the intruder should produce a conductor's badge, whereupon the stranger swore in gypsy, or "words to that effect," wrenched open the door and fled, like Judas, into the outer dark. The Moor excitedly declared to us that our tickets would be called for at the station in Granada, that we should have to pay their price to the gate-keeper, and that our irregular collector, hiding somewhere along the train, would be admitted by that corrupt official to a share in the spoils. Moved by our dismay, this son of the desert thrust his head through the window at the next stop, and roared so lustily for the conductor and the civil guard that, in a twinkling, the robber, if he was a robber, popped up in the doorway again, like a Jack-in-the-box, and rudely flung us back the tickets. Thereupon our benefactor, if he was a benefactor, solemnly charged us never, on the Granada road, to give up anything to anybody who wore no gilt on his cap.

More and more the purple mountains were folding us about, until at last we arrived at Granada, too tired for a thrill. Mr. Gulick's constant care, which had secured us harborage in Madrid, had provided welcome here. Content in mere well-being, it was not until the following afternoon that tourist enterprise revived within us. Then we somewhat recklessly wandered down from the Alhambra hill into the heart of the People's Carnival, a second Sunday of festival given over to the enjoyment of the lower classes. The grotesque costumes were coarser than ever and the fun was rougher. The maskers cracked whips at the other promenaders, blew horns, shook rattles, and struck about them with painted bladders, but the balconies were bright with the bewitching looks of Andalusian beauties, each vying with the rest in throwing the many-colored serpentinas, curly lengths of paper that crisp themselves in gaudy fetters about their captives. A single business house in Granada claimed to have sold over a million of these, representing a value of some ten thousand dollars, during Carnival week. Southern Spain was grumbling bitterly against the Government and the war taxes, and in Seville, where a tax is put on masks, the Carnival had been given up this year as last; but Granada would not be cheated of her frolic. Our study of this closing phase of the Carnival was cut short by the recollection that it was, above all, the fiesta of pickpockets. Finding ourselves, on the superb Paseo del Salón, in the midst of a hooting, jostling, half-gypsy mob, rained upon with confetti, called upon in broken French and English, pressed upon by boys and beggars, and happening to catch sight of the stately bronze statue of Columbus which the women of Granada had recently stoned because, by discovering America, he brought all the Cuban troubles upon Spain, we took the hint of the wise navigator's eye and decided that we two stray Yankees might be as well off somewhere else. "Feet, why do I love you?" say the Spaniards; and so said we, suiting the action to the word.

III

WITHIN THE ALHAMBRA

"The Sierra Nevada, an enormous dove which shelters under its most spotless wings Saracen Granada." – Alarcón: Los Seis Velos.

Our surprises were by no means over. We had come to Granada to bask in the quintessence of earthly sunshine, and we found bleak rains, dark skies, and influenza. The Moorish palace was indeed as wonderful as our lifelong dream of it, – arched and columned halls of exquisite fretwork, walls of arabesque where flushes and glints of color linger yet, ceilings crusted with stalactite figures of tapering caprice, but all too chill, even if the guides would cease from troubling, for tarrying revery. We tarried, nevertheless, were enraptured, and caught cold. We were dwelling in the village on the Alhambra hill, within the circuit of the ruined fortress, in a villa kept by descendants of the Moors, but the insolent grippe microbe respected neither ancient blood nor republican. During the month of our residence, every member of the household was brought low in turn, and there were days when even the stubborn Yankees retreated to their pillows, lulled by the howling of as wild March winds as ever whirled the grasshopper vane on Faneuil Hall. From beyond the partition sounded the groans of our fever-smitten hostess, and from the kitchen below arose the noise of battle between our sturdy host and the rebel spoons and sauce-pans. If we could not always swallow his bold experiments in gruel and porridge, we could always enjoy the roars of laughter with which that merry silversmith plied his unaccustomed labors. It is said that there are only three months of the year when Granada is fit to live in, and certainly February and March are not of these. But our delighted spirits had no thought of surrender to our discomfited bodies. We would not go away. It is better to ache in beautiful Granada than to be at ease elsewhere.

At the first peep of convalescence, we fled out of doors in search of a sunbeam and discovered, again to our surprise, this immemorial Alhambra hill as young as springtime. The famous fragments of towers, with their dim legends of enchantment, all those tumbled masses of time-worn, saffron-lichened masonry, are tragically old, yet the tender petals of peach blossoms, drifting through the fragrant air, lay pink as baby touches against those hoary piles. We rested beside many an ancient ruin overclambered by red rosebuds or by branches laden with the fresh gold of oranges, where thrushes practised songs of welcome for the nightingales. We were too early for these sweetest minstrels of the Alhambra, who, like the Moors of long ago, were yearning on the edge of Africa for the Vega of Granada.

One expects, shut in by the crumbling walls of the Alhambra, in shadow of the ruddy towers, in sound of the Moslem fountains, to live with dreams and visions for one's company, to have no associates less dignified than the moonlight cavalcades of shadowy Arabian warriors, whom the mountain caverns cast forth at stated seasons to troop once more in their remembered ways, or lustrous-eyed, lute-playing sultanas, or, at least, a crook-backed, snow-bearded magician, with a wallet full of talismans, and footsteps that clink like the gold of buried treasure. But here again the eternal fact of youth in the world disconcerts all venerable calculations. The Alhambra dances and laughs with children – ragamuffins, most of them, but none the less radiant with the precious joy of the morning.

They are gentle little people, too. It became well known on the hill that we were Americans, yet not a pebble or rude word followed us from the groups of unkempt boys among whom we daily passed. Once a mimic regiment, with a deafening variety of unmusical instruments and a genuine Spanish flag, charged on me roguishly and drew up in battle square about their prisoner, but it was only to troll the staple song of Spanish adolescence: "I want to be a soldier," and when I had munificently rewarded the captain with a copper, the youngsters doffed their varied headgear, dipped their banner in martial salute, and contentedly re-formed their ranks. It was seldom that we gave money, but we usually carried dulces for the little ones, who, even the dirtiest, have their own pretty standard of manners.

Some half-dozen pequeñitos, not one of whom was clearly out of petticoats, were scampering off one day, for instance, their thanks duly spoken, and their bits of candy just between hand and mouth, when they turned with one accord, as if suddenly aware of an abruptness in their leave-taking, and trotted back to bow them low, their tatters of cap sweeping the ground, and lisp with all Spanish gravity, "Good afternoon, señora." One chubby hidalgo tipped over with the profundity of his obeisance, but the others righted him so solemnly that the dignity of the ceremonial was unimpaired.

The habit of begging, that plague of tourist resorts, is an incessant nuisance on the Alhambra hill. Half-grown girls and young women were the most shameless and persistent of our tormentors. Age can be discouraged, and babyhood diverted, while the Spanish boy, if his importunities are met by smile and jest, will break into a laugh in the midst of his most pathetic appeals and let you off till next time.

"A little money for our Blessed Lady's sake, señora. I am starving."

"Wouldn't you rather have a cigarette?"

"And that I would."

"Then you are not starving, little brother. Run away. I have no cigarettes."

"But you have money for me, señora."

"No, nor enough for myself, not enough to buy one tile of the Alhambra."

"Then may God take care of you!"

"And of you!"

But the wild-haired, jet-eyed gypsy girl from the Albaicín is impervious to mirth and untouched by courtesy. She would not do us the honor of believing our word, even when we were telling the truth.

"Five centimos to buy me a scarlet ribbon! Five centimos!"

"Not to-day, excuse me. I have no change."

"Hoh! You have change enough. Look in your little brown bag and see."

"I have no change."

"Then give me a peseta. Come, now, a whole peseta!"

"But why should I give you a peseta?"

The girl stares like an angry hawk.

"But why shouldn't you?" Darting away, she hustles together a group of toddlers, hardly able to lisp, and drives them on to the attack.

"Beg, Isabelita! Beg of the lady, little Conception! Beg, Alfonsito! Beg, beg, beg! Beg five centimos, ten centimos! Beg a peseta for us all!"

And out pop the tiny palms, and the babble of baby voices makes a pleading music in the air. It is for such as these that the little brown bag has learned to carry dulces.

Before the month was over we had, in a slow, grippe-chastened fashion, "done our Baedeker." We had our favorite courts and corridors in the magical maze of the Moorish palace; we knew the gardens and fountains of the Generalife, even to that many-centuried cypress beneath whose shade the Sultana Zoraya was wont to meet her Abencerrage lover; our fortunes had been told in the gypsy caves of the Albaicín; we had visited the stately Renaissance cathedral where, in a dim vault, the "Catholic Kings," Ferdinand and Isabella, take their royal rest; we had made a first acquaintance with the paintings of the fire-tempered Granadine, Alonso Cano, and paid our dubious respects to the convent of Cartuja, with its over-gorgeous ornament and its horrible pictures of Spanish martyrdoms inflicted by that "devil's bride," Elizabeth of England. We had explored the parks and streets of the strange old city, where we possessed, according to the terms of Spanish hospitality, several houses; but better than the clamorous town we liked our own wall-girdled height, with its songful wood of English elms, planted by the Duke of Wellington, its ever murmuring runlets of clear water, its jessamines and myrtles, its Arabian Nights of mosque and tower, and its far outlook over what is perhaps the most entrancing prospect any hill of earth can show. The sunset often found us leaning over the ivied wall beneath the Torre de la Vela, that bell-tower where the first cross was raised after the Christian conquest, gazing forth from our trellised garden-nook on a vast panorama of gray city all quaintly set with arch and cupola, of sweeping plain with wealth of olive groves, vineyards, orange orchards, pomegranates, aloes, and cypresses, bounded by glistening ranks of snow-cloaked mountains. From the other side of the Alhambra plateau, the fall is sheer to the silver line of the Darro. Across the river rises the slope of the Albaicín, once the chosen residence of Moorish aristocracy, but now dotted over, amid the thickets of cactus and prickly pear, with whitewashed entrances to gypsy caves. Beyond all shine the resplendent summits of the great Sierras.

Yet it is strange how homely are many of the memories that spring to life in me at the name of the Alhambra, – decorous donkeys, laden with water-jars, trooping up the narrow footpath to the old Fountain of Tears, herds of goats clinging like flies to the upright precipice, a lurking peasant darting out on his wife as she passes with a day's earnings hidden in her stocking and holding her close, with laughter and coaxing, while he persistently searches her clothing until he finds and appropriates that copper hoard, and our own cheery little house-drudge washing our linen in a wayside rivulet and singing like a bird as she rubs and pounds an unfortunate handkerchief between two haphazard stones: —

"I like to live in Granada,It pleases me so wellWhen I am falling asleep at nightTo hear the Vela bell."

There is the proud young mother, too, whom we came upon by chance over behind the Tower of the Princesses, where her pot of puchero was bubbling above a miniature bonfire, while the velvet-eyed baby boy sucked his thumb in joyous expectation. She often made us welcome, after that, to her home, – a dingy stone kitchen and bedroom, unfurnished save for pallet, a few cooking-utensils, a chest or two, and, fastened to the wall, a gaudy print of La Virgen de las Angustias, the venerated Patrona of Granada. But this wretched abode, the remains of what may once have been a palace, opened on a lordly pleasure-garden with walls inlaid with patterns of rainbow tiles, whose broken edges were hidden by rose bushes. There were pedestals and even fragments of images in this wild Eden, jets of sparkling water and walks of variegated marble. In the course of the month, English and Spanish callers climbed the hill to us and encompassed us with kindness, but we still maintained our incorrigible taste for low society and used to hold informal receptions on sunny benches for all the tatterdemalions within sight. Swarthy boys, wearied with much loafing, would thriftily lay aside their cigarettes to favor us with conversation, asking many questions about America, for whose recent action they gallantly declined to hold us responsible. "It was not the ladies that made the war," said these modern cavaliers of the Alhambra.