The Mediterranean: Its Storied Cities and Venerable Ruins
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Title: The Mediterranean: Its Storied Cities and Venerable Ruins
Author: T. G. Bonney
Grant Allen
Arthur Griffiths
Eustace A. Reynolds-Ball
H. D. Traill
Release date: November 2, 2012 [eBook #41263]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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THE MEDITERRANEAN
[Illustration]
THE MEDITERRANEAN
Its Storied Cities and Venerable Ruins
by
T. G. BONNEY, E. A. R. BALL, H. D. TRAILL, GRANT ALLEN,
ARTHUR GRIFFITHS AND ROBERT BROWN
Illustrated with Photogravures
New York
James Pott & Company
1907
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. THE PILLARS OF HERCULES, 1
Portals of the ancient world--Bay of Tangier at sunrise--
Tarifa--The Rock of Gibraltar--Wonders of its
fortifications--Afternoon promenade in the Alameda Gardens--
Ascending the Rock--View from the highest point--The Great
Siege--Ceuta, the principal Spanish stronghold on the
Moorish coast--The rock of many names.
II. ALGIERS, 28
"A Pearl set in Emeralds"--Two distinct towns; one ancient,
one modern--The Great Mosque--A Mohammedan religious
festival--Oriental life in perfection--The road to Mustapha
Supérieur--A true Moorish villa described--Women praying to
a sacred tree--Excessive rainfall.
III. MALAGA, 42
A nearly perfect climate--Continuous existence of thirty
centuries--Granada and the world-renowned Alhambra--Systems
of irrigation--Vineyards the chief source of wealth--Esparto
grass--The famous Cape de Gatt--The highest peak of the
Sierra Nevada--Last view of Granada.
IV. BARCELONA, 61
The flower market of the Rambla--Streets of the old town--
The Cathedral of Barcelona--Description of the Columbus
monument--All Saints' Day in Spain--Mont Tibidaho--Diverse
centers of intellectual activity--Ancient history--
Philanthropic and charitable institutions.
V. MARSEILLES, 94
Its Greek founders and early history--Superb view from the
sea--The Cannebière--The Prado and Chemin de la Corniche--
Château d'If and Monte-Cristo--Influence of the Greeks in
Marseilles--Ravages by plague and pestilence--Treasures of
the Palais des Arts--The Chapel of Nôtre Dame de la Garde--
The new Marseilles and its future.
VI. NICE, 124
The Queen of the Riviera--The Port of Limpia--Castle Hill--
Promenade des Anglais--The Carnival and Battle of Flowers--
Place Masséna, the center of business--Beauty of the
suburbs--The road to Monte Carlo--The quaintly picturesque
town of Villefranche--Aspects of Nice and its environs.
VII. THE RIVIERA, 145
In the days of the Doges--Origin of the name--The blue bay
of Cannes--Ste. Marguerite and St. Honorat--Historical
associations--The Rue L'Antibes--The rock of Monaco--"Nôtre
Dame de la Roulette"--From Monte Carlo to Mentone--San
Remo--A romantic railway.
VIII. GENOA, 160
Early history--Old fortifications--The rival of Venice--
Changes of twenty-five years--From the parapet of the
Corso--The lower town--The Genoese palazzi--Monument to
Christopher Columbus--The old Dogana--Memorials in the
Campo Santo--The Bay of Spezzia--The Isola Palmeria--Harbor
scenes.
IX. THE TUSCAN COAST, 192
Shelley's last months at Lerici--Story of his death--Carrara
and its marble quarries--Pisa--Its grand group of
ecclesiastical buildings--The cloisters of the Campo Santo--
Napoleon's life on Elba--Origin of the Etruscans--The ruins
of Tarquinii--Civita Vecchia, the old port of Rome--Ostia.
X. VENICE, 220
Its early days--The Grand Canal and its palaces--Piazza of
St. Mark--A Venetian funeral--The long line of islands--
Venetian glass--Torcello, the ancient Altinum--Its two
unique churches.
XI. ALEXANDRIA, 234
The bleak and barren shores of the Nile Delta--Peculiar
shape of the city--Strange and varied picture of Alexandrian
street life--The Place Mehemet Ali--Glorious panorama from
the Cairo citadel--Pompey's Pillar--The Battle of the Nile--
Discovery of the famous inscribed stone at Rosetta--Port
Said and the Suez Canal.
XII. MALTA, 267
"England's Eye in the Mediterranean"--Vast systems of
fortifications--Sentinels and martial music--The Strada
Reale of Valletta--Church of St. John--St. Elmo--The
Military Hospital, the "very glory of Malta"--Citta
Vecchia--Saint Paul and his voyages.
XIII. SICILY, 295
Scylla and Charybdis--Messina, the chief commercial center
of Sicily--The magnificent ruins of the Greek Theater at
Taormina--Omnipresence of Mt. Etna--Approach to Syracuse--
The famous Latomia del Paradiso--Girgenti, the City of
Temples--Railway route to Palermo--Mosaics--Cathedral and
Abbey of Monreale--Monte Pellegrino at the hour of sunset.
XIV. NAPLES, 325
The Bay of Naples--Vesuvius--Characteristic scenes of street
life--The _al fresco_ restaurants--Chapel of St. Januarius--
Virgil's Tomb--Capri, the Mecca of artists and lovers of the
picturesque--The Emperor Tiberius--Description of the Blue
Grotto--The coast-road from Castellamare to Sorrento--
Amalfi--Sorrento, "the village of flowers and the flower of
villages"--The Temples of Pæstum.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
CAPRI.--The Marina Grande _Frontispiece_
PAGE
GIBRALTAR.--View from the Old Mole 14
ALGIERS.--Government Square and the Street, La Marine 28
ALGIERS.--Interior of the Governor's Palace 36
MALAGA.--General View from Castle 52
BARCELONA.--View of Harbor 70
MARSEILLES.--Panorama of the Old Port 98
NICE.--Promenade des Anglais 132
THE RIVIERA.--San Remo 158
GENOA.--The Doria Palace--Garden and Doorway 172
THE TUSCAN COAST.--Pisa--Cathedral Square and Monuments 198
VENICE.--The Piazza of St. Mark 226
ALEXANDRIA.--General View of the City 240
ALEXANDRIA.--Scene on Canal 260
MALTA.--General View 274
SICILY.--View of Taormina and Mt. Etna 298
NAPLES.--Panorama from Virgil's Tomb 334
The Mediterranean
I
THE PILLARS OF HERCULES
Portals of the ancient world--Bay of Tangier at sunrise--Tarifa--The
Rock of Gibraltar--Wonders of its fortifications--Afternoon promenade
in the Alameda Gardens--Ascending the Rock--View from the highest
point--The Great Siege--Ceuta, the principal Spanish stronghold on the
Moorish coast--The rock of many names.
The "Pillars of Hercules!" The portals of the Ancient World! To how many a
traveller just beginning to tire of his week on the Atlantic, or but
slowly recovering, it may be, in his tranquil voyage along the coasts of
Portugal and Southern Spain, from the effects of thirty unquiet hours in
the Bay of Biscay, has the nearing view of this mighty landmark of history
brought a message of new life! That distant point ahead, at which the
narrowing waters of the Strait that bears him disappear entirely within
the clasp of the embracing shores, is for many such a traveller the
beginning of romance. He gazes upon it from the westward with some dim
reflection of that mysterious awe with which antiquity looked upon it from
the East. The progress of the ages has, in fact, transposed the center of
human interest and the human point of view. Now, as in the Homeric era,
the Pillars of Hercules form the gateway of a world of wonder; but for us
of to-day it is within and not without those portals that that world of
wonder lies. To the eye of modern poetry the Atlantic and Mediterranean
have changed places. In the waste of waters stretching westward from the
rock of Calpe and its sister headland, the Greek of the age of Homer found
his region of immemorial poetic legend and venerable religious myth, and
peopled it with the gods and heroes of his traditional creed. Here, on the
bosom of the wide-winding river Oceanus, lay the Islands of the
Blest--that abode of eternal beauty and calm, where "the life of mortals
is most easy," where "there is neither snow nor winter nor much rain, but
ocean is ever sending up the shrilly breezes of Zephyrus to refresh man."
But for us moderns who have explored this mighty "river Oceanus," this
unknown and mysterious Atlantic to its farthest recesses, the glamor of
its mystery has passed away for ever; and it is eastward and not westward,
through the "Pillars of Hercules," that we now set our sails in search of
the region of romance. It is to the basin of the Mediterranean--fringed
with storied cities and venerable ruins, with the crumbling sanctuaries of
a creed which has passed away, and the monuments of an art which is
imperishable--that man turns to-day. The genius of civilization has
journeyed far to the westward, and has passed through strange experiences;
it returns with new reverence and a deeper awe to that _enclave_ of
mid-Europe which contains its birthplace, and which is hallowed with the
memories of its glorious youth. The grand cliff-portal which we are
approaching is the entrance, the thoughtful traveller will always feel, to
a region eternally sacred in the history of man; to lands which gave birth
to immortal models of literature and unerring canons of philosophic truth;
to shrines and temples which guard the ashes of those "dead but sceptered
sovereigns" who "rule our spirits from their urns."
As our vessel steams onward through the rapidly narrowing Straits, the eye
falls upon a picturesque irregular cluster of buildings on the Spanish
shore, wherefrom juts forth a rocky tongue of land surmounted by a tower.
It is the Pharos of Tarifa, and in another half hour we are close enough
to distinguish the exact outlines of the ancient and famous city named of
Tarif Ibn Malek, the first Berber sheikh who landed in Spain, and itself,
it is said--though some etymologists look askance at the derivation--the
name-mother of a word which is little less terrible to the modern trader
than was this pirate's nest itself to his predecessor of old times. The
arms of Tarifa are a castle on waves, with a key at the window, and the
device is not unaptly symbolical of her mediæval history, when her
possessors played janitors of the Strait, and merrily levied
blackmail--the irregular _tariff_ of those days--upon any vessel which
desired to pass. The little town itself is picturesquely situated in the
deepest embrace of the curving Strait, and the view looking westward--with
the lighthouse rising sharp and sheer against the sky, from the jutting
cluster of rock and building about its base, while dimly to the left in
the farther distance lie the mountains of the African coast, descending
there so cunningly behind the curve that the two continents seem to touch
and connect the channel into a lake--is well worth attentive study. An
interesting spot, too, is Tarifa, as well as a picturesque--interesting at
least to all who are interested either in the earlier or the later
fortunes of post-Roman Europe. It played its part, as did most other
places, on this common battle-ground of Aryan and Semite, in the secular
struggle between European Christendom and the Mohammedan East. And again,
centuries later, it was heard of in the briefer but more catastrophic
struggle of the Napoleonic wars. From the day when Alonzo Perez de Guzman
threw his dagger down from its battlements in disdainful defiance of the
threat to murder his son, dragged bound before him beneath its walls by
traitors, it is a "far cry" to the day when Colonel Gough of the 87th (the
"Eagle-Catchers") beat off Marshal Victor's besieging army of 1,800
strong, and relieved General Campbell and his gallant little garrison; but
Tarifa has seen them both, and it is worth a visit not only for the sake
of the ride from it over the mountains to Algeciras and Gibraltar, but for
its historical associations also, and for its old-world charm.
We have taken it, as we propose also to take Tangier, a little out of its
turn; for the voyaging visitor to Gibraltar is not very likely to take
either of these two places on his way. It is more probable that he will
visit them, the one by land and the other by sea, from the Rock itself.
But Tangier in particular it is impossible to pass without a strong desire
to make its acquaintance straightway; so many are the attractions which
draw the traveller to this some-time appanage of the British Crown, this
African _pied à terre_, which but for the insensate feuds and factions of
the Restoration period might be England's to-day. There are few more
enchanting sights than that of the Bay of Tangier as it appears at
sunrise to the traveller whose steamer has dropped down the Straits in
the afternoon and evening hours of the previous day and cast anchor after
nightfall at the nearest point off shore to which a vessel of any draught
can approach. Nowhere in the world does a nook of such sweet tranquillity
receive, and for a season, quiet, the hurrying waters of so restless a
sea. Half a mile or so out towards the center of the Strait, a steamer
from Gibraltar has to plough its way through the surface currents which
speed continually from the Atlantic towards the Pillars of Hercules and
the Mediterranean beyond. Here, under the reddening daybreak, all is calm.
The blue waters of the bay, now softly flushing at the approach of
sunrise, break lazily in mimic waves and "tender curving lines of creamy
spray" upon the shining beach. To the right lies the city, spectral in the
dawn, save where the delicate pale ivory of some of its higher houses is
warming into faintest rose; while over all, over sea and shore and city,
is the immersing crystal atmosphere of Africa, in which every rock, every
ripple, every housetop, stands out as sharp and clear as the filigree work
of winter on a frosted pane.
Nothing in Tangier, it must be honestly admitted, will compare with the
approach to it by its incomparable bay. In another sense, too, there is
nothing here or elsewhere which exactly resembles this "approach," since
its last stage of all has to be performed alike for man and woman--unless
man is prepared to wade knee-deep in the clear blue water--on the back of
a sturdy Moor. Once landed, he will find that the picturesqueness of
Tangier, like that of most Eastern cities, diminishes rather than
increases on a nearer view. A walk through its main street yields nothing
particularly worthy of note, unless it be the minaret of the
Djama-el-Kebir, the principal mosque of the city. The point to which every
visitor to Tangier directs his steps, or has them directed for him, is the
Bab-el-Sok, the gate of the market place, where the scene to be witnessed
at early morning presents an unequaled picture of Oriental life. Crouching
camels with their loads of dates, chaffering traders, chattering women,
sly and servile looking Jews from the city, fierce-eyed, heavily armed
children of the desert, rough-coated horses, and the lank-sided mules,
withered crones squatting in groups by the wayside, tripping damsels
ogling over the _yashmak_ as they pass, and the whole enveloped in a
blinding, bewildering, choking cloud of such dust as only Africa, "_arida
nutrix_," can produce--such dust as would make the pulverulent particles
of the dryest of turnpikes in the hottest of summers, and under the most
parching of east winds, appear by comparison moist and cool, and no more
than pleasingly titillatory of the mouth and nostrils--let the reader
picture to himself such a scene with such accessories, and he will know
what spectacle awaits him at early morning at the Bab-el-Sok of Tangier.
But we must resume our journey eastward towards the famous "Rock." There
at last it is! There "dawns Gibraltar grand and gray," though Mr. Browning
strains poetic license very hard in making it visible even "in the dimmest
north-east distance," to a poet who was at that moment observing how
"sunset ran one glorious blood-red recking into Cadiz Bay." We, at any
rate, are far enough away from Cadiz before it dawns upon us in all its
Titanic majesty of outline; grand, of course, with the grandeur of Nature,
and yet with a certain strange air of human menace as of some piece of
Atlantean ordnance planted and pointed by the hand of man. This
"armamental" appearance of the Rock--a look visible, or at any rate
imaginable in it, long before we have approached it closely enough to
discern its actual fortifications, still less its artillery--is much
enhanced by the dead flatness of the land from which its western wall
arises sheer, and with which by consequence it seems to have no closer
physical connection than has a gun-carriage with the parade ground on
which it stands. As we draw nearer this effect increases in intensity. The
surrounding country seems to sink and recede around it, and the Rock
appears to tower ever higher and higher, and to survey the Strait and the
two continents, divided by it with a more and more formidable frown. As we
approach the port, however, this impression gives place to another, and
the Rock, losing somewhat of its "natural-fortress" air, begins to assume
that resemblance to a couchant lion which has been so often noticed in it.
Yet alas! for the so-called famous "leonine aspect" of the famous height,
or alas! at least for the capricious workings of the human imagination!
For while to the compiler of one well-reputed guidebook, the outlines of
Gibraltar seem "like those of a lion asleep, and whose head, somewhat
truncated, is turned towards Africa as if with a dreamy and steadfast deep
attention;" to another and later observer the lion appears to have "his
kingly head turned towards Spain, as if in defiance of his former master,
every feature having the character of leonine majesty and power!" The
truth is, of course, that the Rock assumes entirely different aspects,
according as it is looked at from different points of view. There is
certainly a point from which Gibraltar may be made, by the exercise of a
little of Polonius's imagination, to resemble some couchant animal with
its head turned towards Africa--though "a head somewhat truncated," is as
odd a phrase as a "body somewhat decapitated"--and contemplating that
continent with what we may fancy, if we choose, to be "dreamy and
steadfast attention." But the resemblance is, at best, but a slender one,
and a far-fetched. The really and strikingly leonine aspect of Gibraltar
is undoubtedly that which it presents to the observer as he is steaming
towards the Rock from the west, but has not yet come into full view of the
slope on which the town is situated. No one can possibly mistake the lion
then. His head is distinctly turned towards Spain, and what is more, he
has a foot stretched out towards the mainland, as though in token of his
mighty grasp upon the soil. Viewed, however, from the neutral ground, this
Protean cliff takes on a new shape altogether, and no one would suppose
that the lines of that sheer precipice, towering up into a jagged
pinnacle, could appear from any quarter to melt into the blunt and massive
curves which mark the head and shoulders of the King of Beasts.
At last, however, we are in the harbor, and are about to land. To land!
How little does that phrase convey to the inexperienced in sea travel, or
to those whose voyages have begun and ended in stepping from a
landing-stage on to a gangway, and from a gangway on to a deck, and
_vice-versâ_! And how much does it mean for him to whom it comes fraught
with recollections of steep descents, of heaving seas, of tossing
cock-boats, perhaps of dripping garments, certainly of swindling boatmen!
There are disembarkations in which you come in for them all; but not at
Gibraltar, at least under normal circumstances. The waters of the port are
placid, and from most of the many fine vessels that touch there you
descend by a ladder, of as agreeable an inclination as an ordinary flight
of stairs. All you have to fear is the insidious bilingual boatman, who,
unless you strictly covenant with him before entering his boat, will have
you at his mercy. It is true that he has a tariff, and that you might
imagine that the offense of exceeding it would be punished in a place like
Gibraltar by immediate court-martial and execution; but the traveller
should not rely upon this. There is a deplorable relaxation of the bonds
of discipline all over the world. Moreover, it is wise to agree with the
boatmen for a certain fixed sum, as a salutary check upon undue
liberality. Most steamers anchor at a considerable distance from the
shore, and on a hot day one might be tempted by false sentiment to give
the boatman an excessive fee.
Your hosts at Gibraltar--"spoiling" as they always are for the sight of
new civilian faces--show themselves determined from the first to make you
at home. Private Thomas Atkins on sentry duty grins broad welcome to you
from the Mole. The official to whom you have to give account of yourself
and your belongings greets you with a pleasant smile, and, while your
French or Spanish fellow-traveller is strictly interrogated as to his
identity, profession, purpose of visit, &c., your English party is passed
easily and promptly in, as men "at home" upon the soil which they are
treading. Fortunate is it, if a little bewildering, for the visitor to
arrive at midday, for before he has made his way from the landing-place to
his hotel he will have seen a sight which has few if any parallels in the
world. Gibraltar has its narrow, quiet, sleepy alleys as have all Southern
towns; and any one who confined himself to strolling through and along
these, and avoiding the main thoroughfare, might never discover the
strangely cosmopolitan character of the place. He must walk up Waterport
Street at midday in order to see what Gibraltar really is--a conflux of
nations, a mart of races, an Exchange for all the multitudinous varieties
of the human product. Europe, Asia, and Africa meet and jostle in this
singular highway. Tall, stately, slow-pacing Moors from the north-west
coast; white-turbaned Turks from the eastern gate of the Mediterranean;
thick-lipped, and woolly-headed negroids from the African interior;
quick-eyed, gesticulating Levantine Greeks; gabardined Jews, and
black-wimpled Jewesses; Spanish smugglers, and Spanish sailors;
"rock-scorpions," and red-coated English soldiers--all these compose,
without completing, the motley moving crowd that throngs the main street
of Gibraltar in the forenoon, and gathers densest of all in the market
near Commercial Square.
It is hardly then as a fortress, but rather as a great entrepôt of
traffic, that Gibraltar first presents itself to the newly-landed visitor.
He is now too close beneath its frowning batteries and dominating walls of
rock to feel their strength and menace so impressive as at a distance; and
the flowing tide of many-colored life around him overpowers the senses and
the imagination alike. He has to seek the outskirts of the town on either
side in order to get the great Rock again, either physically or morally,
into proper focus. And even before he sets out to try its height and
steepness by the ancient, if unscientific, process of climbing it--nay,
before he even proceeds to explore under proper guidance its mighty
elements of military strength--he will discover perhaps that sternness is
not its only feature. Let him stroll round in the direction of the
race-course to the north of the Rock, and across the parade-ground, which
lies between the town and the larger area on which the reviews and
field-day evolutions take place, and he will not complain of Gibraltar as
wanting in the picturesque. The bold cliff, beneath which stands a Spanish
café, descends in broken and irregular, but striking, lines to the plain,
and it is fringed luxuriantly from stair to stair with the vegetation of
the South. Marching and counter-marching under the shadow of this lofty
wall, the soldiers show from a little distance like the tin toys of the
nursery, and one knows not whether to think most of the physical
insignificance of man beside the brute bulk of Nature, or of the moral--or
immoral--power which has enabled him to press into his service even the
vast Rock which stands there beetling and lowering over him, and to turn
the blind giant into a sort of Titanic man-at-arms.
Such reflections as these, however, would probably whet a visitor's desire
to explore the fortifications without delay; and the time for that is not
yet. The town and its buildings have first to be inspected; the life of
the place, both in its military and--such as there is of it--its civil
aspect, must be studied; though this, truth to tell, will not engage even
the minutest observer very long. Gibraltar is not famous for its shops, or
remarkable, indeed, as a place to buy anything, except tobacco, which, as
the Spanish Exchequer knows to its cost (and the Spanish Customs'
officials on the frontier too, it is to be feared, their advantage), is
both cheap and good. Business, however, of all descriptions is fairly
active, as might be expected, when we recollect that the town is pretty
populous for its size, and numbers some 20,000 inhabitants, in addition to
its garrison of from 5,000 to 6,000 men. With all its civil activity,
however, the visitor is scarcely likely to forget--for any length of
time--that he is in a "place of arms." Not to speak of the shocks
communicated to his unaccustomed nerves by morning and evening gun-fire;
not to speak of the thrilling fanfare of the bugles, executed as only the
bugler of a crack English regiment can execute it, and echoed and
re-echoed to and fro, from face to face of the Rock, there is an
indefinable air of stern order, of rigid discipline, of authority whose
word is law, pervading everything. As the day wears on toward the evening
this aspect of things becomes more and more unmistakable; and in the
neighborhood of the gates, towards the hour of gun-fire, you may see
residents hastening in, and non-residents quickening the steps of their
departure, lest the boom of the fatal cannon-clock should confine or
exclude them for the night. After the closing of the gates it is still
permitted for a few hours to perambulate the streets; but at midnight this
privilege also ceases, and no one is allowed out of doors without a
night-pass. On the 31st of December a little extra indulgence is allowed.
One of the military bands will perhaps parade the main thoroughfare
discoursing the sweet strains of "Auld Lang Syne," and the civil
population are allowed to "see the old year out and the new year in." But
a timid and respectful cheer is their sole contribution to the ceremony,
and at about 12.15 they are marched off again to bed: such and so vigilant
are the precautions against treachery within the walls, or surprise from
without. In Gibraltar, undoubtedly, you experience something of the
sensations of men who are living in a state of siege, or of those Knights
of Branksome who ate and drank in armor, and lay down to rest with
corslet laced, and with the buckler for a pillow.
The lions of the town itself, as distinguished from the wonders of its
fortifications, are few in number. The Cathedral, the Garrison Library,
Government House, the Alameda Gardens, the drive to Europa Point exhaust
the list; and there is but one of these which is likely to invite--unless
for some special purpose or other--a repetition of the visit. In the
Alameda, however, a visitor may spend many a pleasant hour, and--if the
peace and beauty of a hillside garden, with the charms of subtropical
vegetation in abundance near at hand, and noble views of coast and sea in
the distance allure him--he assuredly will. Gibraltar is immensely proud
of its promenade, and it has good reason to be so. From the point of view
of Nature and of Art the Alameda is an equal success. General Don, who
planned and laid it out some three-quarters of a century ago,
unquestionably earned a title to the same sort of tribute as was bestowed
upon a famous military predecessor, Marshal Wade. Anyone who had "seen"
the Alameda "before it was made," might well have "lifted up his hands and
blessed" the gallant officer who had converted "the Red Sands," as the
arid desert once occupying this spot was called, into the paradise of
geranium-trees which has taken its place. Its monuments to Elliot and
Wellington are not ideal: the mysterious curse pronounced upon English
statuary appears to follow it even beyond seas; but the execution of the
effigies of these national heroes may, perhaps, be forgotten in the
interest attaching to their subjects. The residents at any rate, whether
civil or military, are inured to these efforts of the sculptor's art, and
have long since ceased to repine. And the afternoon promenade in these
gardens--with the English officers and their wives and daughters, English
nursemaids and their charges, tourists of both sexes and all ages, and the
whole surrounded by a polyglot and polychromatic crowd of Oriental
listeners to the military band--is a sight well worth seeing and not
readily to be forgotten.
But we must pursue our tour round the peninsula of the Rock; and leaving
the new Mole on our right, and farther on the little land-locked basin of
Rosia Bay, we pass the height of Buena Vista, crowned with its barracks,
and so on to the apex of the promontory, Europa Point. Here are more
barracks and, here on Europa Flats, another open and level space for
recreation and military exercises beneath the cliff wall. Doubling the
point, and returning for a short distance along the eastern side of the
promontory, we come to the Governor's Cottage, a cool summer retreat
nestling close to the Rock, and virtually marking the limits of our
exploration. For a little way beyond this the cliff rises inaccessible,
the road ends, and we must retrace our steps. So far as walking or driving
along the flat is concerned, the visitor who has reached the point may
allege, with a certain kind of superficial accuracy, that he has "done
Gibraltar." No wonder that the seasoned globe-trotter from across the
Atlantic thinks nothing of taking Calpe in his stride.
To those, however, who visit Gibraltar in a historic spirit, it is not to
be "done" by any means so speedily as this. Indeed, it would be more
correct to say that the work of a visitor of this order is hardly yet
begun. For he will have come to Gibraltar not mainly to stroll on a sunny
promenade, or to enjoy a shady drive round the seaward slopes of a Spanish
headland, or even to feast his eyes on the glow of Southern color and
the picturesque varieties of Southern life; but to inspect a great
world-fortress, reared almost impregnable by the hand of Nature, and
raised into absolute impregnability by the art of man; a spot made
memorable from the very dawn of the modern period by the rivalries of
nations, and famous for all time by one of the most heroic exploits
recorded in the annals of the human race. To such an one, we say, the name
of Gibraltar stands before and beyond everything for the Rock of the Great
Siege; and he can no more think of it in the light of a Mediterranean
watering-place, with, a romantic, if somewhat limited, sea-front, than he
can think of the farmhouse of La Haye as an "interesting Flemish
homestead," or the Chateau of Hougoumont as a Belgian gentleman's
"eligible country house."
[Illustration]
For him the tour of the renowned fortifications will be the great event of
his visit. Having furnished himself with the necessary authorization from
the proper military authorities (for he will be reminded at every turn of
the strict martial discipline under which he lives), he will proceed to
ascend the Rock, making his first halt at a building which in all
probability he will often before this have gazed upon and wondered at from
below. This is the Moorish Castle, the first object to catch the eye of
the newcomer as he steps ashore at the Mole, and looks up at the houses
that clamber up the western slope of the Rock. Their ascending tiers are
dominated by this battlemented pile, and it is from the level on which it
stands that one enters the famous galleries of Gibraltar. The castle is
one of the oldest Moorish buildings in Spain, the Arabic legend over the
south gate recording it to have been built in 725 by Abu-Abul-Hajez. Its
principal tower, the Torre del Homenaje, is riddled with shot marks, the
scars left behind it by the ever-memorable siege. The galleries, which are
tunneled in tiers along the north front of the Rock, are from two to three
miles in extent. At one extremity they widen out into the spacious crypt
known as the Hall of St. George, in which Nelson was feasted. No arches
support these galleries; they are simply hewn from the solid rock, and
pierced every dozen yards or so by port-holes, through each of which the
black muzzle of a gun looks forth upon the Spanish mainland. They front
the north, these grim watchdogs, and seeing that the plain lies hundreds
of feet beneath them, and with that altitude of sheer rock face between
them and it, they may perhaps be admitted to represent what a witty
Frenchman has called _le luxe et la coquetterie d' imprenable_, or as we
might put it, a "refinement on the impregnable." Artillery in position
implies the possibility of regular siege operations, followed perhaps by
an assault from the quarter which the guns command; but though the Spanish
threw up elaborate works on the neutral ground in the second year of the
great siege, neither then nor at any other time has an assault on the Rock
from its northern side been contemplated. Yet it has once been "surprised"
from its eastern side, which looks almost equally inaccessible; and
farther on in his tour of exploration, the visitor will come upon traces
of that unprecedented and unimitated exploit. After having duly inspected
the galleries, he will ascend to the Signal Tower, known in Spanish days
as El Hacho, or the Torch, the spot at which beacon fires were wont on
occasion to be kindled. It is not quite the highest point of the Rock, but
the view from it is one of the most imposing in the world. To the north
lie the mountains of Ronda, and to the far east the Sierra of the Snows
that looks down on Granada, gleams pale and spectral on the horizon. Far
beneath you lie town and bay, the batteries with their tiny ordnance, and
the harbor with its plaything ships; while farther onward, in the same
line of vision, the African "Pillar of Hercules," Ceuta, looks down upon
the sunlit waters of the Strait.
A little farther on is the true highest point of the Rock, 1,430 feet; and
yet a little farther, after a descent of a few feet, we come upon the
tower known as O'Hara's Folly, from which also the view is magnificent,
and which marks the southernmost point of the ridge. It was built by an
officer of that name as a watch tower, from which to observe the movements
of the Spanish fleet at Cadiz, which, even across the cape as the crow
flies, is distant some fifty or sixty miles. The extent, however, of the
outlook which it actually commanded has probably never been tested,
certainly not with modern optical appliances, as it was struck by
lightning soon after its completion. Retracing his steps to the northern
end of the height, the visitor historically interested in Gibraltar will
do well to survey the scene from here once more before descending to
inspect the fortifications of the coast line. Far beneath him, looking
landward, lies the flat sandy part of the isthmus, cut just where its neck
begins to widen by the British lines. Beyond these, again, extends the
zone some half mile in breadth of the neutral ground; while yet farther
inland, the eye lights upon a broken and irregular line of earthworks,
marking the limit, politically speaking, of Spanish soil. These are the
most notable, perhaps the only surviving, relic of the great siege. In the
third year of that desperate leaguer--it was in 1781--the Spaniards
having tried in vain, since June, 1779, to starve out the garrison,
resorted to the idea of bombarding the town into surrender, and threw up
across the neutral ground the great earthworks, of which only these ruins
remain. They had reason, indeed, to resort to extraordinary efforts. Twice
within these twenty-four months had they reduced the town to the most
dreadful straits of hunger, and twice had it been relieved by English
fleets. In January, 1780, when Rodney appeared in the Straits with his
priceless freight of food, the inhabitants were feeding on thistles and
wild onions; the hind quarter of an Algerian sheep was selling for seven
pounds ten, and an English milch cow for fifty guineas. In the spring of
1781, when Admiral Darby relieved them for the second time, the price of
"bad ship's biscuits full of vermin"--says Captain John Drinkwater of the
72nd, an actor in the scenes which he has recorded--was a shilling a
pound; "old dried peas, a shilling and fourpence; salt, half dirt, the
sweepings of ships' bottoms, and storehouses, eightpence; and English
farthing candles, sixpence apiece." These terrible privations having
failed to break the indomitable spirit of the besieged, bombardment had,
before the construction of these lines, been resorted to. Enormous
batteries, mounting 170 guns and 80 mortars, had been planted along the
shore, and had played upon the town, without interruption, for six weeks.
Houses were shattered and set on fire, homeless and half-starved families
were driven for shelter to the southern end of the promontory, where again
they were harried by Spanish ships sailing round Europa Point and firing
indiscriminately on shore. The troops, shelled out of their quarters, were
living in tents on the hillside, save when these also were swept away by
the furious rainstorms of that region. And it was to put, as was hoped,
the finishing stroke to this process of torture, that the great
fortifications which have been spoken of were in course of construction
all through the spring and summer of 1781 on the neutral ground. General
Elliot--that tough old Spartan warrior, whose food was vegetables and
water, and four hours his maximum of continuous sleep, and the contagion
of whose noble example could alone perhaps have given heart enough even to
this sturdy garrison--watched the progress of the works with anxiety, and
had made up his mind before the winter came that they must be assaulted.
Accordingly, at three A. M. on the morning of November 27, 1781, he
sallied forth with a picked band of two thousand men--a pair of regiments
who had fought by his side at Minden two-and-twenty years before--and
having traversed the three-quarters of a mile of intervening country in
swift silence, fell upon the Spanish works. The alarm had been given, but
only just before the assailants reached the object of their attack; and
the affair was practically a surprise. The gunners, demoralized and
panic-stricken, were bayoneted at their posts, the guns were spiked, and
the batteries themselves set on fire with blazing faggots prepared for the
purpose. In an hour the flames had gained such strength as to be
inextinguishable, and General Elliot drew off his forces and retreated to
the town, the last sound to greet their ears as they re-entered the gates
being the roar of the explosion of the enemy's magazines. For four days
the camp continued to burn, and when the fire had exhausted itself for
want of materials, the work of laborious months lay in ruins, and the
results of a vast military outlay were scattered to the winds. It was the
last serious attempt made against the garrison by the Spaniards from the
landward side. The fiercest and most furious struggle of the long siege
was to take place on the shore and waters to the west.
And so after all it is to the "line-wall"--to that formidable bulwark of
masonry and gun-metal which fringes the town of Gibraltar from the Old
Mole to Rosia Bay--that one returns as to the chief attraction from the
historical point of view, of the mighty fortress. For two full miles it
runs, zigzagging along the indented coast, and broken here and there by
water-gate or bastion, famous in military story. Here, as we move
southward from the Old Mole, is the King's Bastion, the most renowned of
all. Next comes Ragged Staff Stairs, so named from the heraldic insignia
of Charles V.; and farther on is Jumper's Battery, situated at what is
held to be the weakest part of the Rock, and which has certainly proved
itself to be so on one ever memorable occasion. For it was at the point
where Jumper's Battery now stands that the first English landing-party set
foot on shore; it was at this point, it may be said, that Gibraltar was
carried. The fortunes of nomenclature are very capricious, and the
name of Jumper--unless, indeed, it were specially selected for its
appropriateness--has hardly a better right to perpetuation in this fashion
than the name of Hicks. For these were the names of the two gallant
officers who were foremost in their pinnaces in the race for the South
Mole, which at that time occupied the spot where the landing was effected;
and we are not aware that history records which was the actual winner. It
was on the 23rd of July, 1704, as all the world knows, that these two
gallant seamen and their boats' crews made their historic leap on shore;
and after all, the accident which had preserved the name of one of them is
not more of what is familiarly called a "fluke" than the project of the
capture itself, and the retention of the great fortress when captured. It
is almost comic to think that when Sir George Rooke sailed from England,
on the voyage from which he returned, figuratively speaking, with the key
of the Mediterranean in his pocket, he had no more notion of attacking
Gibraltar than of discovering the North-West Passage. He simply went to
land England's candidate for the Spanish throne, "King Charles III.," at
Lisbon; which service performed, he received orders from the English
Government to sail to the relief of Nice and Villa Franca, which were
supposed to be in danger from the French, while at the same time he was
pressed by Charles to "look round" at Barcelona, where the people, their
aspirant-sovereign thought, were ready to rise in his favor. Rooke
executed both commissions. That is to say, he ascertained that there was
nothing for him to do in either place--that Barcelona would not rise, and
that Nice was in no danger of falling; and the admiral accordingly dropped
down the Mediterranean towards the Straits--where he was joined by Sir
Cloudesley Shovel with another squadron--with the view of intercepting the
Brest Fleet of France, which he had heard was about to attempt a junction
with that of Toulon. The Brest Fleet, however, he found had already given
him the slip, and thus it came about that on the 17th of July these two
energetic naval officers found themselves about seven leagues to the east
of Tetuan with nothing to do. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the
attack on Gibraltar was decreed as the distraction of an intolerable
ennui. The stronghold was known to be weakly garrisoned, though, for that
time, strongly armed; it turned out afterwards that it had only a hundred
and fifty gunners to a hundred guns, and it was thought possible to carry
the place by a _coup-de-main_. On the 21st the whole fleet came to anchor
in Gibraltar Bay. Two thousand men under the Prince of Hesse were landed
on what is now the neutral ground, and cut off all communication with the
mainland of Spain. On the 23rd Rear-Admirals Vanderdussen and Byng (the
father of a less fortunate seaman) opened fire upon the batteries, and
after five or six hours' bombardment silenced them, and Captain Whittaker
was thereupon ordered to take all the boats, filled with seamen and
marines, and possess himself of the South Mole Head. Captains Jumper and
Hicks were, as has been said, in the foremost pinnaces, and were the first
to land. A mine exploded under their feet, killing two officers and a
hundred men, but Jumper and Hicks pressed on with their stout followers,
and assaulted and carried a redoubt which lay between the Mole and the
town. Whereupon the Spanish Governor capitulated, the gates on the side of
the isthmus were thrown open to the Prince of Hesse and his troops, and
Gibraltar was theirs. Or rather it was not theirs, except by the title of
the "man in possession." It was the property of his Highness the Archduke
Charles, styled his Majesty King Charles III. of Spain, and had he
succeeded in making good that title in arms, England should, of course,
have had to hand over to him the strongest place in his dominions, at the
end of the war. But she profited by the failure of her protégé. The war of
the Spanish Succession ended in the recognition of Philip V.; and almost
against the will of the nation--for George I. was ready enough to give it
up, and the popular English view of the matter was that it was "a barren
rock, an insignificant fort, and a useless charge"--Gibraltar remained on
her hands.
Undoubtedly, the King's Bastion is the center of historic military
interest in Gibraltar, but the line-wall should be followed along its
impregnable front to complete one's conception of the sea defenses of the
great fortress. A little farther on is Government House, the quondam
convent, which now forms the official residence of the Governor; and
farther still the landing-place, known as Ragged Staff Stairs. Then
Jumper's Bastion, already mentioned; and then the line of fortification,
running outwards with the coast line towards the New Mole and
landing-place, returns upon itself, and rounding Rosia Bay trends again
southward towards Buena Vista Point. A ring of steel indeed--a coat of
mail on the giant's frame, impenetrable to the projectiles of the most
terrible of the modern Titans of the seas. The casemates for the artillery
are absolutely bomb-proof, the walls of such thickness as to resist the
impact of shots weighing hundreds of pounds, while the mighty arches
overhead are constructed to defy the explosion of the heaviest shells. As
to its offensive armament, the line-wall bristles with guns of the largest
caliber, some mounted on the parapet above, others on the casemates nearer
the sea-level, whence their shot could be discharged with the deadliest
effect at an attacking ship.
He who visits Gibraltar is pretty sure, at least if time permits, to visit
Algeciras and San Roque, while from farther afield still he will be
tempted by Estepona. The first of these places he will be in a hurry,
indeed, if he misses; not that the place itself is very remarkable, as
that it stands so prominently in evidence on the other side of the bay as
almost to challenge a visit. Add to this the natural curiosity of a
visitor to pass over into Spanish territory and to survey Gibraltar from
the landward side, and it will not be surprising that the four-mile trip
across the bay is pretty generally made. On the whole it repays; for
though Algeciras is modern and uninteresting enough, its environs are
picturesque, and the artist will be able to sketch the great rock-fortress
from an entirely new point, and in not the least striking of its aspects.
And now, before passing once for all through the storied portal of the
Mediterranean, it remains to bestow at least a passing glance upon the
other column which guards the entrance. Over against us, as we stand on
Europa Point and look seaward, looms, some ten or a dozen miles away, the
Punta de Africa, the African Pillar of Hercules, the headland behind which
lies Ceuta, the principal Spanish stronghold on the Moorish coast. Of a
truth, one's first thought is that the great doorway of the inland sea has
monstrously unequal jambs. Except that the Punta de Africa is exactly
opposite the Rock of Gibraltar, and that it is the last eminence on the
southern side of the Straits--the point at which the African coast turns
suddenly due southward, and all is open sea--it would have been little
likely to have caught the eye of an explorer, or to have forced itself
upon the notice of the geographer. Such as it is, however, it must stand
for the African Pillar of Hercules, unless that demi-god is to content
himself with only one. It is not imposing to approach as we make our way
directly across the Straits from Gibraltar, or down and along them from
Algeciras towards it: a smooth, rounded hill, surmounted by a fort with
the Spanish flag floating above it, and walled on the sea side, so little
can its defenders trust to the very slight natural difficulties offered
even by its most difficult approach. Such is Ceuta in the distance, and it
is little, if at all, more impressive on a closer inspection. Its name is
said to come from Sebta, a corruption of Septem, and to have been given it
because of the seven hills on which it is built. Probably the seven hills
would be difficult to find and count, or with a more liberal
interpretation of the word, it might very likely be as easy to find
fourteen.
Ceuta, like almost every other town or citadel on this battle-ground of
Europe and Africa, has played its part in the secular struggle between
Christendom and Islam. It is more than four centuries and a half since it
was first wrested from the Moors by King John of Portugal, and in the
hands of that State it remained for another two hundred years, when in
1640, it was annexed to the Crown of Castille. King John's acquisition of
the place, however, was unfortunate for his family. He returned home,
leaving the princes of Portugal in command of his new possession; which,
after the repulse of an attempt on the part of the Moors to recapture it,
he proceeded to strengthen with new fortifications and an increased
garrison. Dying in 1428, he was succeeded by his eldest son, Edward, who
undertook an expedition against Tangier, which turned out so unluckily
that the Portuguese had to buy their retreat from Africa by a promise to
restore Ceuta, the king's son, Don Ferdinand, being left in the hands of
the Moors as a hostage for its delivery. In spite of this, however, the
King and Council refused on their return home to carry out their
undertaking; and though preparations were made for recovering the
unfortunate hostage, the death of Edward prevented the project from being
carried out, and Prince Ferdinand remained a prisoner for several years.
Ceuta was never surrendered, and passing, as has been said, in the
seventeenth century from the possession of Portugal into that of Spain, it
now forms one of the four or five vantage-points held by Spain on the
coast of Africa and in its vicinity. Surveyed from the neighboring
heights, the citadel, with the town stretching away along the neck of land
at its foot, looks like anything but a powerful stronghold, and against
any less effete and decaying race than the Moors who surround it, it might
not possibly prove very easy to defend. Its garrison, however, is strong,
whatever its forts may be, and as a basis of military operations, it
proved to be of some value to Spain in her expedition against Morocco
thirty years ago. In times of peace it is used by the Spaniards as a
convict station.
The internal attractions of Ceuta to a visitor are not considerable. There
are Roman remains in the neighborhood of the citadel, and the walls of the
town, with the massive archways of its gates, are well worthy of remark.
Its main feature of interest, however, is, and always will be, that rock
of many names which it thrusts forth into the Straits, to form, with its
brother column across the water, the gateway between the Eastern and the
Western World. We have already looked upon it in the distance from El
Hacho, the signal tower on the summit of the Rock of Gibraltar. Abyla,
"the mountain of God," it was styled by the Phoenicians; Gibel Mo-osa, the
hill of Musa, was its name among the Moors; it is the Cabo de Bullones of
the Spaniard, and the Apes' Hill of the Englishman. It may be well seen,
though dwarfed a little by proximity, from its neighboring waters; a
curious sight, if only for its strange contrast with the European Pillar
that we have left behind. It is shaped like a miniature Peak of Teneriffe,
with a pointed apex sloping away on either side down high-shouldered
ridges towards its companion hills, and presenting a lined and furrowed
face to the sea. It is its situation, as has been noted already, and not
its conformation, which procured it its ancient name. But however earned,
its mythical title, with all the halo of poetry and romance that the
immortal myths of Hellas have shed around every spot which they have
reached, remains to it for ever. And here we take our farewell look of the
Pillars of Hercules to right and left, and borne onwards amidstream by the
rushing current of the Straits, we pass from the modern into the ancient
world.
II
ALGIERS
"A Pearl set in Emeralds"--Two distinct towns, one ancient, one
modern--The Great Mosque--A Mohammedan religious festival--Oriental
life in perfection--The road to Mustapha Supérieur--A true Moorish
villa described--Women praying to a sacred tree--Excessive rainfall.
"Algiers," says the Arab poet, with genuine Oriental love of precious
stones in literature, "is a pearl set in emeralds." And even in these
degenerate days of Frank supremacy in Islam, the old Moorish town still
gleams white in the sun against a deep background of green hillside, a
true pearl among emeralds. For it is a great mistake to imagine North
Africa, as untravelled folk suppose, a dry and desert country of arid
rocky mountains. The whole strip of laughing coast which has the Atlas for
its backbone may rank, on the contrary, as about the dampest, greenest,
and most luxuriant region of the Mediterranean system. The home of the
Barbary corsairs is a land of high mountains, deep glens, great gorges; a
land of vast pine forests and thick, verdant undergrowth. A thousand rills
tumble headlong down its rich ravines; a thousand rivers flow fast through
its fertile valleys. For wild flowers Algeria is probably unequaled in the
whole world; its general aspect in many ways recalls on a smaller scale
the less snow-clad parts of eastern Switzerland.
[Illustration]
When you approach the old pirate-nest from the sea, the first glimpse of
the African coast that greets your expectant eye is a long, serrated chain
of great sun-smitten mountains away inland and southward. As the steamer
nears the land, you begin, after a while, to distinguish the snowy ridge
of the glorious Djurjura, which is the Bernese Oberland of Algeria, a huge
block of rearing peaks, their summits thick-covered by the virgin snow
that feeds in spring a score of leaping torrents. By-and-by, with still
nearer approach, a wide bay discloses itself, and a little range of green
hills in the foreground detaches itself by degrees from the darker mass of
the Atlas looming large in the distance behind. This little range is the
Sahel, an outlier just separated from the main chain in the rear by the
once marshy plain of the Metidja, now converted by drainage and scientific
agriculture into the most fertile lowland region of all North Africa.
Presently, on the seaward slopes of the Sahel, a white town bursts upon
the eye, a white town so very white, so close, so thick-set, that at first
sight you would think it carved entire, in tier after tier, from a solid
block of marble. No street or lane or house or public building of any sort
stands visible from the rest at a little distance; just a group of white
steps, you would say, cut out by giant hands from the solid hillside. The
city of the Deys looks almost like a chalk-pit on the slope of an English
down; only a chalk-pit in relief, built out, not hewn inwards.
As you enter the harbor the strange picture resolves itself bit by bit
with charming effect into its component elements. White houses rise up
steep, one above the other, in endless tiers and rows, upon a very abrupt
acclivity. Most of them are Moorish in style, square, flat-roofed boxes;
all are whitewashed without, and smiling like pretty girls that show their
pearly teeth in the full southern sunshine. From without they have the
aspect of a single solid block of stone; you would fancy it was impossible
to insert a pin's head between them. From within, to him that enters,
sundry narrow and tortuous alleys discover themselves here and there on
close inspection; but they are too involved to produce much effect as of
streets or rows on the general _coup d'oeil_ from the water.
Land at the quay, and you find at once Algiers consists of two distinct
towns: one ancient, one modern; one Oriental, one Western. Now and again
these intersect, but for the most part they keep themselves severely
separate.
The lower town has been completely transformed within half a century by
its French masters. What it has gained in civilization it has lost in
picturesqueness. A spacious port has been constructed, with massive mole
and huge arcaded breakwater. Inside, vast archways support a magnificent
line of very modern quays, bordered by warehouses on a scale that would do
honor to Marseilles or to Liverpool. Broad streets run through the length
and breadth of this transformed Algiers, streets of stately shops where
ladies can buy all the fripperies and fineries of Parisian dressmakers.
Yet even here the traveller finds himself already in many ways _en plein
Orient_. The general look of the new town itself is far more Eastern than
that of modernized Alexandria since the days of the bombardment. Arabs,
Moors and Kabyles crowd the streets and market-places; muffled women in
loose white robes, covered up to the eyes, flit noiselessly with slippered
feet over the new-flagged pavement; turbaned Jews, who might have stepped
straight out of the "Arabian Nights," chaffer for centimes at the
shop-doors with hooded mountain Berbers. All is strange and incongruous;
all is Paris and Bagdad shaking hands as if on the Devonshire hillsides.
Nor are even Oriental buildings of great architectural pretensions wanting
to this newer French city. The conquerors, in reconstructing Algiers on
the Parisian model, have at least forborne to Haussmannise in every
instance the old mosques and palaces. The principal square, a broad place
lined with palm-trees, is enlivened and made picturesque by the white
round dome and striking minarets of the Mosquée de la Pêcherie. Hard by
stands the Cathedral, a religious building of Mussulman origin, half
Christianized externally by a tower at each end, but enclosing within
doors its old Mohammedan _mimbar_ and many curious remains of quaint
Moorish decoration. The Archbishopric at its side is a Moorish palace of
severe beauty and grandeur; the museum of Græco-Roman antiques is oddly
installed in the exquisite home raised for himself by Mustapha Pasha. The
Great Mosque, in the Rue Bab-el-Oued, remains to us unspoiled as the
finest architectural monument of the early Mohammedan world. That glorious
pile was built by the very first Arab conquerors of North Africa, the
companions of the Prophet, and its exquisite horse-shoe arches of pure
white marble are unsurpassed in the Moslem world for their quaintness,
their oddity, and their originality.
The interior of this mosque is, to my mind, far more impressive than
anything to be seen even in Cairo itself, so vast it is, so imposing, so
grand, so gloomy. The entire body of the building is occupied throughout
by successive arcades, supported in long rows by plain, square pillars.
Decoration there is none; the mosque depends for effect entirely on its
architectural features and its noble proportions. But the long perspective
of these endless aisles, opening out to right and left perpetually as you
proceed, strikes the imagination of the beholder with a solemn sense of
vastness and mystery. As you pick your way, shoeless, among the loose mats
on the floor, through those empty long corridors, between those
buttress-like pillars, the soul shrinks within you, awe-struck. The very
absence of images or shrines, the simplicity and severity, gives one the
true Semitic religious thrill. No gauds or gewgaws here. You feel at once
you are in the unseen presence of the Infinite and the Incomprehensible.
The very first time I went into the Great Mosque happened, by good luck,
to be the day of a Mohammedan religious festival. Rows and rows of Arabs
in white robes filled up the interspaces of the columns, and rose and fell
with one accord at certain points of the service. From the dim depths by
the niche that looks towards Mecca a voice of some unseen ministrant
droned slowly forth loud Arabic prayers or long verses from the Koran. At
some invisible signal, now and again, the vast throng of worshippers, all
ranged in straight lines at even distances between the endless pillars,
prostrated themselves automatically on their faces before Allah, and
wailed aloud as if in conscious confession of their own utter
unworthiness. The effect was extraordinary, electrical, contagious. No
religious service I have ever seen elsewhere seemed to me to possess such
a profundity of earnest humiliation, as of man before the actual presence
of his Maker. It appeared to one like a chapter of Nehemiah come true
again in our epoch. We few intrusive Westerns, standing awe-struck by the
door, slunk away, all abashed, from this scene of deep abasement. We had
no right to thrust ourselves upon the devotions of these intense
Orientals. We felt ourselves out of place. We had put off our shoes, for
the place we stood upon was holy ground. But we slunk back to the porch,
and put them on again in silence. Outside, we emerged upon the nineteenth
century and the world. Yet even so, we had walked some way down the Place
de la Régence, among the chattering negro pedlers, before one of us dared
to exchange a single word with the other.
If the new town of Algiers is interesting, however, the old town is
unique, indescribable, incomprehensible. No map could reproduce it; no
clue could unravel it. It climbs and clambers by tortuous lanes and steep
staircases up the sheer side of a high hill to the old fortress of the
Deys that crowns the summit. Not one gleam of sunshine ever penetrates
down those narrow slits between the houses, where two people can just pass
abreast, brushing their elbows against the walls, and treading with their
feet in the poached filth of the gutter. The dirt that chokes the sides is
to the dirt of Italy as the dirt of Italy is to the dirt of Whitechapel.
And yet so quaint, so picturesque, so interesting is it all, that even
delicate ladies, with the fear of typhoid fever for ever before their
eyes, cannot refuse themselves the tremulous joy of visiting it and
exploring it over and over again; nay, more, of standing to bargain for
old brass-work or Algerian embroidery with keen Arab shopkeepers in its
sunless labyrinths. Except the Mooskee at Cairo, indeed, I know no place
yet left where you can see Oriental life in perfection as well as the old
town of Algiers. For are there not tramways nowadays even in the streets
of Damascus? Has not a railway station penetrated the charmed heart of
Stamboul? The Frank has done his worst for the lower town of his own
building, but the upper town still remains as picturesque, as mysterious,
and as insanitary as ever. No Pasteur could clean out those Augean
stables.
In those malodorous little alleys, where every prospect pleases and every
scent is vile, nobody really walks; veiled figures glide softly as if to
inaudible music; ladies, muffled up to their eyes, use those solitary
features with great effect upon the casual passer-by; old Moors, in
stately robes, emerge with stealthy tread from half-unseen doorways; boys
clad in a single shirt sit and play pitch-and-toss for pence on dark
steps. Everything reeks impartially of dirt and of mystery. All is gloom
and shade. You could believe anything on earth of that darkling old town.
There all Oriental fancies might easily come true, all fables might
revive, all dead history might repeat itself.
These two incongruous worlds, the ancient and the modern town, form the
two great divisions of Algiers as the latter-day tourist from our cold
North knows it. The one is antique, lazy, sleepy, unprogressive; the other
is bustling, new-world, busy, noisy, commercial. But there is yet a third
Algiers that lies well without the wall, the Algiers of the stranger and
of the winter resident. Hither Mr. Cook conducts his eager neophytes;
hither the Swiss innkeeper summons his cosmopolitan guests. It reaches its
culminating point about three miles from the town, on the heights of
Mustapha Supérieur, where charming villas spread thick over the sunlit
hills, and where the Western visitor can enjoy the North African air
without any unpleasant addition of fine old crusted Moorish perfumes.
The road to Mustapha Supérieur lies through the Bab-Azzoun gate, and
passes first along a wide street thronged with Arabs and Kabyles from the
country and the mountains. This is the great market road of Algiers, the
main artery of supplies, a broad thoroughfare lined with _fondouks_ or
caravanserais, where the weary camel from the desert deposits his bales of
dates, and where black faces of Saharan negroes smile out upon the curious
stranger from dense draping folds of some dirty burnouse. The cafés are
filled with every variety of Moslem, Jew, Turk, and infidel. Nowhere else
will you see to better advantage the wonderful variety of races and
costumes that distinguishes Algiers above most other cosmopolitan
Mediterranean cities. The dark M'zabite from the oases, arrayed like
Joseph in a coat of many colors, stands chatting at his own door with the
pale-faced melancholy Berber of the Aurès mountains. The fat and dusky
Moor, over-fed on kous-kous, jostles cheek by jowl with the fair Jewess in
her Paisley shawl and quaint native head-gear. Mahonnais Spaniards from
the Balearic Isles, girt round their waists with red scarves, talk gaily
to French missionary priests in violet bands and black cassocks. Old Arabs
on white donkeys amble with grave dignity down the center of the broad
street, where chasseurs in uniform and spahis in crimson cloaks keep them
company on fiery steeds from the Government stud at Blidah. All is noise
and bustle, hurry, scurry, and worry, the ant-hill life of an English
bazaar grotesquely superimposed on the movement and stir of a great
European city.
You pass through the gates of the old Moorish town and find yourself at
once in a modern but still busy suburb. Then on a sudden the road begins
to mount the steep Mustapha slope by sharp zigzags and bold gradients. In
native Algerian days, before Allah in his wisdom mysteriously permitted
the abhorred infidel to bear sway in the Emerald City over the Faithful of
Islam, a single narrow mule-path ascended from the town wall to the breezy
heights of Mustapha. It still exists, though deserted, that old breakneck
Mussulman road a deep cutting through soft stone, not unlike a Devonshire
lane, all moss-grown and leafy, a favorite haunt of the naturalist and the
trap-door spider. But the French engineers, most famous of road-makers,
knew a more excellent way. Shortly after the conquest they carved a zigzag
carriage-drive of splendid dimensions up that steep hill-front, and paved
it well with macadam of most orthodox solidity. At the top, in proof of
their triumph over nature and the Moslem, they raised a tiny commemorative
monument, the Colonne Voirol, after their commander's name, now the
Clapham Junction of all short excursions among the green dells of the
Sahel.
The Mustapha road, on its journey uphill, passes many exquisite villas of
the old Moorish corsairs. The most conspicuous is that which now forms the
Governor-General's Summer Palace, a gleaming white marble pile of rather
meretricious and over-ornate exterior, but all glorious within, to those
who know the secret of decorative art, with its magnificent heirloom of
antique tiled dados. Many of the other ancient villas, however, and
notably the one occupied by Lady Mary Smith-Barry, are much more really
beautiful, even if less externally pretentious, than the Summer Palace.
One in particular, near the last great bend of the road, draped from the
ground to the flat roof with a perfect cataract of bloom by a crimson
bougainvillea, may rank among the most picturesque and charming homes in
the French dominions.
[Illustration]
It is at Mustapha, or along the El Biar road, that the English colony of
residents or winter visitors almost entirely congregates. Nothing can be
more charming than this delicious quarter, a wilderness of villas, with
its gleaming white Moorish houses half lost in rich gardens of orange,
palm, and cypress trees. How infinitely lovelier these Eastern homes than
the fantastic extravagances of the Californie at Cannes, or the sham
antiques on the Mont Boron! The native North African style of architecture
answers exactly to the country in whose midst it was developed. In our
cold northern climes those open airy arcades would look chilly and out of
place, just as our castles and cottages would look dingy and incongruous
among the sunny nooks of the Atlas. But here, on the basking red African
soil, the milk-white Moorish palace with its sweeping Saracenic arches,
its tiny round domes, its flat, terraced roofs, and its deep perspective
of shady windows, seems to fit in with land and climate as if each were
made for the other. Life becomes absolutely fairy-like in these charming
old homes. Each seems for the moment while you are in it just a dream in
pure marble.
I am aware that to describe a true Moorish villa is like describing the
flavor of a strawberry; the one must be tasted, the other seen. But still,
as the difficulty of a task gives zest to the attempt at surmounting it,
I will try my hand at a dangerous word-picture. Most of the Mustapha
houses have an outer entrance-court, to which you obtain admission from
the road by a plain, and often rather heavy, archway. But, once you have
reached the first atrium, or uncovered central court, you have no reason
to complain of heaviness or want of decoration. The court-yard is
generally paved with parti-colored marble, and contains in its center a
Pompeian-looking fountain, whose cool water bubbles over into a shallow
tank beneath it. Here reeds and tall arums lift their stately green
foliage, and bright pond-blossoms rear on high their crimson heads of
bloom. Round the quadrangle runs a covered arcade (one might almost say a
cloister) of horse-shoe arches, supported by marble columns, sometimes
Græco-Roman antiques, sometimes a little later in date, but admirably
imitated from the originals. This outer court is often the most charming
feature of the whole house. Here, on sultry days, the ladies of the family
sit with their books or their fancy-work; here the lord of the estate
smokes his afternoon cigar; here the children play in the shade during the
hottest African noon-day. It is the place for the siesta, for the
afternoon tea, for the lounge in the cool of the evening, for the joyous
sense of the delight of mere living.
From the court-yard a second corridor leads into the house itself, whose
center is always occupied by a large square court, like the first in
ground-plan, but two-storied and glass-covered. This is the hall, or first
reception room, often the principal apartment of the whole house, from
which the other rooms open out in every direction. Usually the
ground-floor of the hall has an open arcade, supporting a sort of balcony
or gallery above, which runs right round the first floor on top of it.
This balcony is itself arcaded; but instead of the arches being left open
the whole way up, they are filled in for the first few feet from the floor
with a charming balustrade of carved Cairene woodwork. Imagine such a
court, ringed round with string-courses of old Oriental tiles, and
decorated with a profusion of fine pottery and native brasswork, and you
may form to yourself some faint mental picture of the common remodeled
Algerian villa. It makes one envious again to remember how many happy days
one has spent in some such charming retreats, homes where all the culture
and artistic taste of the West have been added to all the exquisite
decorative instinct and insight of the Oriental architect.
Nor are fair outlooks wanting. From many points of view on the Mustapha
Hill the prospect is among the most charming in the western Mediterranean.
Sir Lambert Playfair, indeed, the learned and genial British
Consul-General whose admirable works on Algeria have been the delight of
every tourist who visits that beautiful country, is fond of saying that
the two finest views on the Inland Sea are, first, that from the Greek
Theater at Taormina, and, second, that from his own dining-room windows on
the hill-top at El Biar. This is very strong praise, and it comes from the
author of a handbook to the Mediterranean who has seen that sea in all
aspects, from Gibralta to Syria; yet I fancy it is too high, especially
when one considers that among the excluded scenes must be put Naples,
Sorrento, Amalfi, Palermo, and the long stretch of Venice as seen from the
Lido. I would myself even rank the outlook on Monaco from the slopes of
Cap Martin, and the glorious panorama of Nice and the Maritime Alps from
the Lighthouse Hill at Antibes, above any picture to be seen from the
northern spurs of the Sahel. Let us be just to Piræus before we are
generous to El Biar. But all this is, after all, a mere matter of taste,
and no lover of the picturesque would at any rate deny that the Bay of
Algiers, as viewed from the Mustapha Hill, ranks deservedly high among the
most beautiful sights of the Mediterranean. And when the sunset lights up
in rosy tints the white mole and the marble town, the resulting scene is
sometimes one of almost fairy-like splendor.
Indeed, the country round Mustapha is a district of singular charm and
manifold beauty. The walks and drives are delicious. Great masses of pale
white clematis hang in sheets from the trees, cactus and aloe run riot
among the glens, sweet scents of oleander float around the deep ravines,
delicious perfumes of violets are wafted on every breeze from unseen and
unsuspected gardens. Nowhere do I know a landscape so dotted with houses,
and nowhere are the houses themselves so individually interesting. The
outlook over the bay, the green dells of the foreground, the town on its
steep acclivity, the points and headlands, and away above all, in the
opposite direction, the snow-clad peaks of the Djurjura, make up a picture
that, after all, has few equals or superiors on our latter-day planet.
One of the sights of Mustapha is the Arab cemetery, where once a week the
women go to pray and wail, with true Eastern hyperbole, over the graves of
their dead relations. By the custom of Islam they are excluded from the
mosques and from all overt participation in the public exercises of
religion; but these open-air temples not made with hands, even the Prophet
himself has never dared to close to them. Ancestor-worship and the
veneration of the kindred dead have always borne a large part in the
domestic creed of the less civilized Semites, and, like many other traces
of heathenism, this antique cult still peeps sturdily through the thin
veil of Mohammedan monotheism. Every hillock in the Atlas outliers is
crowned by the tiny domed tomb, or _koubba_, of some local saint; every
sacred grove overshadows the relics of some reverend Marabout. Nay, the
very oldest forms of Semitic idolatry, the cult of standing stones, of
holy trees, and of special high places on the mountain-tops, survive to
this day even in the midst of Islam. It is the women in particular who
keep alive these last relics of pre-Moslem faith; it is the women that one
may see weeping over the narrow graves of their loved ones, praying for
the great desire of the Semitic heart, a man-child from Allah, before the
sacred tree of their pagan ancestors, or hanging rags and dolls as
offerings about the holy grove which encloses the divine spring of pure
and hallowed water.
Algiers is thus in many ways a most picturesque winter resort. But it has
one great drawback: the climate is moist and the rainfall excessive. Those
who go there must not expect the dry desert breeze that renders Luxor and
Assiout so wholesome and so unpleasant. Beautiful vegetation means rain
and heat. You will get both in Algiers, and a fine Mediterranean tossing
on your journey to impress it on your memory.
III
MALAGA
A nearly perfect climate--Continuous existence of thirty
centuries--Granada and the world-renowned Alhambra--Systems of
irrigation--Vineyards the chief source of wealth--Esparto grass--The
famous Cape de Gatt--The highest peak of the Sierra Nevada--Last view
of Granada.
Malaga has been very differently described and appreciated. The Arab
chroniclers who knew it in the palmy days of the Moorish domination
considered it "a most beautiful city, densely peopled, large and most
excellent." Some rose to poetical rhapsody in describing it; they praised
it as "the central jewel of a necklace, a land of paradise, the pole star,
the diadem of the moon, the forehead of a bewitching beauty unveiled." A
Spanish poet was not less eloquent, and sang of Malaga as "the
enchantress, the home of eternal spring, bathed by the soft sea, nestling
amidst flowers." Ford, on the other hand, that prince of guide-book
makers, who knew the Spain of his day intimately from end to end, rather
despised Malaga. He thought it a fine but purely commercial city, having
"few attractions beyond climate, almonds and raisins, and sweet wine."
Malaga has made great strides nevertheless in the fifty-odd years since
Ford so wrote of it. While preserving many of the charming characteristics
which evoked such high-flown encomiums in the past, it has developed
considerably in trade, population, and importance. It grows daily;
building is constantly in progress, new streets are added year after year
to the town. Its commerce flourishes; its port is filled with shipping
which carry off its many manufactures: chocolate, liquorice, porous jars,
and clay figures, the iron ores that are smelted on the spot; the
multifarious products of its fertile soil, which grows in rich profusion
the choicest fruits of the earth: grapes, melons, plantains, guava,
quince, Japanese medlars, oranges, lemons, and prickly pears. All the
appliances and luxurious aids to comfort known to our latter-day
civilization are to be found in Malaga: several theaters, one of them an
opera house, clubs, grand hotels, bankers, English doctors, cabs. It
rejoices too in an indefeasible and priceless gift, a nearly perfect
climate, the driest and balmiest in Southern Europe. Rain falls in Malaga
but half a dozen days in the year, and its winter sun would shame that of
an English summer. It has a southern aspect, and is sheltered from the
north by an imposing range of mountains; its only trouble is the _terral_
or north-west wind, the same disagreeable visitor as that known on the
Italian Riviera as the Tramontana, and in the south of France as the
Mistral. These climatic advantages have long recommended Malaga as a
winter health resort for delicate and consumptive invalids, and an
increasingly successful rival to Madeira, Malta, and Algiers. The general
view of this city of sunshine, looking westward, to which point it lies
open, is pleasing and varied; luxuriant southern vegetation, aloes,
palmetto, and palms, fill up the foreground; in the middle distance are
the dazzling white façades and towers of the town, the great amphitheater
of the bull ring, the tall spire of the Cathedral a very conspicuous
object, the whole set off by the dark blue Mediterranean, and the
reddish-purple background of the Sierra Bermeja or Vermilion Hills.
There is active enjoyment to be got in and near Malaga as well as the mere
negative pleasure of a calm, lazy life amid beautiful scenes. It is an
excellent point of departure for interesting excursions. Malaga lies on
the fringe of a country full of great memories, and preserving many
curious antiquarian remains. It is within easy reach by rail of Granada
and the world-renowned Alhambra, whence the ascent of the great southern
snowy range, the Sierra Nevada, may be made with pleasurable excitement
and a minimum of discomfort. Other towns closely associated with great
events may also be visited: Alhama, the mountain key of Granada, whose
capture preluded that of the Moorish capital and is enshrined in Byron's
beautiful verse; Ronda, the wildly picturesque town lying in the heart of
its own savage hills; Almeria, Antequera, Archidona, all old Moorish
towns. By the coast road westward, a two days' ride, through Estepona and
Marbella, little seaside towns bathed by the tideless Mediterranean,
Gibraltar may be reached. Inland, a day's journey, are the baths of
Caratraca, delightfully situated in a narrow mountain valley, a cleft of
the rugged hill, and famous throughout Spain. The waters are akin to those
of Harrogate, and are largely patronized by crowds of the bluest-blooded
hidalgos, the most fashionable people, Spaniards from La Corte (Madrid),
and all parts of the Peninsula. Yet another series of riding excursions
may be made into the wild Alpujarras, a desolate and uncultivated district
gemmed with bright oases of verdure, which are best reached by the coast
road leading from Malaga through Velez Malaga, Motril to Adra, and which
is perhaps the pleasantest route to Granada itself. On one side is the
dark-blue sea; on the other, vine-clad hills: this is a land, to use
Ford's words, "overflowing with oil and wine; here is the palm without the
desert, the sugar-cane without the slave;" old Moorish castles perched
like eagles' eyries crown the hills; below cluster the spires and towers
of churches and convents, hemmed in by the richest vegetation. The whole
of this long strip of coast is rich with the alluvial deposits brought
down by the mountain torrents from the snowy Sierras above; in spring
time, before the summer heats have parched the land, everything flourishes
here, the sweet potato, indigo, sugar-cane and vine; masses of wild
flowers in innumerable gay colors, the blue iris, the crimson oleander,
geraniums, and luxuriant festoons of maidenhair ferns bedeck the landscape
around. It is impossible to exaggerate the delights of these riding trips;
the traveller relying upon his horse, which carries a modest kit, enjoys a
strange sense of independence: he can go on or stop, as he chooses,
lengthen or shorten his day's journey, which takes him perpetually and at
the leisurely pace which permits ample observation of the varied views.
The scene changes constantly: now he threads a half-dried watercourse,
thick with palmetto and gum cistus; now he makes the slow circuit of a
series of little rocky bays washed by the tideless calm of the blue sea;
now he breasts the steep slope, the seemingly perilous ascent of bold
cliffs, along which winds the track made centuries since when the most
direct was deemed the shortest way to anywhere in spite of the
difficulties that intervened.
Malaga as a seaport and place of settlement can claim almost fabulous
antiquity. It was first founded by the Phoenicians three thousand years
ago, and a continuous existence of thirty centuries fully proves the
wisdom of their choice. Its name is said to be Phoenician, and is
differently derived from a word meaning salt, and another which would
distinguish it as "the king's town." From the earliest ages Malaga did a
thriving business in salt fish; its chief product and export were the same
anchovies and the small _boquerones_, not unlike an English whitebait,
which are still the most highly prized delicacies of the Malaga fish
market. Southern Spain was among the richest and most valued of Phoenician
possessions. It was a mine of wealth to them, the Tarshish of Biblical
history from which they drew such vast supplies of the precious metals
that their ships carried silver anchors. Hiram, King of Tyre, was a sort
of goldsmith to Solomon, furnishing the wise man's house with such stores
of gold and silver utensils that silver was "accounted nothing therein,"
as we read in the First Book of Kings. When the star of Tyre and Sidon
waned, and Carthage became the great commercial center of the
Mediterranean, it controlled the mineral wealth of Spain and traded
largely with Malaga. Later, when Spain passed entirely into Roman hands,
this southern province of Boetica grew more and more valuable, and the
wealth of the country passed through its ports eastward to the great marts
of the world. Malaga however, was never the equal either in wealth or
commercial importance of its more eastern and more happily placed neighbor
Almeria. The latter was the once famous "Portus Magnus," or Great Port,
which monopolized most of the maritime traffic with Italy and the more
distant East. But Malaga rose in prosperity as Roman settlers crowded
into Boetica, and Roman remains excavated in and around the town attest
the size and importance of the place under the Romans. It was a
municipium, had a fine ampitheater, the foundations of which were laid
bare long afterwards in building a convent, while many bronzes, fragments
of statuary, and Roman coins found from time to time prove the intimate
relations between Malaga and the then Mistress of the World. The Goths,
who came next, overran Boetica, and although their stay was short, they
rechristened the province, which is still known by their name, the modern
Andal-, or Vandalucia. Malaga was a place of no importance in the time of
the Visigoths, and it declined, only to rise with revived splendor under
the Moors, when it reached the zenith of its greatness, and stood high in
rank among the Hispano-Mauresque cities.
It was the same one-eyed Berber General, Tarik, who took Gibraltar who was
the first Moorish master of Malaga. Legendary story still associates a
gate in the old Moorish castle, the Gibralfaro, with the Moorish invasion.
This Puerta de la Cava was called, it has been said, after the ill-used
daughter of Count Julyan whose wrongs led to the appeal to Moorish
intervention. But it is not known historically that Count Julyan had a
daughter named La Cava, or any daughter at all; nor is it likely that the
Moors would remember the Christian maiden's name as sponsor for the gate.
After the Moorish conquest Malaga fell to the tribes that came from the
river Jordan, a pastoral race who extended their rule to the open lands as
far as Archidona. The richness of their new possession attracted great
hordes of Arabs from their distant homes; there was a general exodus, and
each as it came to the land of promise settled where they found anything
that recalled their distant homes. Thus the tribes from the deserts of
Palmyra found a congenial resting-place on the arid coast near Almeria and
the more rugged kingdom of Murcia; the Syrian mountaineers established
themselves amidst the rocky fastness of the Ronda Serranía; while those
from Damascus and Bagdad reveled in the luxuriant beauty of the fertile
plains watered by the Xenil and Darro, the great Vega, with its
orange-groves and jeweled gardens that still make Granada a smiling
paradise.
These Moslem conquerors were admirable in their administration and
development of the land they seized, quick to perceive its latent
resources and make the most of them. Malaga itself became the court and
seat of government of a powerful dynasty whose realms extended inland as
far as Cordova, and the region around grew under their energetic and
enlightened management into one great garden teeming with the most varied
vegetation. What chiefly commended Malaga to the Moors was the beauty of
its climate and the amazing fertility of the soil. The first was a
God-sent gift, the latter made unstinting return for the labor freely but
intelligently applied. Water was and still is the great need of those
thirsty and nearly rainless southern lands, and the Moorish methods of
irrigation, ample specimens of which still survive, were most elaborate
and effective contrivances for distributing the fertilizing fluid. Many of
these ancient systems of irrigation are still at work at Murcia, Valencia,
Granada, and elsewhere. The Moors were masters of hydraulic science, which
was never more widely or intelligently practiced than in the East. So the
methods adopted and still seen in Spain have their Oriental prototypes and
counterparts. They varied, of course, with the character of the district
to be irrigated and the sources of supply. Where rivers and running water
gave the material, it was conveyed in canals; one main trunk-line or
artery supplied the fluid to innumerable smaller watercourses or veins,
the _acequias_, which formed a reticulated network of minute
ramifications. The great difficulty in the plains, and this was especially
the case about Malaga, was to provide a proper fall, which was effected
either by carrying the water to a higher level by an aqueduct, or sinking
it below the surface in subterranean channels. Where the water had to be
raised from underground, the simple pole, on which worked an arm or lever
with a bucket, was used, the identical "shadoof" of the Nile; or the more
elaborate water-wheel, the Arab _Anaoura_, a name still preserved in the
Spanish _Noria_, one of which is figured in the Almeria washing-place,
where it serves the gossiping _lavanderas_ at their work. In these norias
the motive power is usually that of a patient ox, which works a revolving
wheel, and so turns a second at right angles armed with jars or buckets.
These descend in turn, coming up charged with water, which falls over into
a reservoir or pipe, whence it flows to do its business below.
Under this admirable system the land gives forth perpetual increases. It
knows no repose. Nothing lies fallow. "Man is never weary of sowing, nor
the sun of calling into life." Crop succeeds crop with astonishing
rapidity; three or four harvests of corn are reaped in the year, twelve or
fifteen of clover and lucerne. All kinds of fruit abound; the margins of
the watercourses blossom with flowers that would be prized in a hothouse,
and the most marvelous fecundity prevails. By these means the Moors of
Malaga, the most scientific and successful of gardeners, developed to the
utmost the marvelously prolific soil. Moorish writers described the
pomegranates of Malaga as red as rubies, and unequaled in the whole world.
The _brevas_, or small green figs, were of exquisitely delicious flavor,
and still merit that encomium. Grapes were a drug in the markets, cheap as
dirt; while the raisins into which they were converted, by a process that
dates back to the Phoenicians, found their way into the far East and were
famous in Palestine, Arabia, and beyond. The vineyards of the Malaga
district, a wide tract embracing all the southern slopes towards the
Mediterranean, were, and still are, the chief source of its wealth. The
wine of Malaga could tempt even Mohammedan Moors to forget their prophet's
prohibition; it was so delicious that a dying Moor when commending his
soul to God asked for only two blessings in Paradise, enough to drink of
the wines of Malaga and Seville. As the "Mountains," this same wine was
much drunk and appreciated by our forefathers. To this day "Malaga" is
largely consumed, both dry and sweet, especially that known as the
Lagrimas, or Tears, a cognate term to the famous Lachrymæ Christi of
Naples, and which are the very essence of the rich ripe grapes, which are
hung up in the sun till the juice flows from them in luscious drops.
Orange groves and lemon groves abound in the Vega, and the fruit is
largely exported. The collection and packing are done at points along the
line of railway to which Malaga is the maritime terminus, as at La
Pizarra, a small but important station which is the starting point for the
Baths of Caratraca, and the mountain ride to Ronda through the
magnificent pass of El Burgo. Of late years Malaga has become a species
of market garden, in which large quantities of early vegetables are
raised, the _primeurs_ of French gourmets, the young peas, potatoes,
asparagus, and lettuce, which are sent north to Paris during the winter
months by express trains. This is probably a more profitable business than
the raising of the sugar-cane, an industry introduced (or more exactly,
revived, for it was known to and cultivated by the Moors) in and around
Malaga by the well-known General Concha, Marques del Duero. He spent the
bulk of a large fortune in developing the cane cultivation, and almost
ruined himself in this patriotic endeavor. Others benefited largely by his
well-meant enterprise, and the sugar fields of southern Spain prospered
until the German beet sugar drove the homegrown hard. The climate of
Malaga, with its great dryness and absolute immunity from frost, is
exceedingly favorable to the growth of the sugar-cane, and the sugar
fields at the time of the cutting are picturesque centers of activity. The
best idea, however, of the amazing fertility of this gifted country will
be obtained from a visit to one of the private residential estates, or
_fincas_, such as that of La Concepcion, where palms, bamboos, arums,
cicads and other tropical plants thrive bravely in the open air. It is
only a short drive, and is well worth a visit. The small Grecian temple is
full of Roman remains, chiefly from Cartama, the site of a great Roman
city which Livy has described. Some of these remains are of beautiful
marble figures, which were found, like ordinary stones, built into a
prison wall and rescued with some difficulty. The Malaga authorities
annexed them, thinking they contained gold, then threw them away as old
rubbish. Other remains at La Concepcion are fragments of the Roman
municipal law, on bronze tablets, found at Osuna, between Antequera and
Seville.
Malaga possesses many mementoes of the Moors besides their methods of
irrigation. The great citadel which this truly militant race erected upon
the chief point of vantage and key to the possession of Malaga still
remains. This, the Castle of Gibralfaro, the rock of the lighthouse, was
built by a prince of Granada, Mohammed, upon the site of a Phoenician
fortress, and it was so strongly fortified and held that it long resisted
the strenuous efforts of Ferdinand and Isabella in the memorable siege
which prefaced the fall of Granada. How disgracefully the Catholic kings
ill-treated the conquered Moors of Malaga, condemning them to slavery or
the _auto da fé_, may be read in the pages of Prescott. The towers of the
Gibralfaro still standing have each a story of its own: one was the
atalaya, or watch-tower; on another, that of La Vela, a great silver cross
was erected when the city surrendered. Below the Gibralfaro, but connected
with it and forming part of the four deep city walls, is the Alcazaba,
another fortification utilized by the Moors, but the fortress they raised
stands upon Phoenician foundations. The quarter that lies below these
Moorish strongholds is the most ancient part of Malaga, a wilderness of
dark, winding alleys of Oriental aspect, and no doubt of Moorish origin.
This is the home of the lower classes, of the turbulent masses who have in
all ages been a trial and trouble to the authorities of the time. The
Malagueños, the inhabitants of Malaga, whether Moors or Spaniards, have
ever been rebellious subjects of their liege lords, and uncomfortable
neighbors to one another. In all their commotions they have generally
espoused the cause which has ultimately failed.
[Illustration]
Thus, in 1831, Riego and Torrijos having been in open revolt against the
Government, were lured into embarking for Malaga from Gibraltar, where
they had assembled, by its military commandant Moreno, and shot down to a
man on the beach below the Carmen Convent. Among the victims was an
Englishman, Mr. Boyd, whose unhappy fate led to sharp protests from
England. Since this massacre a tardy tribute has been raised to the memory
of the slain; it stands in the shape of a monument in the Plaza de Riego,
the Alameda. Again, Malaga sided with Espartero in 1843, when he
"pronounced" but had to fly into exile. Once more, in 1868, the Malagueños
took up arms upon the losing side, fighting for the dethroned Isabella
Segunda against the successful soldiers who had driven her from Madrid.
Malaga was long and obstinately defended, but eventually succumbed after a
sanguinary struggle. Last of all, after the abdication of Amadeus in 1873,
the Republicans of Malaga rose, and carried their excesses so far as to
establish a Communistic régime, which terrorized the town. The troops
disbanded themselves, their weapons were seized by the worst elements of
the population, who held the reins of power, the local authorities having
taken to flight. The mob laid hands on the customhouse and all public
moneys, levied contributions upon the more peaceable citizens, then
quarreled among themselves and fought out their battles in the streets,
sweeping them with artillery fire, and threatening a general bombardment.
Order was not easily restored or without the display of armed force, but
the condign punishment of the more blameworthy has kept Malaga quiet ever
since.
While the male sex among the masses of Malaga enjoy an indifferent
reputation, her daughters of all classes are famed for their
attractiveness, even in Spain, the home, _par excellence_, of a
well-favored race. "Muchachas Malagueñas, muy halagueñas" (the girls of
Malaga are most bewitching) is a proverbial expression, the truth of which
has been attested by many appreciative observers. Théophile Gautier's
description of them is perhaps the most complimentary. The Malagueña, he
tells us, is remarkable for the even tone of her complexion (the cheek
having no more color than the forehead), the rich crimson of her lips, the
delicacy of her nostril, and above all the brilliancy of her Arab eyes,
which might be tinged with henna, they are so languorous and so
almond-shaped. "I cannot tell whether or not it was the red draperies of
their headgear, but their faces exhibited gravity combined with passion
that was quite Oriental in character." Gautier drew this picture of the
Malagueñas as he saw them at a bull-fight, and he expresses a not
unnatural surprise that sweet, Madonna-like faces, which might well
inspire the painter of sacred subjects, should look on unmoved at the
ghastly episodes of the blood-stained ring. It shocked him to see the deep
interest with which these pale beauties followed the fight, to hear the
feats of the arena discussed by sweet lips that might speak more suitably
of softer things. Yet he found them simple, tender-hearted, good, and
concluded that it was not cruelty of disposition but the custom of the
country that drew them to this savage show. Since then the bull-fight,
shorn, however, of its worst horrors, has become acclimatized and most
popular amidst M. Gautier's own country-women in Paris. That the beauty of
the higher ranks rivals that of the lowest may be inferred from the fact
that a lady whose charms were once celebrated throughout Europe is of
Malagueñan descent. The mother of the Empress Eugénie, who shared with
Napoleon III. the highest honors in France, was a Malaga girl, a Miss
Fitzpatrick, the daughter of the British consul, but she had also Spanish
blood in her veins.
A near neighbor and old rival, as richly endowed, may again pass Malaga in
the great race for commercial expansion. This is Almeria, which lies
farther eastward and which owns many natural advantages; its exposed port
has been improved by the construction of piers and breakwaters, and it now
offers a secure haven to the shipping that should ere long be attracted in
increasing tonnage to carry away the rich products of the neighboring
districts. Almeria is the capital of a province teeming with mineral
wealth, and whose climate and soil favor the growth of the most varied and
valuable crops. The silver mines of the mountains of Murcia and the
fertile valleys of the Alpujarras would find their best outlet at Almeria,
while Granada would once more serve as its farm. So ran the old proverb,
"When Almería was really Almería, Granada was only its alquería," or
source of supply. What this time-honored but almost forgotten city most
needs is to be brought into touch with the railway systems of Spain.
Meanwhile, Almeria, awaiting better fortune, thrives on the exports of its
own products, chief among which are grapes and esparto. The first has a
familiar sound to British ears, from the green grapes known as "Almerias,"
which are largely consumed in British households. These are not equal to
the delicately flavored Muscatels, but they are stronger and will bear the
packing and rough usages of exportation under which the others perish.
Esparto is a natural product of these favored lands, which, after long
supplying local wants, has now become an esteemed item in their list of
exports. It is known to botanists as the Spanish rush, or bass feather
grass, the Genet d'Espagne, and is compared by Ford to the "spear grass
which grows on the sandy sea-shores of Lancashire." It is still
manufactured, as in the days of Pliny, into matting, baskets, ropes, and
the soles for the celebrated Alpargatas, or rope sandal shoes, worn
universally by Spanish peasants in the south and Spanish soldiers on the
line of march. The ease and speed with which the Spanish infantry cover
long distances are greatly attributed to their comfortable chaussures.
Nowadays a much wider outlet has been found for esparto grass, and it is
grown artificially. When rags became more and more scarce and unequal to
the demands of the paper-makers, experiments were made with various
substitutes, and none answered the purpose better than the wild
spear-grass of southern Spain.
Almeria, while awaiting the return of maritime prosperity, can look with
some complacency upon a memorable if not altogether glorious past. Its
very names, Portus Magnus under the Romans, and Al Meriah, the
"Conspicuous," under the Moors, attest its importance. All the
agricultural produce of the prolific Vega, the silks that were woven on
Moorish looms and highly prized through the East, were brought to Almeria
for transmission abroad. The security and convenience of this famous port
gave it an evil reputation in after years, when it became an independent
kingdom under Ibn Maymum. Almeria was the terror of the Mediterranean; its
pirate galleys roved to and fro, making descents upon the French and
Italian coasts, and carrying back their booty, slaves, and prizes to their
impregnable home. Spaniards and Genoese presently combined against the
common enemy, and Almeria was one of the earliest Christian conquests
regained from the Moors. Later still the Algerian Moors took fresh
revenge, and their corsairs so constantly threatened Almeria that Charles
V. repaired its ancient fortifications, the old Moorish castle now called
the Alcazaba, the center or keep, and hung a great tocsin bell upon its
cathedral tower to give notice of the pirates' approach. This cathedral is
the most imposing object in the decayed and impoverished town. Pigs and
poultry roam at large in the streets, amidst dirt and refuse; but in the
strong sunlight, white and blinding as in Africa, the mean houses glisten
brightly, and the abundant color seen on awnings and lattice, upon the
women's skirts and kerchiefs, in the ultramarine sea, is brought out in
the most vivid and beautiful relief.
The scenery on the coast from Malaga eastward is fine, in some parts and
under certain aspects magnificent. Beyond Almeria is the famous Cape de
Gatt, as it is known to our mariners, the Cabo de Gata of local parlance,
the Agate Cape, to give it its precise meaning. This remarkable
promontory, composed of rocks encrusted with gems, is worthy a place in
the "Arabian Nights." There are miles and miles of agates and crystal
spar, and in one particular spot amethysts are found. Wild winds gather
and constantly bluster about this richly constituted but often
storm-tossed landmark. Old sailor saws have perpetuated its character in
the form of a proverb, "At the Cape de Gatt take care of your hat." Other
portions of the coast nearer Malaga are still more forbidding and
dangerous: under the Sierra Tejada, for example, where the rocky barriers
which guard the land rise tier above tier as straight as a wall, in which
there are no openings, no havens of safety for passing craft in an inshore
gale. Behind all, a dim outline joining hands as it were with the clouds,
towers the great snowy range of southern Spain, the Sierra Nevada,
rejoicing in an elevation as high as the Swiss Alps, and in some respects
far more beautiful.
There are, however, no such grim glaciers, no such vast snow-fields as in
Switzerland, for here in the south the sun has more power, and even at
these heights only the peaks and pinnacles wear white crests during the
summer heats. This more genial temperature encourages a richer vegetation,
and makes the ascents less perilous and toilsome. A member of the Alpine
Club would laugh to scorn the conquest of Muley Hacen, or of the Picacho
de la Veleta, the two crowning peaks of the range. The enterprise is
within the compass of the most moderate effort. The ascent of the
last-named and lowest, although the most picturesque, is the easiest made,
because the road from Granada is most direct. In both cases the greatest
part of the climbing is performed on horseback; but this must be done a
day in advance, and thus a night has to be passed near the summit under
the stars. The temperature is low, and the travellers can only defend
themselves against the cold by the wraps they have brought and the fuel
they can find (mere knotted roots) around their windy shelter. The ascent
to where the snow still lingers, in very dirty and disreputable patches,
is usually commenced about two in the morning, so that the top may be
reached before dawn. If the sky is clear, sunrise from the Picacho is a
scene that can never be forgotten, fairly competing with, if not
outrivaling, the most famous views of the kind. The Mediterranean lies
below like a lake, bounded to the north and west by the Spanish coast, to
the south by the African, the faintest outlines of which may often be seen
in the far, dim distance. Eastward the horizon is made glorious by the
bright pageants of the rising sun, whose majestic approach is heralded by
rainbow-hued clouds. All around are the strangely jagged and contorted
peaks, rolling down in diminishing grandeur to the lower peaks that seem
to rise from the sea.
The highest peak of the Sierra Nevada is Muley Hacen, although it has only
the advantage over the Picacho de la Veleta by about a couple of hundred
feet. It is a longer and more difficult ascent, but in some ways the most
interesting, as it can best be reached through the Alpujarras, those
romantic and secluded valleys which are full of picturesque scenery and of
historical associations. The starting point, as a general rule, is
Trevelez, although the ascent may be equally made from Portugos, somewhat
nearer Granada. Trevelez is the other side and the most convenient coming
from Malaga by way of Motril. But no one would take the latter route who
could travel by the former, which leads through Alhendin, that well-known
village which is said to have seen the last of the departing Moors. This
is the point at which Granada is finally lost to view, and it was here
that Boabdil, the last king of Granada, took his last farewell of the city
whose loss he wept over, under the scathing sarcasm of his more heroic
mother, who told him he might well "weep like a woman for what he could
not defend as a man." Near this village is the little hill still known as
the site of "El Ultimo Suspiro del Moro, the last sigh of the Moor." This
same road leads through Lanjaron, an enchanting spot, posted high upon a
spur of the hills, and famous as a bathing place with health-giving
mineral springs. From Portugos or Trevelez the climb is easy enough: to be
accomplished a great part of the way on horseback, and in its earlier
levels ascending amid forests of evergreen oak; after that, long wastes of
barren rock are passed, till at length the summit is reached, on a narrow
strip of table-land, the highest in Southern Europe, and with an unrivaled
view. The charm of the Muley Hacen peak is its isolation, while the
Picacho looks better from it than Muley Hacen does from the Picacho, and
there is a longer vista across the Mediterranean Sea.
IV
BARCELONA
The flower market of the Rambla--Streets of the old town--The
Cathedral of Barcelona--Description of the Columbus monument--All
Saints' Day in Spain--Mont Tibidaho--Diverse centers of intellectual
activity--Ancient history--Philanthropic and charitable institutions.
"Barcelona, shrine of courtesy, harbor of the wayfarer, shelter of the
poor, cradle of the brave, champion of the outraged, nurse of friendship,
unique in position, unique in beauty!"
Such was the eulogium bestowed upon Barcelona by the great Cervantes
several hundred years ago, an eulogium warranted by a stranger's
experience in our own day. The matchless site of the second city of Spain,
its luxuriant surroundings, awaken enthusiasm as of old, whilst even the
briefest possible sojourn suffices to make us feel at home. A winning
urbanity, a cosmopolitan amiableness, characterize the townsfolk, Spanish
hauteur is here replaced by French cordiality. Softness of manner and
graces of speech lend additional charm to a race conspicuous for personal
beauty. The Barcelonese are described by a contemporary as laborious and
energetic, ambitious of social advance, tenacious of personal dignity,
highly imaginative, at the same time eminently practical, steadfast in
friendship, vehement in hate. The stir and magnificence of the city
attest the progressive character of the inhabitants.
Few European capitals can boast of finer public monuments, few indeed
possess such a promenade as its famous Rambla. The Rambla may be regarded
as an epitome, not only of the entire city, but of all Spain, and here the
curious traveller should take up his quarters. A dozen brilliant or moving
spectacles meet the eye in a day, whilst the normal aspect is one of
unimaginable picturesqueness and variety. The dark-eyed flower-girls with
their rich floral displays; the country folks still adhering to the
costume of Catalonia--the men sandaled and white-hosed, for headgear,
slouch caps of crimson, scarlet, or peach-colored felt, the women with
gorgeous silk kerchiefs pinned under the chin--the Asturian nursemaids in
poppy-red skirts barred with black, and dainty gold and lace caps; the
ladies fanning themselves as they go in November, with black lace
mantillas over their pretty heads; the Guardia Civile in big,
awe-inspiring cocked hats and long black cloaks reaching to the ankle; the
trim soldiery in black and red tunics, knickerbockers and buskins, their
officers ablaze with gold braid and lace; the spick-and-span city police,
each neat as a dandy in a melodrama, not a hair out of place, collars and
cuffs of spotless white, ironed to perfection, well-fitting costumes,
swords at their sides; the priests and nuns; the seafaring folk of many
nationalities; the shepherds of uncouth appearance from the neighboring
mountains--all these at first make us feel as if we were taking part in a
masquerade.
Now way is made for the funeral train of some rich citizen, the lofty car
of sumptuous display of black and gold drapery, wreaths of fresh roses,
violet, and heliotrope, large as carriage-wheels, fastened to the sides,
the coffin, encased in black and violet velvet, studded with gold nails;
following slowly, a long procession of carriages bearing priests,
choristers, and mourners. And now the sounds of martial music summon the
newcomer a second time to his window. It is a soldier who is borne to his
rest. Six comrades accompany the bier, carrying long inverted tapers;
behind march commanding officers and men, the band playing strains all too
spirited it seems for such an occasion. There is always something going on
in this splendid avenue animated from early morning till past midnight,
market-place, parade ground, promenade in one.
The daily flower-market of itself would almost repay the journey from
London. When northern skies are gloomiest, and fogs are daily fare, the
Rambla is at its best. The yellowing leaves of the plane-trees look golden
under the dazzling blue sky, and brilliant as in a picture are the
flower-sellers and their wares. These distractingly pretty girls, with
their dark locks pulled over the brow, their lovely eyes, rich olive
complexions, and gleaming white teeth, have nothing of the mendicant about
them. As they offer their flowers--perhaps fastening roses to a
half-finished garland with one hand, whilst with the other a pot of
heliotrope is reached down--the passer-by is engagingly invited to
purchase. The Spanish language, even the dialect of Catalonia, is music to
begin with, and the flower-maidens make it more musical still by their
gentle, caressing ways. Some wear little mantillas of black, blonde, or
cashmere; others, silk kerchiefs of brightest hue--orange, crimson, deep
purple, or fanciful patterns of many colors. Barcelona is a flower-garden
all the year round, and in mid-winter we stroll between piled-up masses
of rose, carnation, and violet, to say nothing of dahlias and
chrysanthemums.
It is especially on All Saints' and All Souls' Days that the flower-market
of the Rambla is seen to advantage; enormous sums are spent upon wreaths
and garlands for the cemetery, the poorest then contriving to pay his
floral tribute to departed kith and kin.
In striking contrast with the wide, airy, ever brilliantly illuminated
Rambla, electric light doing duty for sunshine at night, are the streets
of the old town. The stranger may take any turning--either to right or
left--he is sure to find himself in one of these dusky narrow
thoroughfares, so small ofttimes the space between window and opposite
window that neighbors might almost shake hands. With their open shops of
gay woolen stuffs, they vividly recall Cairene bazaars. Narrow as is the
accommodation without, it must be narrower still within, since when folks
move from one house to another their goods and chattels are hoisted up and
passed through the front windows. The sight of a chest of drawers or a
sofa in cloudland is comical enough, although the system certainly has its
advantages. Much manual labor is thereby spared, and the furniture
doubtless escapes injury from knocking about.
The wise traveller will elect to live on the Rambla, but to spend his time
in the old town. Wherever he goes he is sure to come upon some piece of
antiquity, whilst here, in a great measure, he loses sight of the
cosmopolitan element characterizing the new quarters. Novel and striking
as is its aspect to the stranger, Barcelona must nevertheless be described
as the least Spanish of Spanish towns. The second seaport of Spain is
still--as it was in the Middle Ages--one of the most important seats of
international commerce on the Mediterranean. As we elbow our way along
the crowded Rambla we encounter a diversity of types and hear a perplexing
jargon of many tongues. A few minutes suffice to transport us into the
old-world city familiar to Ford--not, however, to be described by the
twentieth century tourist in Ford's own words. "A difficult language," he
wrote just upon half a century ago, "rude manners, and a distrust of
strangers, render Barcelona a disagreeable city." Nowhere nowadays is more
courtesy shown to the inquiring stranger. He is not even obliged to ask
his way in these narrow tortuous streets. The city police, to be found at
every turn, uninvited come to his aid, and, bringing out a pocket-map,
with an infinity of pains make clear to him the route he has to take. The
handsome Calle San Fernando leads to the somber but grandiose old
Cathedral with its lovely cloisters, magnificent towers and bells,
deep-voiced as that of Big Ben itself. All churches in Spain, by the way,
must be visited in the forenoon; even then the light is so dim that little
can be seen of their treasures--pictures, reliquaries, marble tombs. The
Cathedral of Barcelona forms no exception to the rule. Only lighted by
windows of richly stained old glass, we are literally compelled to grope
our way along the crowded aisles. Mass is going on from early morning till
noon, and in the glimmering jeweled light we can just discern the moving
figures of priests and acolytes before the high altar, and the scattered
worshippers kneeling on the floor. Equally vague are the glimpses we
obtain of the chapels, veritable little museums of rare and beautiful
things unfortunately consigned to perpetual obscurity, veiled in
never-fading twilight. What a change we find outside! The elegant Gothic
cloisters, rather to be described as a series of chapels, each differing
from the other, each sumptuously adorned, enclose a sunny open space or
patio, planted with palms, orange and lemon trees, the dazzlingly bright
foliage and warm blue sky in striking contrast to the somber gray of the
building-stone. A little farther off, on the other side, we may see the
figures of the bell-ringers high up in the open belfry tower, swinging the
huge bells backwards and forwards with tremendous effort, a sight never to
be missed on Sundays and fête days.
This stately old Cathedral, like so many others, was never finished and
works of reparation and restoration are perpetually going on. Close by
stands the Palais de Justice, with its beautiful Gothic court and carved
stone staircase, the balustrade supported by lovely little statuettes or
gargoyles, each an artistic study in itself. Abutting this is the Palais
de Diputacion, Provincial or local Parliament House, a building of truly
Spanish grandeur. Its wide marble staircases, its elaborate ceilings of
carved wood, its majestic proportions, will, perhaps, have less interest
for some travellers than its art-treasures, two _chefs d'oeuvre_ of the
gifted Fortuny. Barcelona was the patron of this true genius--Catalan by
birth--so unhappily cut off in his early prime. With no little pride the
stately officials show these canvases--the famous "Odalisque" and the
"Battle of Tetuan"--the latter, alas! left unfinished. It is a superb
piece of life and color, but must be seen on a brilliant day as the hall
is somber. Nothing can exceed the courtesy of the Barcelonese to
strangers, and these pictures are shown out of the regular hours. But let
no one incautiously offer a fee. The proffered coin will be politely, even
smilingly, rejected, without humiliating reproof, much less a look of
affront. Ford's remark that "a silver key at all times secures admission"
does not hold good in these days.
Near the Cathedral, law courts, and Provincial Parliament House stands
another picturesque old palace of comparatively modern date, yet Saracenic
aspect, and containing one of the most curious historic treasures in
Europe. This is the palace of the kings of Aragon, or Archivo General de
la Corona de Aragon. The exterior, as is usual with Spanish buildings, is
massive and gloomy. Inside is a look of Oriental lightness and gaiety.
Slender columns, painted red, enclose an open court, and support a little
terrace planted with shrubs and flowers. Here in perfect order and
preservation, without a break, are stored the records of upwards of a
thousand years, the earlier consisting of vellum scrolls and black letter,
the latter showing the progress of printing from its beginning down to our
own day. The first parchment bears date A. D. 875. Among the curiosities
of the collection are no less than eight hundred and two Papal Bulls from
the year 1017 to 1796. Besides the archives of Barcelona itself, and of
the kingdom of Aragon, to which it was annexed in the twelfth century, the
palace contains many deeply interesting manuscripts found in the
suppressed monasteries.
The archives have been ingeniously arranged by the learned keeper of
records. The bookcases, which are not more than six feet high, stand on
either side of the vast library, at some distance from the wall, made
staircase-wise; one set of volumes just above the other, with the result
that no accumulation of dust is possible, and that each set is equally
accessible. The effect on the eye of these symmetrically-placed volumes in
white vellum is very novel and pleasing. We seem to be in a hall, the
walls of which are of fluted cream-colored marble.
The little museum of local antiquities in the ruined Church of Santa
Agneda, the somber old churches of San Pablo del Campo, Santa Maria del
Mar and Belen, the fragments of mediæval domestic architecture remaining
here and there--all these will detain the archæologist. Of more general
interest are the modern monuments of Barcelona. In no city have civic
lavishness and public spirit shone forth more conspicuously.
A penny tramway--you may go anywhere here for a penny--takes you to the
beautiful Park and Fountain of Neptune. The word "fountain" gives an
inadequate notion of the splendid pile, with its vast triple-storied
marble galleries, its sculptured Naiads and dolphins, and on the summit,
towering above park and lake and cascades, its three gigantic sea-horses
and charioteers richly gilt, gleaming as if indeed of massive gold. Is
there any more sumptuous fountain in the world? I doubt it. In spite of
the gilded sea-horses and chariot, there is no tawdriness here; all is
bold, splendid, and imposing. Below the vast terraced galleries and wide
staircases, all of pure marble, flows in a broad sheet the crystal-clear
water, home of myriads of gold fish. The _entourage_ is worthy of so
superb a construction. The fountain stands in the midst of a
scrupulously-kept, tastefully laid-out, ever-verdant park or public
pleasure-ground. In November all is fresh and blooming as in an English
June. Palms, magnolias, bananas, oleanders, camellias, the pepper-tree,
make up a rich, many-tinted foliage. Flowers in winter-time are supplanted
by beds of brilliant leaved plants that do duty for blossoms. The purple,
crimson, and sea-green leaves are arranged with great effect, and have a
brilliant appearance. Here surrounded by gold green turf, are little lakes
which may be sailed across in tiny pleasure skiffs. At the chief entrance,
conspicuously placed, stands the fine equestrian monument to Prim,
inaugurated with much civil and military pomp some years ago. It is a bold
statue in red bronze. The general sits his horse, hat in hand, his fine,
soldier-like face turned towards the city. On the sides of the pedestal
are bas-reliefs recording episodes of his career, and on the front these
words only, "Barcelona à Prim." The work is that of a Spanish artist, and
the monument as a whole reflects great credit alike to local art and
public spirit.
But a few minutes' drive brings us within sight of a monument to one of
the world's heroes. I allude to the memorial column recently raised to
Columbus by this same public-spirited and munificent city of Barcelona.
Columbus, be it remembered, was received here by Ferdinand and Isabella
after his discovery of America in 1493. Far and wide over hills and city,
palm-girt harbor, and sea, as a lighthouse towers the tremendous obelisk,
the figure of the great Genoese surmounting it, his feet placed on a
golden sphere, his outstretched arm pointing triumphantly in the direction
of his newly-discovered continent as much as to say, "It is there!"
Never did undertaking reflect more credit upon a city than this stupendous
work. The entire height of the monument is about two-thirds of the height
of the Monument of London. The execution was entrusted to Barcelonese
craftsmen and artists; the materials--bronze, stone, and marble--all being
supplied in the neighborhood.
On the upper tier of the pedestal are statues of the four noble Catalans
who materially aided Columbus in his expedition--by name Fray Boyl, monk
of Montserrat, Pedro Margarit, Jaime Ferrer, and Luis Sentangel. Below are
allegorical figures representing, in the form of stately matrons, the four
kingdoms of Catalonia, Castille, Aragon, and Leon. Bas-reliefs,
illustrating scenes in the career of the discoverer, adorn the hexagonal
sides, six magnificent winged lions of greystone keep jealous watch over
the whole, and below these, softening the aspect of severity, is a belt of
turf, the following inscription being perpetually written in flowers:
"Barcelona à Colon." The column is surmounted by a globe burnished with
gold, and above rises the colossal figure of Columbus.
No happier site could have been selected. The monument faces the sea, and
is approached from the town by a palm-bordered walk and public garden. The
first object to greet the mariner's eye as he sights land is the figure of
Columbus poised on his glittering ball; the last to fade from view is that
beacon-like column towering so proudly above city and shore. A little
excursion must be made by boat or steamer, in order to realize the
striking effect of this monument from the sea.
To obtain a bird's-eye view of Barcelona itself, the stranger should go
some distance inland. The Fort of Montjuich, commanding the town from the
south, or Mont Tibidaho to the north, will equally answer his purpose. A
pretty winding path leads from the shore to a pleasure-garden just below
the fort, and here we see the entire city spread as in a map at our feet.
The panorama is somewhat monotonous, the vast congeries of white walls and
grey roofs only broken by gloomy old church towers and tall factory
chimneys, but thus is realized for the first time the enormous extent of
the Spanish Liverpool and Manchester in one. Thus, indeed, may
Barcelona be styled. Looking seaward, the picture is animated and
engaging--the wide harbor bristling with shipping, lateen-sailed fishing
boats skimming the deep-blue sunny waves, noble vessels just discernible
on the dim horizon.
[Illustration]
The once celebrated promenade of the Murallo del Mar, eulogized by Ford
and other writers, no longer exists, but the stranger will keep the
sea-line in search of the new cemetery. A very bad road leads thither, on
All Saints' and All Souls' days followed by an unbroken string of
vehicles, omnibuses, covered carts, hackney carriages, and private
broughams; their occupants, for the most part, dressed in black. The
women, wearing black Cashmere mantillas, are hardly visible, being hidden
by enormous wreaths, crosses, and bouquets of natural and also of
artificial flowers. The new cemetery is well placed, being several miles
from the city, on high ground between the open country and the sea. It is
tastefully laid out in terraces--the trees and shrubs testifying to the
care bestowed on them. Here are many costly monuments--mausoleums, we
should rather say--of opulent Barcelonese, each family possessing its tiny
chapel and burial-place.
It is to be hoped that so progressive a city as Barcelona will ere long
adopt the system of cremation. Nothing can be less hygienic, one would
think, than the present mode of burial in Spain. To die there is
literally--not figuratively--to be laid on the shelf. The terrace-like
sides of the cemetery ground have been hollowed out into pigeon-holes, and
into these are thrust the coffins, the marble slab closing the aperture
bearing a memorial inscription. Ivy and other creepers are trained around
the various divisions, and wreaths of fresh flowers and immortelles adorn
them; the whole presenting the appearance of a huge chest of drawers
divided into mathematically exact segments. To us there is something
uncanny--nay, revolting--in such a form of burial; which, to say the least
of it, cannot be warranted on æsthetic, much less scientific, principles.
It is satisfactory to find that at last Protestants and Jews have their
own burial-place here, shut off from the rest, it is true by a wall at
least twenty feet high, but a resting-place for all that. It was not so
very long ago that Malaga was the only Spanish town according Protestants
this privilege, the concession being wrung from the authorities by the
late much-esteemed British consul, Mr. Mark.
For some days preceding the festival of All Saints the cemetery presents a
busy scene. Charwomen, gardeners, masons, and painters then take
possession of the place. Marble is scoured, lettering is repainted, shrubs
clipped, turf cut--all is made spick and span, in time for the great
festival of the dead. It must be borne in mind that All Saints' Day in
Spain has no analogy with the same date in our own calendar. Brilliant
sunshine, air soft and balmy as of July, characterize the month of
November here. These visits to the cemetery are, therefore, less
depressing than they would be performed amid English fog and drizzle. We
Northerners, moreover, cannot cast off gloomy thoughts and sad
retrospection as easily as the more elastic, more joyous Southern
temperament. Mass over, the pilgrimage to the cemetery paid, all is
relaxation and gaiety. All Saints' and All Souls' days are indeed periods
of unmitigated enjoyment and relaxation. Public offices, museums, schools,
shops, are closed. Holiday folk pour in from the country. The city is as
animated as Paris on the 14th of July.
In the forenoon it is difficult to elbow one's way through the crowded
thoroughfares. Every street is thronged, men flocking to mass as zealously
as devotees of the other sex. In these early hours most of the ladies wear
black; their mourning garb later in the day to be exchanged for
fashionable toilettes of all colors. The children are decked out gaily, as
for a fancy fair. Service is being held in every church, and from all
parts may be heard the sonorous Cathedral bells. Its vast, somber
interior, now blazing with wax-lights, is a sight to remember. Crowds in
rapt devotion are kneeling on the bare stones, the ladies heedless of
their silks; here and there the men kneeling on a glove or
pocket-handkerchief, in order to protect their Sunday pantaloons. Rows of
poor men--beggars, it would seem, tidied up for the occasion--sit in rows
along the aisle, holding lighted tapers. The choir is filled with
choristers, men and boys intoning the service so skilfully that they
almost seem to sing. Soon the crowds fall back, and a procession passes
from choir to high altar--priests and dignitaries in their gorgeous robes,
some of black, embroidered with crosses in gold, others of white and
purple or yellow, the bishop coming last, his long violet train borne by a
priest; all the time the well-trained voices of the choristers--sweet
treble of the boys, tenor, and base--making up for lack of music. At last
the long ceremony comes to an end, and the vast congregation pours out to
enjoy the balmy air, the warm sunshine, visits, confectionery, and other
distractions.
Such religious holidays should not be missed by the traveller, since they
still stamp Spain as the most Catholic country in the world. Even in
bustling, cosmopolitan, progressive Barcelona people seem to spend half
their time in church.
In the capital of Catalonia, twentieth-century civilization and the
mediæval spirit may still be called next-door neighbors. The airy
boulevards and handsome villas of suburban Algiers are not more strikingly
contrasted with the ancient Moorish streets than the new quarters of
Barcelona with the old. The Rambla, its electric lights, its glittering
shops, cafés, clubs, and theaters, recalls a Parisian boulevard. In many
of the tortuous, malodorous streets of the old town there is hardly room
for a wheelbarrow to be drawn along; no sunbeam has ever penetrated the
gloom.
Let us take a penny tramway from the Rambla to the gloomy, grandiose old
church of Santa Maria del Mar. Between the city and the sea rises the
majestic monument to Columbus, conspicuous as a lighthouse alike from land
and sea. We follow a broad palm-bordered alley and pleasure garden beyond
which are seen the noble harbor bristling with masts and the soft blue
Mediterranean. Under the palms lounge idle crowds listening to a band,
shading themselves as best they can from the burning sun of November! What
a change when we leave the tramway and the airy, handsome precincts of the
park, and plunge into the dark, narrow street behind the Lonja Palace. The
somber picture is not without relief. Round about the ancient façade of
the church are cloth-shops, the gay wares hanging from each story, as if
the shopmen made a display of all their wares. Here were reds, yellows,
greens of brightest hue, some of these woolen blankets, shawls, and
garments of every description being gay to crudeness; grass green,
scarlet, orange, sky-blue, dazzled the eye, but the general effect was
picturesque and cheerful. The dingy little square looked ready for a
festival. In reality, a funeral service was taking place in the church. If
Spanish interiors are always dark and depressing, what must they be when
draped with black? No sooner does the door swing behind us here than
daylight is shut out completely as on entering a mine; we are obliged to
grope our way by the feeble rays of light penetrating the old stained
glass of the clerestory. The lovely lancets of the aisles are hidden by
huge black banners, the vast building being only lighted by a blaze of wax
tapers here and there. Sweet soft chanting of boys' voices, with a
delicious organ accompaniment, was going on when I entered, soon to be
exchanged for the unutterably monotonous and lugubrious intoning of
black-robed choristers. They formed a procession and, chanting as they
went, marched to a side altar before which a priest was performing mass.
The Host elevated, all marched back again, the dreary intoning now
beginning afresh. It is impossible to convey any adequate notion of the
dreariness of the service. If the Spaniards understand how to enjoy to the
uttermost what Browning calls "the wild joy of living," they also know how
to clothe death with all the terrors of mediæval superstition. It takes
one's breath away, too, to calculate the cost of a funeral here, what with
the priests accomplished in the mystic dance--so does a Spanish writer
designate the performance--the no less elaborate services of the
choristers, the lighting up of the church, the display of funeral drapery.
The expense, fortunately, can only be incurred once. These ancient
churches--all somberness and gloom, yet on fête days ablaze with light
and colors--symbolize the leading characteristics of Spanish character. No
sooner does the devotee rise from his knees than the Southern passion for
joy and animation asserts itself. Religious exercise and revel, penitence
and enjoyment, alternate one with the other; the more devout the first,
all the more eagerly indulged in the last.
On the Sunday morning following the Festival of All Saints--the 4th of
November--the splendid old cathedral was the scene of a veritable pageant.
Wax lights illuminated the vast interior from end to end, the brocades and
satins of priestly robes blazed with gold embroidery, the rich adornments
and treasure of altar and chapels could be seen in full splendor. Before
the grand music of the organ and the elevation, a long, very long, sermon
had to be listened to, the enormous congregation for the most part
standing; scattered groups here and there squatted on the stone piers, not
a chair to be had anywhere, no one seeming to find the discourse too long.
When at last the preacher did conclude, the white-robed choristers, men
and boys, passed out of the choir, and formed a double line. Then the
bishop in solemn state descended from the high altar. He wore a crimson
gown with long train borne by a priest, and on his head a violet cap, with
pea-green tuft. The dresses of the attendant clergy were no less gorgeous
and rich in texture, some of crimson with heavy gold trimmings, others of
mauve, guinea-gold, peach color, or creamy white, several wearing fur
caps. The procession made the round of the choir, then returned to the
starting-point. As I sat behind the high altar on one of the high-backed
wooden benches destined for the aged poor, two tiny chorister boys came
up, both in white surplices, one with a pink, the other with sky-blue
collar. Here they chatted and laughed with their hands on the bell-rope,
ready to signal the elevation. On a sudden the tittering ceased, the
childish hands tugged at the rope, the tinkling of the bell was heard, and
the multitude, as one man, fell on its knees, the organ meantime being
played divinely. Service over, the crowds emerged into the dazzling
sunshine: pleasure parties, steamboat trips, visits, theaters, bull-fights
occupied the rest of the day, the Rambla presenting the appearance of a
masquerade.
An excursion northwards of the city is necessary, in order to see its
charming, fast-increasing suburbs. Many, as is the case with those of
Paris, Passy, Auteuil, Belleville, and others, were formerly little towns,
but are fast becoming part of Barcelona itself.
Most musically named is Gracia, approached by rail or tramway, where rich
citizens have their orange and lemon gardens, their chateaux and villas,
and where religious houses abound. In this delightful suburban retreat
alone no less than six nunneries may be counted; somber prison-like
buildings, with tiny barred windows, indicating the abode of cloistered
nuns of ascetic orders. That of the Order of St. Domingo has been recently
founded. The house looks precisely like a prison. Here also are several
congregations of the other sex--the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, the
Fathers of San Filipe, and others.
Gracia may be called the Hampstead of Barcelona. Hardly a house but
possesses its garden. Above the high walls trail gorgeous creepers and
datura, whilst through the iron gates we obtain glimpses of dahlias in
full splendor, roses red and white, and above these the glossy-leaved
orange and lemon trees with their ripening fruit. The pleasantest suburb
of Barcelona is well worthy of its name. As Sarria is approached, the
scenery becomes more rural, and under the brilliant November sunshine
reminds the traveller of the East, the square, white, low-roofed houses
rising amid olive and palm trees. The aloes and prickly pears on the waste
ground again and again recall Algeria. Here are vast stretches of
vegetable gardens and vineyards supplying the city markets, and standing
in their own grounds on sunny hill-sides, the quintas or country houses of
rich citizens and grandees.
From the little town of Sarria--hardly as yet to be called suburban--a
glorious view is obtained of city, port, and sea. The narrow dusty
streets, with their close-shuttered houses, have a sleepy look; yet Sarria
possesses one of the largest cotton-mills in Spain, several thousand hands
being employed by one firm. The branch railway ends at Sarria. Here
tourists and holiday-makers alight; the hardy pedestrian to reach the
summit of Mont Tibidaho on foot--a matter of two hours or so--the less
enterprising, to accept one of the covered cars awaiting excursionists
outside the station. Mont Tibidaho is the favorite holiday ground of the
citizens. Even in November numerous pleasure parties are sure to be found
here, and the large restaurants indicate the extent of summer patronage.
On the breezy heights round about are the sumptuous mansions of nobles and
merchant princes; whilst down below are numerous picturesque valleys,
notably that of San Cugat. The stranger fortunate enough to obtain
admission will find himself in the kind of fairyland described by Tennyson
in his "Haroun-al-Raschid," Owen Meredith in "The Siege of
Constantinople," or Gayangos in his delightful translation of the
"Chronicles of Al-Makkari." Marble courts, crystal fountains, magnificent
baths, mosaic pavements, statuary, tapestries, aviaries, rare exotics,
gold and silver plate, are now combined with all modern appliances of
comfort. A sojourn in one of the well-appointed hotels will suffice to
give some notion of Spanish society. During the holidays many families
from the city take up their quarters here. Social gatherings, picnics,
excursions, concerts, are the order of the day, and good military bands
enliven the gardens on Sundays.
To the south-east of Barcelona lies the suburb of Barceloneta, frequented
by the seafaring population. Penny boats ply between city and suburb, on
Sundays and holidays the music of a barrel-organ being thrown into the
bargain. The harbor is then black with spectators, and the boats and
little steamers, making the cruise of the port for half a franc, are
crowded with holiday-makers. The bright silk head-dresses of the women,
the men's crimson or scarlet sombreros and plaids, the uniforms of the
soldiers, the gay dresses of the ladies, make up a picturesque scene. On
board the boats the music of the barrel-organ must on no account be paid
for. A well-intentioned stranger who should offer the musician a penny is
given to understand that the treat is gratuitous and generously supplied
by the owners of the craft. Greed being almost universal in those parts of
the world frequented by tourists, it is gratifying to be able to chronicle
such exceptions. Seldom, indeed, has the sightseer at Barcelona to put his
hand in his pocket.
If inferior to other Spanish cities in picturesqueness and interest
generally, the capital of Catalonia atones for the deficit by its
abundance of resources. It possesses nothing to be called a
picture-gallery; the museums are second-rate, the collections of
antiquities inconsiderable. But what other city in Spain can boast of so
many learned bodies and diverse centers of intellectual activity?
Excessive devotion and scientific inquiry do not here seem at variance.
Strange to say, a population that seems perpetually on its knees is the
first to welcome modern ideas.
The Academy of Arts was founded in 1751, and owes its origin to the Junta,
or Tribunal of Commerce of Catalonia. This art school is splendidly lodged
in the Lonja Palace, and attached to it is a museum, containing a few
curious specimens of old Spanish masters, some rather poor copies of the
Italian schools, and one real artistic treasure of the first water. This
is a collection of studies in black and white by the gifted Fortuny, whose
first training was received here. The sketches are masterly, and atone for
the insignificance of the remaining collection. Students of both sexes are
admitted to the classes, the course of study embracing painting in all its
branches, modeling, etching, linear drawing and perspective, anatomy and
æsthetics. It is gratifying to find that girls attend these classes,
although as yet in small numbers.
The movement in favor of the higher education of women marches at a
snail's pace in Spain. The vast number of convents and what are called
"Escuelas Pias," or religious schools, attest the fact that even in the
most cosmopolitan and enlightened Spanish town the education of girls
still remains chiefly in the hands of the nuns. Lay schools and colleges
exist, also a normal school for the training of female teachers, founded a
few years ago. Here and there we find rich families entrusting their girls
to English governesses, but such cases are rare.
We must remember, however, that besides the numerous "Escuelas pias" and
secular schools, several exist opened under the auspices of the Spanish
Evangelical body, and also the League for the Promotion of lay Teaching.
We need not infer, then, that because they do not attend the municipal
schools the children go untaught.
How reluctantly Catholic countries are won over to educate their women we
have witnessed in France. Here in the twentieth century the chief
occupation of an educated Spanish lady seems to be that of counting her
beads in church.
Music is universally taught, the cultivation of the piano being nowhere
more assiduous. Pianoforte teachers may be counted by the hundred; and a
Conservatorium, besides academies due to private initiative, offers a
thorough musical training to the student. Elegant pianos, characterized by
great delicacy of tone and low price, are a leading feature of Barcelona
manufacture, notably of the firm Bernareggi.
The University, attended by two thousand five hundred students, was
founded so long ago as 1430, and rebuilt in 1873.
A technical school--the only complete school of arts and sciences existing
in Spain--was opened under the same roof in 1850; and, in connection with
it, night classes are held. Any workman provided with a certificate of
good conduct can attend these classes free of cost. Schools of
architecture and navigation are also attached to the University.
Thirst after knowledge characterizes all classes of the community. A
workman's literary club, or Athenæum, founded a few years back, is now a
flourishing institution, aided by municipal funds. No kind of recreation
is allowed within its walls. Night-schools opened here are attended by
several hundred scholars. Barcelona also boasts of an Academy of _Belles
Lettres_, the first founded in Spain; schools of natural science,
chemistry, agriculture, of medicine and surgery, of jurisprudence, an
academy devoted to the culture of the Catalonian language, and containing
library and museum. This society has greatly contributed to the protection
of ancient buildings throughout the province, besides amassing valuable
treasure, legend, botanical and geological specimens and antiquities. The
Archæological Society of Barcelona has also effected good work: to its
initiative the city is mainly indebted for the charming little collection
of antiquities known as the "Museo Provincial," before alluded to.
In places of public entertainment Barcelona is unusually rich. Its Opera
House, holding four thousand spectators, equals in spaciousness the
celebrated house of Moscow. The unpretentious exterior gives no idea of
the splendor within. A dozen theaters may be counted besides. Bull-fights,
alas! still disgrace the most advanced city of the Peninsula. The
bull-ring was founded in 1834, and the brutal spectacle still attracts
enormous crowds, chiefly consisting of natives. The bull-fight is almost
unanimously repudiated by foreign residents of all ranks.
A few words must now be said about the history of this ancient place. The
city founded here by Hamilcar Barco, father of the great Hannibal, is
supposed to stand on the site of one more ancient still, existing long
before the foundation of Rome. The Carthaginian city in 206 B. C. became a
Roman colonia, under the title of "Faventia Julia Augusta Pia Barzino,"
which was eclipsed in importance, however, by Tarragona, the Roman
capital. In 409 A. D. it was taken by the Goths, and under their
domination increased in size and influence, coining its own money stamped
with the legend "Barcinona." On the destruction of Tarragona by the Moors
Barcelona capitulated, was treated with clemency, and again became a
metropolis. After many vicissitudes it was ruled in the ninth century by a
Christian chief of its own, whose descendants till the twelfth governed it
under the title of Counts of Barcelona, later assuming that of Kings of
Aragon, to which kingdom the province was annexed. During the Middle Ages
Barcelona played a foremost part in the history of commerce. In the words
of Ford, "Like Carthage of old, it was the lord and terror of the
Mediterranean. It divided with Italy the enriching commerce of the East.
It was then a city of commerce, conquest, and courtiers, of taste,
learning, and luxury--the Athens of the troubadour."
Its celebrated commercial code, framed in the thirteenth century, obtained
acceptance throughout Europe. Here one of the first printing-presses in
Spain was set up, and here Columbus was received by Ferdinand and Isabella
after his discovery of a new world. A hundred years later a ship was
launched from the port, made to move by means of steam. The story of
Barcelona is henceforth but a catalogue of tyrannies and treacheries,
against which the brave, albeit turbulent, city struggled single-handed.
In 1711 it was bombarded and partly ruined by Philip V.; a few years
later, after a magnanimous defense, it was stormed by Berwick, on behalf
of Louis XIV., and given up to pillage, outrage, fire, and sword.
Napoleon's fraudulent seizure of Barcelona is one of the most shameful
pages of his shameful history. The first city--the key of Spain, as he
called it--only to be taken in fair war by eighty thousand men, was basely
entrapped, and remained in the hands of the French till the Treaty of
Paris in 1814. From that time Barcelona has only enjoyed fitful intervals
of repose. In 1827 a popular rising took place in favor of Don Carlos. In
1834 Queen Christina was opposed, and in 1840 public opinion declared for
Espartero. In 1856 and 1874 insurrections occurred, not without bloodshed.
Barcelona is a great gathering-place of merchants from all parts of
Europe. In its handsome hotels is heard a very Babel of tongues. The
principal manufactures consist of woolen stuffs--said to be inferior to
English in quality--silk, lace, firearms, hats, hardware, pianos; the
last, as has been already stated, of excellent quality, and low in price.
Porcelain, crystal, furniture, and inlaid work, must be included in this
list, also ironwork and stone blocks.
Beautifully situated on the Mediterranean between the mouths of two
rivers,--the Llobregat and the Besos--and possessing one of the finest
climates in the world, Barcelona is doubtless destined ere long to rival
Algiers as a health resort. Three lines of railway now connect it directly
with Paris, from which it is separated by twenty-eight hours' journey. The
traveller may leave Barcelona at five o'clock in the morning and reach
Lyons at midnight with only a change of carriages on the frontier. The
route _viâ_ Bordeaux is equally expeditious; that by way of
Clermont-Ferrand less so, but more picturesque. Hotels in the capital of
Catalonia leave nothing to desire on the score of management, hygiene,
comfort, and prices strictly regulated by tariff. The only drawback to be
complained of is the total absence of the feminine element--not a woman
to be seen on the premises. Good family hotels, provided with lady clerks
and chambermaids, is a decided desideratum. The traveller wishing to
attain a knowledge of the Spanish language, and see something of Spanish
life and manners, may betake himself to one of the numerous
boarding-houses.
Barcelona is very rich in philanthropic and charitable institutions.
Foremost of these is its Hospital of Santa Cruz, numbering six hundred
beds. It is under the conjoint management of sisters and brothers of
charity and lay nurses of both sexes. An asylum for the insane forms part
of the building, with annexes for the convalescent. The Hospital del
Sagrado Corazon, founded by public subscription in 1870 for surgical
cases, also speaks volumes for the munificence of the citizens. The only
passport required of the patient is poverty. One interesting feature about
this hospital is that the committee of management consists of ladies. The
nursing staff is formed of French Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul. Besides
these must be named the orphanage for upwards of two thousand children of
both sexes--Casa de Caridad de la Provincia de Barcelona--asylums for
abandoned infants, for the orphaned children of seamen, maternity
hospitals, crêches, etc. There is also a school for the blind and deaf
mutes, the first of the kind established in Spain. Here the blind of both
sexes receive a thorough musical training, and deaf mutes are taught
according to the system known as lip-speech. All teaching is gratuitous.
Barcelona possesses thirty-eight churches, without counting the chapels
attached to convents, and a vast number of conventual houses. Several
evangelical services are held on Sundays both in the city and in the
suburb of Barceloneta. The Protestant communities of Spain, England,
France, Germany, Sweden, and other countries, have here their
representative and organization. Sunday-schools and night-schools for
adults are held in connection with these churches. The Protestant body
seems active. We find here a branch depôt of the Religious Tract Society;
various religious magazines, many of them translations from the English
and German, are published. Among these are the "Revista Christiana,"
intended for the more thoughtful class of readers; "La Luz," organ of the
Reformed Church of Spain; and several illustrated periodicals for
children. Will Protestantism ever take deep root in the home of the
Inquisition? Time will show.
That very advanced political opinions should be held here need hardly
surprise us. We find the following Democratic clubs in existence: The
Historic Republican Club ("Centro Republicano Historico"), the Possibilist
Republican Club ("Circulo Republicano Possibilista"), the Democratic
Progressist Club, the Federal Republican Club, and many others. When next
a great popular movement takes place in Spain--and already the event looms
in the distance--without doubt the first impulse will be given at
Barcelona.
Electric lighting was early introduced here, a company being founded so
long back as 1880, and having branches in the capital, Seville, Valencia,
Bilbao, and other towns. The importance of Barcelona as a center of
commerce is attested by the extraordinary number of banks. At every turn
the stranger comes upon a bank. "Compared to the mighty hives of English
industry and skill, here everything is petty," wrote Ford, fifty years
ago. Very different would be his verdict could he revisit the Manchester
and Liverpool of Catalonia in our own day.
One curious feature of social life in Spain is the extraordinary number of
religious fête days and public holidays. No Bank Holiday Act is needed, as
in the neighboring country of France. Here is a list of days during which
business is for the most part suspended in this recreation-loving city:
Twelfth-cake Day is the great festival of the little ones--carnival is
kept up, if with less of former splendor, nevertheless with much spirit;
on Ash Wednesday rich and poor betake themselves to the country; Holy
Thursday and Good Friday are celebrated with great pomp in the churches;
on Easter Eve takes place a procession of shepherds in the park; Easter
Monday is a day given up to rural festivity; the 19th of March St. José's
Day--is a universal fête, hardly a family in Spain without a José among
its number. The first Sunday in May is a feast of flowers and poetic
competitions; the days consecrated to St. Juan and St. Pedro are public
holidays, patronized by enormous numbers of country-folks; All Saints' and
All Souls' Days are given up, as we have seen, to alternate devotion and
festivity. On the 20th of December is celebrated the Feast of the
Nativity, the fair and the displays of the shops attracting strangers from
all parts. But it is especially the days sacred to the Virgin that are
celebrated by all classes. Balls, banquets, processions, miracle-plays,
illuminations, bull-fights, horse-races, scholastic fêtes, industrial
exhibitions, civic ceremonial, besides solemn services, occupy old and
young, rich and poor. Feasting is the order of the day, and the
confectioners' windows are wonderful to behold.
Although many local customs are dying out, we may still see some of the
curious street sights described by Ford fifty years ago, and the
Mariolatry he deplored is still as active as ever. The goodly show of
dainties in the shops, however, belie his somewhat acrimonious description
of a Spanish reception. "Those who receive," he wrote, "provide very
little refreshment unless they wish to be covered with glory; space,
light, and a little bad music, are sufficient to amuse these merry,
easily-pleased souls, and satisfy their frugal bodies. To those who, by
hospitality and entertainment, can only understand eating and
drinking--food for man and beast--such hungry proceedings will be more
honored in the breach than in the observance; but these matters depend
much on latitude and longitude." Be this as it may, either the climate of
Barcelona has changed, or international communication has revolutionized
Spanish digestion. Thirty years ago, when travelling in Spain, it was no
unusual sight to see a spare, aristocratic hidalgo enter a restaurant,
and, with much form and ceremony, breakfast off a tiny omelette. Nowadays
we find plenty of Spanish guests at public ordinaries doing ample justice
to a plentiful board. English visitors in a Spanish house will not only
get good music, in addition to space and light, but abundant hospitality
of material sort.
The Spain of which Ford wrote so humorously, and, it must be admitted,
often so maliciously, is undergoing slow, but sure, transformation. Many
national characteristics remain--the passion for the brutal bull-fight
still disgraces a polished people, the women still spend the greater
portion of their lives in church, religious intolerance at the beginning
of the twentieth century must be laid to the charge of a slowly
progressive nation. On the other hand, and nowhere is the fact more
patent than at Barcelona, the great intellectual and social revolution,
described by contemporary Spanish novelists, is bringing the peninsula in
closer sympathy with her neighbors. Many young Spaniards, _for_ instance,
are now educated in England, English is freely spoken at Malaga, and its
literature is no longer unknown to Spanish readers. These facts indicate
coming change. The exclusiveness which has hitherto barred the progress of
this richly-dowed and attractive country is on the wane. Who shall say? We
may ere long see dark-eyed students from Barcelona at Girton College, and
a Spanish society for the protection of animals prohibiting the torture of
bulls and horses for the public pleasure.
Already--all honor to her name--a Spanish woman novelist, the gifted
Caballero, has made pathetic appeals to her country-folks for a gentler
treatment of animals in general. For the most part, it must be sadly
confessed, in vain!
In spite of its foremost position, in intellectual and commercial
pre-eminence, Barcelona has produced no famous men. Her noblest monument
is raised to an alien; Lopez, a munificent citizen, honored by a statue,
was born at Santander. Prim, although a Catalan, did not first see the
light in the capital. By some strange concatenation of events, this noble
city owes her fame rather to the collective genius and spirit of her
children than to any one. A magnanimous stepmother, she has adopted those
identified with her splendor to whom she did not herself give birth.
Balzac wittily remarks that the dinner is the barometer of the family
purse in Paris. One perceives whether Parisians are flourishing or no by a
glance at the daily board. Clothes afford a nice indication of
temperature all the world over. We have only to notice what people wear,
and we can construct a weather-chart for ourselves. Although the late
autumn was, on the whole, favorable, I left fires, furs, and overcoats in
Paris. At Lyons, a city afflicted with a climate the proper epithet of
which is "muggy," ladies had not yet discarded their summer clothes, and
were only just beginning to refurbish felt hats and fur-lined pelisses.
At Montpellier the weather was April-like--mild, blowy, showery;
waterproofs, goloshes, and umbrellas were the order of the day. On
reaching Barcelona I found a blazing sun, windows thrown wide open, and
everybody wearing the lightest garments. Such facts do duty for a
thermometer.
Boasting, as it does of one of the finest climates in the world, natural
position of rare beauty, a genial, cosmopolitan, and strikingly handsome
population, and lastly, accessibility, Barcelona should undoubtedly be a
health resort hardly second to Algiers. Why it is not, I will undertake to
explain.
In the first place, there is something that invalids and valetudinarians
require more imperatively than a perfect climate. They cannot do without
the ministrations of women. To the suffering, the depressed, the nervous,
feminine influence is ofttimes of more soothing--nay, healing--power than
any medical prescription.
Let none take the flattering unction to their souls--as well look for a
woman in a Bashaw's army, or on a man-of-war, as in the palatial,
well-appointed, otherwise irreproachable hotels of Barcelona! They boast
of marble floors, baths that would not have dissatisfied a Roman epicure,
salons luxurious as those of a West-end club, newspapers in a score of
languages, a phalanx of gentlemanly waiters, a varied ordinary, delicious
wines, but not a daughter of Eve, old or young, handsome or ugly--if,
indeed, there exists an ugly woman in Barcelona--to be caught sight of
anywhere! No charming landlady, as in French hotels, taking friendliest
interest in her guests, no housemaids, willing and nimble as the Marys and
Janes we have left at home, not even a rough, kindly, garrulous charwoman
scrubbing the floors. The fashionable hotel here is a vast barrack
conducted on strictly impersonal principles. Visitors obtain their money's
worth, and pay their bills. There the transaction between innkeeper and
traveller ends.
Good family hotels or "pensions," in which invalids would find a home-like
element, are sadly needed in this engaging, highly-favored city. The next
desideratum is a fast train from Port Bou--the first Spanish town on the
frontier. An express on the Spanish line would shorten the journey to
Lyons by several hours. New carriages are needed as much as new iron
roads. Many an English third-class is cleaner and more comfortable than
the so-called "first" here. It must be added that the officials are all
politeness and attention, and that beyond slowness and shabbiness the
traveller has nothing to complain of. Exquisite urbanity is still a
characteristic of the Barcelonese as it was in the age of Cervantes. One
exception will be mentioned farther on.
If there are no women within the hotel walls--except, of course, stray
lady tourists--heaven be praised, there are enough, and to spare, of most
bewitching kind without. Piquancy is, perhaps, the foremost charm of a
Spanish beauty, whether a high-born señora in her brougham, or a
flower-girl at her stall. One and all seem born to turn the heads of the
other sex, after the fashion of Carmen in Merimée's story. Nor is outward
attraction confined to women. The city police, cab-drivers,
tramway-conductors, all possess what Schopenhauer calls the best possible
letter of introduction, namely, good looks.
The number of the police surprise us. These bustling, brilliant streets,
with their cosmopolitan crowds, seem the quietest, most orderly in the
world. It seems hard to believe that this tranquillity and contentment
should be fallacious--on the surface only. Yet such is the case, as shown
by the recent outbreak of rioting and bloodshed.
"I have seen revolution after revolution," said to me a Spanish gentleman
of high position, an hidalgo of the old school; "I expect to see more if
my life is sufficiently prolonged. Spain has no government; each in power
seeks but self-aggrandizement. Our army is full of Boulangers, each ready
to usurp power for his own ends. You suggest a change of dynasty? We could
not hope to be thereby the gainers. A Republic, say you? That also has
proved a failure with us. Ah, you English are happy; you do not need to
change abruptly the existing order of things, you effect revolutions more
calmly."
I observed that perhaps national character and temperament had something
to do with the matter. He replied very sadly, "You are right; we
Southerners are more impetuous, of fiercer temper. Whichever way I look, I
see no hope for unhappy Spain."
Such somber reflections are difficult to realize by the passing traveller.
Yet, when we consider the tremendous force of such a city as Barcelona,
its progressive tendencies, its spirit of scientific inquiry, we can but
admit that an Ultramontane regency and reactionary government must be out
of harmony with the tendencies of modern Spain.
There is only one occupation which seems to have a deteriorating effect
upon the Spanish temper. The atmosphere of the post-office, at any rate,
makes a Catalan rasping as an east wind, acrimonious as a sloe-berry. I
had been advised to provide myself with a passport before revisiting
Spain, but I refused to do so on principle.
What business have we with this relic of barbarism at the beginning of the
twentieth century, in times of peace among a friendly people? The taking a
passport under such circumstances seemed to me as much of an anachronism
as the wearing of a scapular, or seeking the royal touch for scrofula. By
pure accident, a registered letter containing bank notes was addressed to
me at the Poste Restante. Never was such a storm in a teacup, such
groaning of the mountain before the creeping forth of a tiny mouse! The
delivery of registered letters in Spain is accompanied with as much form
as a marriage contract in France. Let future travellers in expectation of
such documents provide themselves, not only with a passport, but a copy of
their baptismal register, of the marriage certificate of their parents,
the family Bible--no matter its size--and any other proofs of identity
they can lay hands upon. They will find none superfluous.
V
MARSEILLES
Its Greek founders and early history--Superb view from the sea--The
Cannebière--The Parado and Chemin de la Corniche--Château d'If and
Monte-Cristo--Influence of the Greeks in Marseilles--Ravages by plague
and pestilence--Treasures of the Palais des Arts--The chapel of Notre
Dame de la Garde--The new Marseilles and its future.
About six hundred years before the birth of Christ, when the
Mediterranean, ringed round with a long series of commercial colonies, was
first beginning to transform itself with marvelous rapidity into "a Greek
lake," a body of adventurous Hellenic mariners--young Columbuses of their
day--full of life and vigor, sailed forth from Phocæa in Asia Minor, and
steered their course, by devious routes, to what was then the Far West, in
search of a fitting and unoccupied place in which to found a new trading
city. Hard pressed by the Persians on their native shore, these free young
Greeks--the Pilgrim Fathers of modern Marseilles--left behind for ever the
city of their birth, and struck for liberty in some distant land, where no
Cyrus or Xerxes could ever molest them. Sailing away past Greece and
Sicily, and round Messina into the almost unknown Tyrrhenian Sea, the
adventurous voyagers arrived at last, after various false starts in
Corsica and elsewhere, at some gaunt white hills of the Gaulish coast,
and cast anchor finally in a small but almost land-locked harbor, under
the shelter of some barren limestone mountains. Whether they found a
Phoenician colony already established on the spot or not, matters as
little to history nowadays as whether their leaders' names were really
Simos and Protis or quite otherwise. What does matter is the indubitable
fact that Massalia, as its Greek founders called it, preserved through all
its early history the impress of a truly Hellenic city; and that even to
this moment much good Greek blood flows, without question, in the hot
veins of all its genuine native-born citizens.
The city thus founded has had a long, a glorious, and an eventful history.
Marseilles is to-day the capital of the Mediterranean, the true commercial
metropolis of that inland sea which now once more has become a single
organic whole, after its long division by the Mohammedan conquest of North
Africa and the Levant into two distinct and hostile portions. Naples, it
is true, has a larger population; but then, a population of Neapolitan
lazzaroni, mere human drones lounging about their hive and basking in the
sunlight, does not count for much, except for the macaroni trade. What
Venice once was, that Marseilles is to-day; the chief gate of
Mediterranean traffic, the main mart of merchants who go down in ships on
the inland sea. In the Cannebière and the Old Port, she possesses, indeed,
as Edmond About once graphically phrased it, "an open door upon the
Mediterranean and the whole world." The steamers and sailing vessels that
line her quays bind together the entire Mediterranean coast into a single
organic commercial whole. Here is the packet for Barcelona and Malaga;
there, the one for Naples, Malta, and Constantinople. By this huge liner,
sunning herself at La Joliette, we can go to Athens and Alexandria; by
that, to Algiers, Cagliari, and Tunis. Nay, the Suez Canal has extended
her bounds beyond the inland sea to the Indian Ocean; and the Pillars of
Hercules no longer restrain her from free use of the great Atlantic
water-way. You may take ship, if you will, from the Quai de la Fraternité
for Bombay or Yokohama, for Rio or Buenos Ayres, for Santa Cruz,
Teneriffe, Singapore, or Melbourne. And this wide extension of her
commercial importance Marseilles owes, mainly no doubt, to her exceptional
advantages of natural position, but largely also, I venture to think, to
the Hellenic enterprise of her acute and vigorous Græco-Gaulish
population.
And what a marvelous history has she not behind her! First of all, no
doubt, a small fishing and trading station of prehistoric Gaulish or
Ligurian villagers occupied the site where now the magnificent façade of
the Bourse commemorates the names of Massalia's greatest Phocæan
navigators. Then the Phoenicians supervened upon the changeful scene, and
built those antique columns and forgotten shrines whose scanty remains
were recently unearthed in the excavations for making the Rue de la
République. Next came the early Phocæan colonists, reinforced a little
later by the whole strength of their unconquerable townsmen, who sailed
away in a body, according to the well-known legend preserved in Herodotus,
when they could no longer hold out against the besieging Persian. The
Greek town became as it were a sort of early Calcutta for the Gaulish
trade, with its own outlying colonies at Nice, Antibes, and Hyères, and
its inland "factories" (to use the old familiar Anglo-Indian word) at
Tarascon, Avignon, and many other ancient towns of the Rhône valley. Her
admirals sailed on every known sea: Euthymenes explored the coasts of
Africa as far as Senegal; Pytheas followed the European shore past Britain
and Ireland to the north of the Shetlands. Till the Roman arrived upon the
Gaulish coast with his dreaded short-sword, Massalia, in short, remained
undisputed queen of all the western Mediterranean waters.
Before the wolf of the Capitol, however, all stars paled. Yet even under
the Roman Empire Massilia (as the new conquerors called the name, with a
mere change of vowel) retained her Greek speech and manners, which she
hardly lost (if we may believe stray hints in later historians) till the
very eve of the barbarian invasion. With the period of the Crusades, the
city of Euthymenes became once more great and free, and hardly lost her
independence completely up to the age of Louis XIV. It was only after the
French Revolution, however, that she began really to supersede Venice as
the true capital of the Mediterranean. The decline of the Turkish power,
the growth of trade with Alexandria and the Levant, the final crushing of
the Barbary pirates, the conquest of Algeria, and, last of all, the
opening of the Suez Canal--a French work--all helped to increase her
commerce and population by gigantic strides in half a dozen decades. At
the present day Marseilles is the chief maritime town of France, and the
acknowledged center of Mediterranean travel and traffic.
The right way for the stranger to enter Marseilles is, therefore, by sea,
the old-established high road of her antique commerce. The Old Port and
the Cannebière are her front door, while the railway from Paris leads you
in at best, as it were, through shabby corridors, by a side entry. Seen
from the sea, indeed, Marseilles is superb. I hardly know whether the
whole Mediterranean has any finer approach to a great town to display
before the eyes of the artistic traveller. All round the city rises a
semicircle of arid white hills, barren and bare indeed to look upon; but
lighted up by the blue Provençal sky with a wonderful flood of borrowed
radiance, bringing out every jutting peak and crag through the clear dry
air in distinct perspective. Their sides are dotted with small square
white houses, the famous _bastides_ or country boxes of the good
Marseillais bourgeois. In front, a group of sunlit rocky isles juts out
from the bay, on one of which tower the picturesque bastions of the
Chateau d'If, so familiar to the reader of "Monte-Cristo." The foreground
is occupied by the town itself, with its forest of masts, and the new dome
of its checkered and gaudy Byzantine Cathedral, which has quite supplanted
the old cathedral of St. Lazare, of which only a few traces remain. In the
middle distance the famous old pilgrimage chapel of Notre Dame de la Garde
crowns the summit of a pyramidal hill, with its picturesque mass of
confused architecture. Away to right and left, those endless white hills
gleam on with almost wearying brightness in the sun for miles together;
but full in front, where the eye rests longest, the bustle and commotion
of a great trading town teem with varied life upon the quays and
landing-places.
If you are lucky enough to enter Marseilles for the first time by the Old
Port, you find yourself at once in the very thick of all that is most
characteristic and vivid and local in the busy city. That little oblong
basin, shut in on its outer side by projecting hills, was indeed the
making of the great town. Of course the Old Port is now utterly
insufficient for the modern wants of a first-class harbor; yet it still
survives, not only as a historical relic but as a living reality,
thronged even to-day with the crowded ships of all nations. On the quay
you may see the entire varied Mediterranean world in congress assembled.
Here Greeks from Athens and Levantines from Smyrna jostle cheek by jowl
with Italians from Genoa and Arabs or Moors from Tangier or Tunis. All
costumes and all manners are admissible. The crowd is always excited, and
always animated. A babel of tongues greets your ears as you land, in which
the true Marseillais dialect of the Provençal holds the chief place--a
graceful language, wherein the predominant Latin element has not even yet
wholly got rid of certain underlying traces of Hellenic origin. Bright
color, din, life, movement: in a moment the traveller from a northern
climate recognizes the patent fact that he has reached a new world--that
vivid, impetuous, eager southern world, which has its center to-day on the
Provençal seaboard.
[Illustration]
Go a yard or two farther into the crowded Cannebière, and the difference
between this and the chilly North will at each step be forced even more
strikingly upon you. That famous thoroughfare is firmly believed by every
good son of old Marseilles to be, in the familiar local phrase, "la plus
belle rue de l'univers." My own acquaintance with the precincts of the
universe being somewhat limited (I have never travelled myself, indeed,
beyond the narrow bounds of our own solar system), I should be loth to
endorse too literally and unreservedly this sweeping commendation of the
Marseillais mind; but as regards our modest little planet at least, I
certainly know no other street within my own experience (save Broadway,
New York) that has quite so much life and variety in it as the Cannebière.
It is not long, to be sure, but it is broad and airy, and from morning
till night its spacious _trottoirs_ are continually crowded by such a
surging throng of cosmopolitan humanity as you will hardly find elsewhere
on this side of Alexandria. For cosmopolitanism is the true key-note of
Marseilles, and the Cannebière is a road that leads in one direction
straight to Paris, but opens in the other direction full upon Algiers and
Italy, upon Egypt and India.
What a picture it offers, too, of human life, that noisy Cannebière! By
day or by night it is equally attractive. On it centers all that is alive
in Marseilles--big hotels, glittering cafés, luxurious shops, scurrying
drays, high-stepping carriage-horses, and fashionably-dressed humanity; an
endless crowd, many of them hatless and bonnetless in true southern
fashion, parade without ceasing its ringing pavements. At the end of all,
the Old Port closes the view with its serried masts, and tells you the
wherefore of this mixed society. The Cannebière, in short, is the Rue de
Rivoli of the Mediterranean, the main thoroughfare of all those teeming
shores of oil and wine, where culture still lingers by its ancient cradle.
Close to the Quai, and at the entrance of the Cannebière, stands the
central point of business in new Marseilles, the Bourse, where the filial
piety of the modern Phocæans has done ample homage to the sacred memory of
their ancient Hellenic ancestors. For in the place of honor on the façade
of that great palace of commerce the chief post has been given, as was
due, to the statues of the old Massaliote admirals, Pytheas and
Euthymenes. It is this constant consciousness of historical continuity
that adds so much interest to Mediterranean towns. One feels as one stands
before those two stone figures in the crowded Cannebière, that after all
humanity is one, and that the Phocæans themselves are still, in the
persons of their sons, among us.
The Cannebière runs nearly east and west, and is of no great length, under
its own name at least; but under the transparent alias of the Rue de
Noailles it continues on in a straight line till it widens out at last
into the Allées de Meilhan, the favorite haunt of all the gossips and
quidnuncs of Marseilles. The Allées de Meilhan, indeed, form the _beau
idéal_ of the formal and fashionable French promenade. Broad avenues of
plane trees cast a mellow shade over its well-kept walks, and the neatest
of nurses in marvelous caps and long silk streamers dandle the laciest and
fluffiest of babies, in exquisite costumes, with ostentatious care, upon
their bountiful laps. The stone seats on either side buzz with the latest
news of the town; the Zouave flirts serenely with the bonnetless
shop-girls; the sergeant-de-ville stalks proudly down the midst, and
barely deigns to notice such human weaknesses. These Allées are the
favorite haunt of all idle Marseilles, below the rank of "carriage
company," and it is probable that Satan finds as much mischief still for
its hands to do here as in any other part of that easy-going city.
At right angles to the main central artery thus constituted by the
Cannebière, the Rue de Noailles, and the Allées de Meilhan runs the second
chief stream of Marseillais life, down a channel which begins as the Rue
d'Aix and the Cours Belzunce, and ends, after various intermediate
disguises, as the Rue de Rome and the Prado. Just where it crosses the
current of the Cannebière, this polyonymous street rejoices in the title
of the Cours St. Louis. Close by is the place where the flower-women sit
perched up quaintly in their funny little pulpits, whence they hand down
great bunches of fresh dewy violets or pinky-white rosebuds, with
persuasive eloquence to the obdurate passer-by. This flower-market is one
of the sights of Marseilles, and I know no other anywhere--not even at
Nice--so picturesque or so old-world. It keeps up something of the true
Provençal flavor, and reminds one that here, in this Greek colony, we are
still in the midst of the land of roses and of Good King René, the land of
troubadours, and gold and flowers, and that it is the land of sun and
summer sunshine.
As the Rue de Rome emerges from the town and gains the suburb, it clothes
itself in overhanging shade of plane-trees, and becomes known forthwith as
the Prado--that famous Prado, more sacred to the loves and joys of the
Marseillais than the Champs Elysées are to the born Parisian. For the
Prado is the afternoon-drive of Marseilles, the Rotten Row of local
equestrianism, the rallying-place and lounge of all that is fashionable in
the Phocæan city as the Allées de Meilhan are of all that is bourgeois or
frankly popular. Of course the Prado does not differ much from all other
promenades of its sort in France: the upper-crust of the world has grown
painfully tame and monotonous everywhere within the last twenty-five
years: all flavor and savor of national costume or national manners has
died out of it in the lump, and left us only in provincial centers the
insipid graces of London and Paris, badly imitated. Still, the Prado is
undoubtedly lively; a broad avenue bordered with magnificent villas of the
meretricious Haussmannesque order of architecture; and it possesses a
certain great advantage over every other similar promenade I know of in
the world--it ends at last in one of the most beautiful and picturesque
sea-drives in all Europe.
This sea-drive has been christened by the Marseillais, with pardonable
pride, the Chemin de la Corniche, in humble imitation of that other great
Corniche road which winds its tortuous way by long, slow gradients over
the ramping heights of the Turbia between Nice and Mentone. And a "ledge
road" it is in good earnest, carved like a shelf out of the solid
limestone. When I first knew Marseilles there was no Corniche: the Prado,
a long flat drive through a marshy plain, ended then abruptly on the
sea-front; and the hardy pedestrian who wished to return to town by way of
the cliffs had to clamber along a doubtful and rocky path, always
difficult, often dangerous, and much obstructed by the attentions of the
prowling _douanier_, ever ready to arrest him as a suspected smuggler.
Nowadays, however, all that is changed. The French engineers--always
famous for their roads--have hewn a broad and handsome carriage-drive out
of the rugged rock, here hanging on a shelf sheer above the sea; there
supported from below by heavy buttresses of excellent masonwork; and have
given the Marseillais one of the most exquisite promenades to be found
anywhere on the seaboard of the Continent. It somewhat resembles the new
highway from Villefranche to Monte Carlo; but the islands with which the
sea is here studded recall rather Cannes or the neighborhood of Sorrento.
The seaward views are everywhere delicious; and when sunset lights up the
bare white rocks with pink and purple, no richer coloring against the
emerald green bay, can possibly be imagined in art or nature. It is as
good as Torquay; and how can cosmopolitan say better?
On the Corniche, too, is the proper place nowadays to eat that famous old
Marseillais dish, immortalized by Thackeray, and known as _bouillabaisse_.
The Réserve de Roubion in particular prides itself on the manufacture of
this strictly national Provençal dainty, which proves, however, a little
too rich and a little too mixed in its company for the fastidious taste of
most English gourmets. Greater exclusiveness and a more delicate
eclecticism in matters of cookery please our countrymen better than such
catholic comprehensiveness. I once asked a white-capped Provençal _chef_
what were the precise ingredients of his boasted _bouillabaisse_; and the
good man opened his palms expansively before him as he answered with a
shrug, "Que voulez-vous? Fish to start with; and then--a handful of
anything that happens to be lying about loose in the kitchen."
Near the end of the Prado, at its junction with the Corniche, modern
Marseilles rejoices also in its park or Public Garden. Though laid out on
a flat and uninteresting plain, with none of the natural advantages of the
Bois de Boulogne or of the beautiful Central Park at New York, these
pretty grounds are nevertheless interesting to the northern visitor, who
makes his first acquaintance with the Mediterranean here, by their curious
and novel southern vegetation. The rich types of the south are everywhere
apparent. Clumps of bamboo in feathery clusters overhang the ornamental
waters; cypresses and araucarias shade the gravel walks; the eucalyptus
showers down its fluffy flowers upon the grass below; the quaint
Salisburia covers the ground in autumn with its pretty and curious
maidenhair-shaped foliage. Yuccas and cactuses flourish vigorously in the
open air, and even fan-palms manage to thrive the year round in cosy
corners. It is an introduction to the glories of Rivieran vegetation, and
a faint echo of the magnificent tones of the North African flora.
As we wind in and out on our way back to Marseilles by the Corniche road,
with the water ever dashing white from the blue against the solid crags,
whose corners we turn at every tiny headland, the most conspicuous object
in the nearer view is the Château d'If, with the neighboring islets of
Pomègues and Ratonneau. Who knows not the Château d'If, by name at least,
has wasted his boyhood. The castle is not indeed of any great
antiquity--it was built by order of François I--nor can it lay much claim
to picturesqueness of outline or beauty of architecture; but in historical
and romantic associations it is peculiarly rich, and its situation is
bold, interesting, and striking. It was here that Mirabeau was imprisoned
under a _lettre de cachet_ obtained by his father, the friend of man; and
it was here, to pass from history to romance, that Monte-Cristo went
through those marvelous and somewhat incredible adventures which will keep
a hundred generations of school-boys in breathless suspense long after
Walter Scott is dead and forgotten.
But though the Prado and the Corniche are alive with carriages on sunny
afternoons, it is on the quays themselves, and around the docks and
basins, that the true vivacious Marseillais life must be seen in all its
full flow and eagerness. The quick southern temperament, the bronzed
faces, the open-air existence, the hurry and bustle of a great seaport
town, display themselves there to the best advantage. And the ports of
Marseilles are many and varied: their name is legion, and their shipping
manifold. As long ago as 1850, the old square port, the Phocæan harbor,
was felt to have become wholly insufficient for the needs of modern
commerce in Marseilles. From that day to this, the accommodation for
vessels has gone on increasing with that incredible rapidity which marks
the great boom of modern times. Never, surely, since the spacious days of
great Elizabeth, has the world so rapidly widened its borders as in these
latter days in which we are all living. The Pacific and the Indian Ocean
have joined the Atlantic. In 1853 the Port de la Joliette was added,
therefore, to the Old Harbor, and people thought Marseilles had met all
the utmost demands of its growing commerce. But the Bassin du Lazaret and
the Bassin d'Arenc were added shortly after; and then, in 1856, came the
further need for yet another port, the Bassin National. In 1872 the Bassin
de la Gare Maritime was finally executed; and now the Marseillais are
crying out again that the ships know not where to turn in the harbor.
Everywhere the world seems to cosmopolitanize itself and to extend its
limits: the day of small things has passed away for ever; the day of vast
ports, huge concerns, gigantic undertakings is full upon us.
Curiously enough, however, in spite of all this rapid and immense
development, it is still to a great extent the Greek merchants who hold in
their hands--even in our own time--the entire commerce and wealth of the
old Phocæan city. A large Hellenic colony of recent importation still
inhabits and exploits Marseilles. Among the richly-dressed crowd of
southern ladies that throngs the Prado on a sunny afternoon in full
season, no small proportion of the proudest and best equipped who loll
back in their carriages were born at Athens or in the Ionic Archipelago.
For even to this day, these modern Greeks hang together wonderfully with
old Greek persistence. Their creed keeps them apart from the Catholic
French, in whose midst they live, and trade, and thrive; for, of course,
they are all members of the "Orthodox" Church, and they retain their
orthodoxy in spite of the ocean of Latin Christianity which girds them
round with its flood on every side. The Greek community, in fact, dwells
apart, marries apart, worships apart, and thinks apart. The way the
marriages, in particular, are most frequently managed, differs to a very
curious extent from our notions of matrimonial proprieties. The system--as
duly explained to me one day under the shady plane-trees of the Allées de
Meilhan, in very choice modern Greek, by a Hellenic merchant of
Marseilles, who himself had been "arranged for" in this very manner--is
both simple and mercantile to the highest degree yet practised in any
civilized country. It is "marriage by purchase" pure and simple; only
here, instead of the husband buying the wife, it is the wife who
practically buys the husband.
A trader or ship-owner of Marseilles, let us say, has two sons, partners
in his concern, who he desires to marry. It is important, however, that
the wives he selects for them should not clash with the orthodoxy of the
Hellenic community. Our merchant, therefore, anxious to do the best in
both worlds at once, writes to his correspondents of the great Greek
houses in Smyrna, Constantinople, Beyrout, and Alexandria; nay, perhaps
even in London, Manchester, New York, and Rio, stating his desire to
settle his sons in life, and the amount of _dot_ they would respectively
require from the ladies upon whom they decided to bestow their name and
affections. The correspondents reply by return of post, recommending to
the favorable attention of the happy swains certain Greek young ladies in
the town of their adoption, whose _dot_ and whose orthodoxy can be
equally guaranteed as beyond suspicion. Photographs and lawyers' letters
are promptly exchanged; settlements are drawn up to the mutual
satisfaction of both the high contracting parties; and when all the
business portion of the transaction has been thoroughly sifted, the young
ladies are consigned, with the figs and dates, as per bill of lading, to
the port of entry, where their lords await them, and are duly married, on
the morning of their arrival, at the Greek church in the Rue de la Grande
Armée, by the reverend archimandrite. The Greeks are an eminently
commercial people, and they find this idyllic mode of conducting a
courtship not only preserves the purity of the orthodox faith and the
Hellenic blood, but also saves an immense amount of time which might
otherwise be wasted on the composition of useless love-letters.
It was not so, however, in the earlier Greek days. Then, the colonists of
Marseilles and its dependent towns must have intermarried freely with the
native Gaulish and Ligurian population of all the tributary Provençal
seaboard. The true antique Hellenic stock--the Aryan Achæans of the
classical period--were undoubtedly a fair, a light-haired race, with a far
more marked proportion of the blond type than now survives among their
mixed and degenerate modern descendants. In Greece proper, a large
intermixture of Albanian and Sclavonic blood, which the old Athenians
would have stigmatized as barbarian or Scythian, has darkened the
complexion and blackened the hair of a vast majority of the existing
population. But in Marseilles, curiously enough, and in the surrounding
country, the genuine old light Greek type has left its mark to this day
upon the physique of the inhabitants. In the ethnographical map of
France, prepared by two distinguished French savants, the other
Mediterranean departments are all, without exception, marked as "dark" or
"very dark," while the department of the Bouches du Rhône is marked as
"white," having, in fact, as large a proportion of fair complexions, blond
hair, and light eyes as the eastern semi-German provinces, or as Normandy
and Flanders. This curious survival of a very ancient type in spite of
subsequent deluges, must be regarded as a notable instance of the way in
which the popular stratum everywhere outlasts all changes of conquest and
dynasty, of governing class and ruling family.
Just think, indeed, how many changes and revolutions in this respect that
fiery Marseilles has gone through since the early days of her Hellenic
independence! First came that fatal but perhaps indispensable error of
inviting the Roman aid against her Ligurian enemies, which gave the Romans
their earliest foothold in Southern Gaul. Then followed the foundation of
Aquæ Sextiæ or Aix, the first Roman colony in what was soon to be the
favorite province of the new conquerors. After that, in the great civil
war, the Greeks of Marseilles were unlucky enough to espouse the losing
cause; and, in the great day of Cæsar's triumph, their town was reduced
accordingly to the inferior position of a mere Roman dependency. Merged
for a while in the all-absorbing empire, Marseilles fell at last before
Visigoths and Burgundians in the stormy days of that vast upheaval, during
which it is impossible for even the minutest historian to follow in detail
the long list of endless conquests and re-conquests, while the wandering
tribes ebbed and flowed on one another in wild surging waves of refluent
confusion. Ostrogoth and Frank, Saracen and Christian, fought one after
another for possession of the mighty city. In the process her Greek and
Roman civilization was wholly swept away and not a trace now remains of
those glorious basilicas, temples, and arches, which must once, no doubt,
have adorned the metropolis of Grecian Gaul far more abundantly than they
still adorn mere provincial centers like Arles and Nîmes, Vienne, and
Orange. But at the end of it all, when Marseilles emerges once more into
the light of day as an integral part of the Kingdom of Provence, it still
retains its essentially Greek population, fairer and handsomer than the
surrounding dark Ligurian stock; it still boasts its clear-cut Greek
beauty of profile, its Hellenic sharpness of wit and quickness of
perception. And how interesting in this relation to note, too, that
Marseilles kept up, till a comparatively late period in the Middle Ages,
her active connection with the Byzantine Empire; and that her chief
magistrate was long nominated--in name at least, if not in actual fact--by
the shadowy representative of the Cæsars at Constantinople.
May we not attribute to this continuous persistence of the Greek element
in the life of Marseilles something of that curious local and
self-satisfied feeling which northern Frenchmen so often deride in the
born Marseillais? With the Greeks, the sense of civic individuality and
civic separateness was always strong. Their _Polis_ was to them their
whole world--the center of everything. They were Athenians, Spartans,
Thebans first; Greeks or even Boeotians and Lacedæmonians in the second
place only. And the Marseillais bourgeois, following the traditions of his
Phocæan ancestry, is still in a certain sense the most thoroughly
provincial, the most uncentralized and anti-Parisian of modern French
citizens. He believes in Marseilles even more devoutly than the average
boulevardier believes in Paris. To him the Cannebière is the High Street
of the world, and the Cours St. Louis the hub of the universe. How pleased
with himself and all his surroundings he is, too! "At Marseilles, we do
so-and-so," is a frequent phrase which seems to him to settle off-hand all
questions of etiquette, of procedure, or of the fitness of things
generally. "Massilia locuta est; causa finita est." That anything can be
done better anywhere than it is done in the Cannebière or the Old Port is
an idea that never even so much as occurs to his smart and quick but
somewhat geographically limited intelligence. One of the best and
cleverest of Mars's clever Marseillais caricatures exhibits a good
bourgeois from the Cours Pierre Puget, in his Sunday best, abroad on his
travels along the Genoese Riviera. On the shore at San Remo, the happy,
easy-going, conceited fellow, brimming over to the eyes with the
happy-go-lucky Cockney joy of the South, sees a couple of pretty Italian
fisher-girls mending their nets, and addresses them gaily in his own soft
dialect: "Hé bien, més pitchounettes, vous êtes tellement croussetillantes
que, sans éza
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