Chapter 24

Our guide led us to the back gate of our hotel garden, where we found ourselves in the company of several other students of English. There was our charming young guide of the day before and there was that sad hunchback already mentioned, and there was their teacher who seemed so few years older and master of so little more English. Together we looked into the valley into which the vision makes its prodigious plunge at Ronda before lifting again over the fertile plain to the amphitheater of its mighty mountains; and there we took leave of that nice boy who would not follow us into our garden because, as he showed us by the sign, it was forbidden to any but guests. He said he was going into the country with his family for the afternoon, and with some difficulty he owned that he expected to play there; it was truly an admission hard to make for a boy of his gravity. We shook hands at parting with him, and with our yesterday’s guide, and with the teacher and with the hunchback; they all offered it in the bond of our common English; and then we felt that we had parted with much, very much of what was sweetest and best in Ronda.

VI

The day had been so lovely till now that we said we would stay many days in Ronda, and we loitered in the sun admiring the garden; the young landlady among her flowers said that all the soil had to be brought for it in carts and panniers, and this made us admire its autumn blaze the more. That afternoon we had planned taking our tea on the terrace for the advantage of looking at the sunset light on the mountains, but suddenly great black clouds blotted it out. Then we lost courage; it appeared to us that it would be both brighter and, warmer by the sea and that near Gibraltar we could more effectually prevent our steamer from getting away to New York without us. We called for our bill, and after luncheon the head waiter who brought it said that the large black cat which had just made friends with us always woke him if he slept late in the morning and followed him into the town like a dog when he walked there.

It was hard to part with a cat like that, but it was hard to part with anything in Ronda. Yet we made the break, and instead of ruining over the precipitous face of the rock where the city stands, as we might have expected, we glided smoothly down the long grade into the storm-swept lowlands sloping to the sea. They grew more fertile as we descended and after we had left a mountain valley where the mist hung grayest and chillest, we suddenly burst into a region of mellow fruitfulness, where the haze was all luminous, and where the oranges hung gold and green upon the trees, and the women brought grapes and peaches and apples to the train. The towns seemed to welcome us southward and the woods we knew instantly to be of cork trees, with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza under their branches anywhere we chose to look.

Otherwise, the journey was without those incidents which have so often rendered these pages thrilling. Just before we left Ronda a couple, self-evidently the domestics of a good family, got into our first-class carriage though they had unquestionably only third-class tickets. They had the good family’s dog with them, and after an unintelligible appeal to us and to the young English couple in the other corner, they remained and banished any misgivings they had by cheerful dialogue. The dog coiled himself down at my feet and put his nose close to my ankles, so that without rousing his resentment I could not express in Spanish my indignation at what I felt to be an outrageous intrusion: servants, we all are, but in traveling first class one must draw the line at dogs, I said as much to the English couple, but they silently refused any part in the demonstration. Presently the conductor came out to the window for our fares, and he made the Spanish pair observe that they had third-class tickets and their dog had none. He told them they must get out, but they noted to him the fact that none of us had objected to their company, or their dog’s, and they all remained, referring themselves to us for sympathy when the conductor left. After the next station the same thing happened with little change; the conductor was perhaps firmer and they rather more yielding in their disobedience. Once more after a stop the conductor appeared and told them that when the train halted again, they and their dog must certainly get out. Then something surprising happened: they really got out, and very amiably; perhaps it was the place where they had always meant to get out; but it was a great triumph for the railway company, which owed nothing in the way of countenance to the young English couple; they had done nothing but lunch from their basket and bottle. We ourselves arrived safely soon after nightfall at Algeciras, just in time for dinner in the comfortable mother-hotel whose pretty daughter had made us so much at home in Ronda.

XIII. ALGECIRAS AND TARIFA

When we walked out on the terrace of our hotel at Algeciras after breakfast, the first morning, we were greeted by the familiar form of the Rock of Gibraltar still advertising, as we had seen it three years before, a well-known American insurance company. It rose beyond five miles of land-locked water, which we were to cross every other day for three weeks on many idle and anxious errands, until we sailed from it at last for New York.

Meanwhile Algeciras was altogether delightful not only because of our Kate-Greenaway hotel, embowered in ten or twelve acres of gardened ground, with walks going and coming under its palms and eucalyptuses, beside beds of geraniums and past trellises of roses and jasmines, all in the keeping of a captive stork which was apt unexpectedly to meet the stranger and clap its formidable mandibles at him, and then hop away with half-lifted wings. Algeciras had other claims which it urged day after day more winningly upon us as the last place where we should feel the charm of Spain unbroken in the tradition which reaches from modern fact far back into antique fable. I will not follow it beyond the historic clue, for I think the reader ought to be satisfied with knowing that the Moors held it as early as the seven hundreds and as late as the thirteen hundreds, when the Christians definitively recaptured it and their kings became kings of Algeciras as well as kings of Spain, and remain so to this day. At the end of the eighteenth century one of these kings made it his lookout for watching the movements of the inimical English fleets, and then Algeciras slumbered again, haunted only by “a deep dream of peace” till the European diplomats, rather unexpectedly assisted by an American envoy, made it the scene of their famous conference for settling the Morocco question in. 1906.

I think this is my whole duty to the political interest of Algeciras, and until I come to our excursion to Tarifa I am going to give myself altogether to our pleasure in the place unvexed by any event of history. I disdain even to note that the Moors took the city again from the Christians, after twenty-five years, and demolished it, for I prefer to remember it as it has been rebuilt and lies white by its bay, a series of red-tiled levels of roof with a few church-towers topping them. It is a pretty place, and remarkably clean, inhabited mostly by beggars, with a minority of industrial, commercial, and professional citizens, who live in agreeable little houses, with _patios_ open to the passer, and with balconies overhanging him. It has of course a bull-ring, enviously closed during our stay, and it has one of the pleasantest Alamedas and the best swept in Spain, where some nice boys are playing in the afternoon sun, and a gentleman, coming out of one of the villas bordering on it, is courteously interested in the two strangers whom he sees sitting on a bench beside the walk, with the leaves of the plane trees dropping round them in the still air.

The Alameda is quite at the thither end of Algeciras. At the end next our hotel, but with the intervention of a space of cliff, topped and faced by summer cottages and gardens, is the station with a train usually ready to start from it for Ronda or Seville or Malaga, I do not know which, and with the usual company of freight-cars idling about, empty or laden with sheets of cork, as indifferent to them as if they were so much mere pine or spruce lumber. There is a sufficiently attractive hotel here for transients, and as an allurement to the marine and military leisure of Gibraltar, “The Picnic Restaurant,” and “The Cabin Tea Room,” where no doubt there is something to be had beside sandwiches and tea. Here also is the pier for the Gibraltar boats, with the Spanish custom-house which their passengers must pass through and have their packages and persons searched for contraband. One heard of wild caprices on the part of the inspectors in levying duties which were sometimes made to pass the prime cost of the goods in Gibraltar. I myself only carried in books which after the first few declarations were recognized as of no imaginable value and passed with a genial tolerance, as a sort of joke, by officers whom I saw feeling the persons of their fellow-Spaniards unsparingly over.

We had, if anything, less business really in Algeciras than in Gibraltar, but we went into the town nearly every afternoon, and wantonly bought things. By this means we proved that the Andalusian shopmen had not the proud phlegm of the Castilians across their counters. In the principal dry-goods store two salesmen rivaled each other in showing us politeness, and sent home our small purchases as promptly as if we had done them a favor in buying. We were indeed the wonder of our fellow-customers who were not buying; but our pride was brought down in the little shop where the proprietress was too much concerned in cooking her dinner (it smelled delicious) to mind our wish for a very cheap green vase, inestimably Spanish after we got it home. However, in another shop where the lady was ironing her week’s wash on the counter, a lady friend who was making her an afternoon call got such a vase down for us and transacted the negotiation out of pure good will for both parties to it.

Parallel with the railway was a channel where small fishing-craft lay, and where a leisurely dredging-machine was stirring up the depths in a stench so dire that I wonder we do not smell it across the Atlantic. Over this channel a bridge led into the town, and offered the convenient support of its parapet to the crowd of spectators who wished to inhale that powerful odor at their ease, and who hung there throughout the working-day; the working-day of the dredging-machine, that is. The population was so much absorbed in this that when we first crossed into the town, we found no beggar children even, though there were a few blind beggarmen, but so few that a boy who had one of them in charge was obliged to leave off smelling the river and run and hunt him up for us. Other boys were busy in street-sweeping and b-r-r-r-r-ing to the donkeys that carried off the sweepings in panniers; and in the fine large plaza before the principal church of Algeciras there was a boy who had plainly nothing but mischief to do, though he did not molest us farther than to ask in English, “Want to see the cathedral?” Then he went his way swiftly and we went into the church, which we found very whitewashed and very Moorish in architecture, but very Spanish in the Blessed Virgins on most of the altars, dressed in brocades and jewels. A sacristan was brushing and dusting the place, but he did not bother us, and we went freely about among the tall candles standing on the floor as well as on the altars, and bearing each a placard attached with black ribbon, and dedicated in black letters on silver “To the Repose of This or That” one among the dead.

The meaning was evident enough, but we sought something further of the druggist at the corner, who did his best for us in such English as he had. It was not quite the English of Ronda; but he praised his grammar while he owned that his vocabulary was in decay from want of practise. In fact, he well-nigh committed us to the purchase of one of those votive candles, which he understood we wished to buy; he all but sent to the sacristan to get one. There were several onlookers, as there always are in Latin pharmacies, and there was a sad young mother waiting for medicine with a sick baby in her arms. The druggist said it had fever of the stomach; he seemed proud of the fact, and some talk passed between him and the bystanders which related to it. We asked if he had any of the quince jelly which we had learned to like in Seville, but he could only refer us to the confectioner’s on the other corner. Here was not indeed quince jelly, but we compromised on quince cheese, as the English call it; and we bought several boxes of it to take to America, which I am sorry to say moulded before our voyage began, and had to be thrown away. Near this confectioner’s was a booth where boiled sweet-potatoes were sold, with oranges and joints of sugar-cane, and, spitted on straws, that terrible fruit of the strawberry tree which we had tasted at Honda without wishing to taste it ever again. Yet there was a boy boldly buying several straws of it and chancing the intoxication which over-indulgence in it is said to cause. Whether the excitement of these events was too great or not, we found ourselves suddenly unwilling, if not unable, to walk back to our hotel, and we took a cab of the three standing in the plaza. One was without a horse, another without a driver, but the third had both, as in some sort of riddle, and we had no sooner taken it than a horse was put into the first and a driver ran out and got on the box of the second, as if that was the answer to the riddle.

II

It was then too late for them to share our custom, but I am not sure that it was not one of these very horses or drivers whom we got another day for our drive about the town and its suburbs, and an excursion to a section of the Moorish aqueduct which remains after a thousand years. You can see it at a distance, but no horse or driver in our employ could ever find the way to it; in fact, it seemed to vanish on approach, and we were always bringing up in our hotel gardens without having got to it; I do not know what we should have done with it if we had. We were not able to do anything definite with the new villas built or building around Algeciras, though they looked very livable, and seemed proof of a prosperity in the place for which I can give no reason except the great natural beauty of the nearer neighborhood, and the magnificence of the farther, mountain-walled and skyed over with a September blue in November. I think it would be a good place to spend the winter if one liked each day to be exactly like every other. I do not know whether it is inhabited by English people from Gibraltar, where there are of course those resources of sport and society which an English colony always carries with it.

The popular amusements of Algeciras in the off season for bull-feasts did not readily lend themselves to observance. Chiefly we noted two young men with a graphophone on wheels which, being pushed about, wheezed out the latest songs to the acceptance of large crowds. We ourselves amused a large crowd when one of us attempted to sketch the yellow facade of a church so small that it seemed all facade; and another day when that one of us who held the coppers, commonly kept sacred to blind beggars, delighted an innumerable multitude of mendicants having their eyesight perfect. They were most of them in the vigor of youth, and they were waiting on a certain street for the monthly dole with which a resident of Algeciras may buy immunity for all the other days of the month. They instantly recognized in the stranger a fraudulent tax-dodger, and when he attempted tardily to purchase immunity they poured upon him; in front, behind, on both sides, all round, they boiled up and bubbled about him; and the exhaustion of his riches alone saved him alive. It must have been a wonderful spectacle, and I do not suppose the like of it was ever seen in Algeciras before. It was a triumph over charity, and left quite out of comparison the organized onsets of the infant gang which always beset the way to the hotel under a leader whose battle-cry, at once a demand and a promise, was “Penny-go-way, Penny-go-way!”

Along that pleasant shore bare-legged fishermen spread their nets, and going and coming by the Gibraltar boats were sometimes white-hosed, brown-cloaked, white-turbaned Moors, who occasionally wore Christian boots, but otherwise looked just such Moslems as landed at Algeciras in the eighth century; people do not change much in Africa. They were probably hucksters from the Moorish market in Gibraltar, where they had given their geese and turkeys the holiday they were taking themselves. They were handsome men, tall and vigorous, but they did not win me to sympathy with their architecture or religion, and I am not sure but, if there had been any concerted movement against them on the landing at Algeciras, I should have joined in driving them out of Spain. As it was I made as much Africa as I could of them in defect of crossing to Tangier, which we had firmly meant to do, but which we forbore doing till the plague had ceased to rage there. By this time the boat which touched at Tangier on the way to Cadiz stopped going to Cadiz, and if we could not go to Cadiz we did not care for going to Tangier. It was something like this, if not quite like it, and it ended in our seeing Africa only from the southernmost verge of Europe at Tarifa. At that little distance across it looked dazzlingly white, like the cotton vestments of those Moorish marketmen, but probably would have been no cleaner on closer approach.

III

As a matter of fact, we were very near not going even to Tarifa, though we had promised ourselves going from the first. But it was very charming to linger in the civilization of that hotel; to wander through its garden paths in the afternoon after a forenoon’s writing and inhale the keen aromatic odors of the eucalyptus, and when the day waned to have tea at an iron table on the seaward terrace. Or if we went to Gibraltar, it was interesting to wonder why we had gone, and to be so glad of getting back, and after dinner joining a pleasant international group in the long reading-room with the hearth-fires at either end which, if you got near them, were so comforting against the evening chill. Sometimes the pleasure of the time was heightened by the rain pattering on the glass roof of the _patio,_ where in the afternoon a bulky Spanish mother sat mute beside her basket of laces which you could buy if you would, but need not if you would rather not; in either case she smiled placidly.

At last we did get together courage enough to drive twelve miles over the hills to Tarifa, but this courage was pieced out of the fragments of the courage we had lost for going to Cadiz by the public automobile which runs daily from Algeciras. The road after you passed Tarifa was so bad that those who had endured it said nobody could endure it, and in such a case I was sure I could not, but now I am sorry I did not venture, for since then I have motored over some of the roads in the state of Maine and lived. If people in Maine had that Spanish road as far as Tarifa they would think it the superb Massachusetts state road gone astray, and it would be thought a good road anywhere, with the promise of being better when the young eucalyptus trees planted every few yards along it grew big enough to shade it. But we were glad of as much sun as we could get on the brisk November morning when we drove out of the hotel garden and began the long climb, with little intervals of level and even of lapse. We started at ten o’clock, and it was not too late in that land of anomalous hours to meet peasants on their mules and donkeys bringing loads of stuff to market in Algeciras. Men were plowing with many yoke of oxen in the wheat-fields; elsewhere there were green pastures with herds of horses grazing in them, an abundance of brown pigs, and flocks of sheep with small lambs plaintively bleating. The pretty white farmhouses, named each after a favorite saint, and gathering at times into villages, had grapes and figs and pomegranates in their gardens; and when we left them and climbed higher, we began passing through long stretches of cork woods.

The trees grew wild, sometimes sturdily like our oaks, and sometimes gnarled and twisted like our seaside cedars, and in every state of excoriation. The bark is taken from them each seventh year, and it begins to be taken long before the first seventh. The tender saplings and the superannuated shell wasting to its fall yield alike their bark, which is stripped from the roots to the highest boughs. Where they have been flayed recently they look literally as if they were left bleeding, for the sap turns a red color; but with time this changes to brown, and the bark begins to renew itself and grows again till the next seventh year. Upon the whole the cork-wood forest is not cheerful, and I would rather frequent it in the pages of _Don Quixote_ than out; though if the trees do not mind being barked it is mere sentimentality in me to pity them.

The country grew lonelier and drearier as we mounted, and the wind blew colder over the fields blotched with that sort of ground-palm, which lays waste so much land in southern Spain. When we descended the winding road from the summit we came in sight of the sea with Africa clearly visible beyond, and we did not lose sight of it again. Sometimes we met soldiers possibly looking out for smugglers but, let us hope, not molesting them; and once we met a brace of the all-respected Civil Guards, marching shoulder to shoulder, with their cloaks swinging free and their carbines on their arms, severe, serene, silent. Now and then a mounted wayfarer came toward us looking like a landed proprietor in his own equipment and that of his steed, and there were peasant women solidly perched on donkeys, and draped in long black cloaks and hooded in white kerchiefs.

IV