Part 7

No finer panegyric has been written on this mighty River Tagus than Ford’s description of its poetical and picturesque course: “First green and arrowy, amid the yellow cornfields of New Castile, then freshening the sweet Tempe of Aranjuez, clothing the gardens with verdure, and filling the nightingale-tenanted glens with groves: then boiling and rushing around the granite ravines of rock-built Toledo, hurrying to escape from the cold shadow of its deep prison, and dashing joyously into light and liberty, to wander far away into silent plains, and on to Talavera, where its waters were dyed with brave blood, and gladly reflected the flash of the victorious bayonets of England--triumphantly it rolls thence, under the shattered arches of Almaraz, down to desolate Estremadura, and in a stream as tranquil as the azure sky by which it is curtained, yet powerful enough to force the mountains at Alcántara. There the bridge of Trajan is worth going a hundred miles to see: it stems the fierce, condensed stream, and ties the rocky gorges together: grand, simple, and solid, tinted by the tender colours of seventeen centuries, it looms like the gray skeleton of Roman power, with all the sentiment of loneliness, magnitude, and the interest of the past and present. How stern, solemn, and striking is this Tagus of Spain! No commerce has ever made it its highway--no English steamer has ever civilised its waters like those of France and Germany. Its rocks have witnessed battles, not peace: have reflected castles and dungeons, not quays, or warehouses: few cities have risen on its banks, as on those of the Thames and Rhine: it is truly a river of Spain--that isolated and solitary land. Its waters are without boats, its banks without life: man has never laid his hand upon its billows, nor enslaved their free and independent gambols.”

The old Alcázar, which occupies the highest ground in Toledo, is of Roman origin, and was used by the Visigoths as a citadel. The Cid resided here after the capture of the city by Alfonso VI., and it was converted into a palace by the saintly Ferdinand and the learned Alfonso. It was burned down in the war of Spanish Succession in 1710, was restored by Cardinal Lorenzana in 1772, was burned by the French in 1810, and in

1887 it was gutted by a third conflagration. To-day it is utilised as a Military Academy for the education of officers for the Spanish infantry. The Archbishop’s Palace, the Hospital of Santa Cruz, the Moorish Mosque, the Town Hall, the Synagogue of _Santa Maria la Blanca_, and the Church of _San Juan de los Reyes_, which looks more like a royal palace than a church, are but a few of the many sights that Toledo has to offer to the leisured visitor. To the traveller, whose time is limited, as was mine when I stayed there, she leaves an impression of greatness, grandeur, and melancholy which one does not, and would not, lightly lose.

From Toledo I proceeded direct to Córdova, because, in my mind, the two cities were linked together by the broad band of longevity, and I desired to see them both in the same mood cycle. So, while the atmosphere of Toledan greatness was still hot in my veins, I hastened across the broad, bare, sandy plains of the celebrated Mancha--the immortal theatre of the adventures of Don Quixote--past Argasamilla--where Don Quixote was born, and died, and where his great creator, Cervantes, was imprisoned for debt--across the Sierra Morena to the land of the valley of the Guadalquiver--“the garden of Spain, the Eden of the Arabs, the paradise of poets and painters”--to Andalucia. Thenceforward there are no more rocks, but fields now studded, now hidden by flowers--flowers, flowers all the way--carpet after carpet of purple, gold, and snow-white flowers, poppies, daisies, lilies, wild mushrooms, and ranunculuses. Then, as we are carried deeper into the bosom of the south, we are met with grain and orange groves, olive groves, and green hillsides, vineyards, and fruit trees. First a few Moorish towers and many-coloured houses, then on the hills of the Sierra Nevada clusters of villas and gardens, then a perfumed air scented with rose leaves, an enchanted garden, and--Córdova.

Córdova is as different a place from Toledo as Monte Carlo is from Manchester. Toledo, sombre, austere, overpowering in its impressive solemnity; and Córdova, gay, vivacious, flashing its pervading whitewash in the sunshine beneath the clearest sky in Europe. And yet Córdova is one of the most ancient of cities; its record of all the races that have fought for it, made it, died for it during twenty centuries, are visible on every side. A thousand years ago it boasted upwards of a million inhabitants, three hundred mosques, nine hundred baths, and six hundred _fondas_. Its cathedral was formerly a mosque: before that it had been a basilica: and it had commenced life as a Roman temple dedicated to Janus. The Carthagenians styled the city the “Gem of the South.” Cæsar half destroyed it, and slaughtered 28,000 of its inhabitants, because it had sided with Pompey. Under the Goths its importance diminished; but it became, under the Moors, the Athens of the West, and was the

successful rival of Bagdad and Damascus as a seat of learning, and the centre of European civilisation. It was the birthplace of Seneca, Lucan, Averroes, and Juan de Mena, the Chaucer of Spain; and here, in the Church of San Nicolas, Gonzalo de Córdova, the great captain of Spain, was baptised.

To-day Córdova is no more than an overgrown village in size and rank, a village with open-air market-places, and winding, uneven streets. Theophile Gautier wrote, in his delightful graphic style of the streets of Córdova, that “they have a more thoroughly African appearance than those of any other town in Spain. One threads one’s way between interminable whitewashed walls, their scanty windows guarded by heavy iron bars, over a pebbly pavement so rough that it is like the bed of a torrent, littered with straw from the burdens of innumerable donkeys.” These streets are traversed by happy, light-hearted people, who would seem to have no memory of the past, and no thought for the morrow. But the city contains a mosque which gives one a better idea of the power and magnificence of the Moors than anything else in Spain, not excepting even the Alhambra. This wondrous Arab temple--huge, wonderful, fairy-like in its Eastern gorgeousness--with its thousand marble columns, is unique in beauty as it is in curious detail. It is said that these columns were brought, already shaped, from various centres of the old civilised world--Carthage, Constantinople, Alexandria, Nîmes, and Narbonne--while others came from the marble quarries of the Sierra Morena, from Loja and Cadiz. Black, gray, dark green, and dull red in colour, they stretch out on every side, and form a seemingly boundless forest of marble pillars.

Concerning the impression made by this many-columned mosque, Gautier says: “You appear to be walking about in a roofed forest rather than in a building: whichever direction you turn to, your eye strays along rows of columns, which cross each other, and lengthen out endlessly, like marble trees that have risen spontaneously from the soil.” De Amicis has written of it in similar terms: “Imagine a forest; fancy yourself in the thickest portion of it, and that you can see nothing but trunks of trees. So, in this mosque, on whichever side you look, the eye loses itself among the columns. It is a forest of marble, whose confines one cannot discover.” It stands, this dazzling Mezquita, in the centre of the Court of Orange Trees, whose rows were planted to correspond with the lines of the columns in the mosque. Above the dark, shining foliage and flame-colour fruit rises the creamy delicate belfry-tower, rival of Sevilla’s Giralda.

Some day, when “the wandering footsteps of my life” take me again to Spain, I shall go to Córdova, and seek out this _Patio de los Naranjos_; and among its pleasant fountains, and its blithesome, indolent gossipers, I shall recall the impressions of my former visit. And, if possible, I shall again visit the city in May. The guide-books warn the traveller against going there in that month, when the annual fair is held. I know that fair, as the suspicious Brother Goldfinch used to say, with its booths erected under the trees, its band and its coloured lanterns, its dear dates and its cigar lotteries, its gaiety, its gaudy mantillas, its laughing, dark-eyed girls and gesticulating men, and its culminating display of fireworks. I know it, and I can conceive no reason why the guide-book makers should endeavour to

deprive other visitors of the enjoyment I got out of the innocent and exhilarating experience.

Everything about Córdova--the streets, the squares, the houses, with their _patios_--are small, lovely, mysterious, and Eastern. The ground-work is white--white and smooth are the walls and the houses--but the detail is a blaze of colours--roses, and oranges, and pinks forming a colour scheme of Nature’s own designing. The youthful gaiety of the town has overgrown its ancient might and sombreness, even as gay flowers, burst from between the ancient stones of a ruined castle. It has a charm that fills the heart with a sad pleasure; a mysterious spell that one cannot resist. The cathedral is a fortress from without, but within it is a palace of enchantment; the town is a citadel become a pleasure garden; it is a museum of Roman and Arabian antiquities, peopled with blithesome men and women. Within a mile or two of Córdova once flourished Medina Az-zahra, which was one of the most marvellous works of architecture, the most superb earthly palace, and the most delicious garden in the world, and Zahira, built by the powerful Almansur, the governor of the kingdom. Both these superb cities have been destroyed, and not even the ruins are to be found.

The Castiles.

Some of the oldest and most truly national cities of Spain are situated in the two Castiles--silent cities peopled by silent men, in the midst of a mountainous, silent country. It is no light thing to bear the stamp of Castile. The men, reserved, well bred, loyal, and proud, carry their Castilian origin in their faces, their habits, and their cast of mind; and the cities are Castilian in their strength and their uncompromising severity. One sees it in the Toledo of New Castile, and finds it in the Burgos of the older province. Burgos, a representative Gothic Castilian city, was long the capital of the kingdom of Castile and León, and its cathedral ranks among the finest in Spain. What voyager that crosses the Pyrenees is not acquainted with Burgos Cathedral? The train that hurls the traveller across the mountainous boundary dumps him in Burgos, and being there, he proceeds forthwith to inspect the Cathedral. He is, it may be assumed, new to Spain, the Spanish cathedrals have the charm of novelty, and the first one he visits he does thoroughly. Unless he is an architect, or an archæologist, he will expend over this first specimen of the Peninsula’s religious edifices an amount of enthusiasm that would, if properly apportioned, carry him with interest round all the cathedrals of Spain. As an illustration of this contention I may mention the experience of an American whom I encountered in Seville. He was enthusiastic about the bull-fighting, delighted with the Alcázar, and fascinated with the Sevillian patios; but when I spoke to him of the cathedral, he replied, in an off-hand manner and a shrug of the shoulders: “Oh, I haven’t seen it, except from the outside. I got so full up of cathedrals at Burgos that I haven’t been inside another.”

Burgos Cathedral is certainly a magnificent specimen to get, to quote my American acquaintance, “full up on.” Although by no means large in comparison with many others in Spain, it appears to fill half the town. In addition to its conspicuousness and inviting aspect, it is the principal surviving monument to the ancient wealth and grandeur of the province, and one of the most beautiful structures in Europe. It was begun in 1221, and it was not finished till 1567, so that the period of its erection extends over three centuries and a-half, during which Gothic architecture passed through its successive stages in what we regard as Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular. The exterior is greatly admired for the variety and richness of its outline, which embraces a whole forest of pinnacles, spires, and towers; but unfortunately it is so hemmed in with houses that it is not easy to find a point from which the eye can take in the whole sweep of the building from one end to the other. The _Capilla del Condestable_, the most interesting portion of the interior, might vie, for elevation and spaciousness of proportion, with many a church; while its magnificent tombs, profusion of sculpture and other decoration, combined with its general sumptuousness, render it worthy to be the sepulchre of kings. Burgos, like all other Spanish cathedrals, or all that I have visited, abounds in magnificent iron-work, a department of art which appears to have been cultivated with more ease in this country than in all the rest of Christendom. Almost every chapel (and some cathedrals contain no fewer than twenty) is fenced about by grilles of most graceful design and admirable workmanship; while the high altar is enclosed on two sides by railings, and in front by gates of the same material, each portion being a perfect marvel of the metal-worker’s art. Some of these gates stand thirty feet high; and when constructed of iron, as is usually the case, are not only richly gilt, so as to convey the effect of light and shade, but covered in addition with profuse ornamentation and heraldic devices.

There is a Christ in Burgos Cathedral--_the_ Christ it is called in Burgos--and it is claimed for it that it bleeds every Friday. It hangs behind a curtain over the altar in one of the chapels. When the curtain was drawn, I expected to see a figure of painted wood or marble, such as one sees elsewhere, and the spectacle filled me with horror. For this effigy is covered with skin, and is so terribly real that one recoils from it involuntarily. The beard, the hair, and the lashes are real, the hair is matted with clots of blood, the wounds gape in the side and the hands, and the pose is a marvel of realism. It has well been designated “_the_ Christ”--to see it is to lose all desire to look upon it again.

In one of the rooms of the old sacristy the visitor is shown the broken and worm-eaten coffer in which the Cid carried his treasure in his wars against the Moors. The Cid, it would appear, was the original exponent of the confidence trick. Being in need of ready money, he filled the coffer with metal and stones, and pawned it to a Jewish usurer, making a stipulation that it should not be opened until the loan was repaid. Seeing that the Cid would, in all probability, have kept the trick to himself if he had redeemed the goods, we may assume that he never paid his debt. People have been filling portmanteaus with bricks and living at hotels on the good faith of their worthless luggage ever since.

But Burgos, though magnificent in its cathedral and severe as a judge by temperament, is somewhat like an ancient and irrepressible comedian in appearance. Its situation, on the slope of the mountain is sufficiently impressive; its narrow, winding streets are serious and unresponsive in character; but its colouring is strangely genial, even to the verge of facetiousness. No two houses together are of the same colour; but orange and blue, red and grey and green confront the eye from doors, and railing, and windows, and from every bit of decoration that can bear its dollop of paint. No design is allowed to restrict the freedom of the artist’s fancy; the paints are daubed on irrespective of all the laws of colour harmony, and without any reference to the feelings of the family that live over the way. But the effect is decidedly cheerful and waggish, and the cathedral uprears its head in the midst of it like a Salvini in the middle of a crowd of Gaiety choristers. The silence of Burgos arises in part from the lack of vehicular traffic, and, in a measure, from the scarcity of women to be seen in the streets. Such ladies as are about keep their eyes to themselves, and pass along unheedful of the signs of life about them. But in the security of their _miradores_, or high-balconied windows, they regard mankind with perfect composure and entire freedom. So long as the beauty of Burgos can only be contemplated by throwing back the head and gazing up at “skied” windows, it is not a bad thing that carriages should be few and far between.

La Granja wakes up for three months in the year, viz., in July, August, and September, when the Court seeks in the altitude of the Palace a relief from the heat of the capital. Madrid has no reason to be ashamed of her elevation, but the Royal Residence of La Granja stands nearly 1,500 feet above the Palace of Madrid, and the Spanish people are well pleased that the King should desire so exalted a spot in which to live. The palace is a cheerful, if theatrical-looking French chateau, the antithesis of the severe Madrid palace, or the proud, gloomy Escorial. The interior is pretty rather than magnificent; agreeable rather than impressive. But if French art has reared the building, the natural surroundings are truly Spanish, and unmistakably Castilian. Around the palace on all sides are rocks, and forests, and crystal streams, and adjoining it are the palace gardens, which are at once among the finest, as they are certainly the most costly in the kingdom. These gardens, which cover an area of 360 acres, are an imitation, on a smaller scale, of the gardens of Versailles. The formal cut of the ground plan, the regularity of its avenues, the artificiality of the numerous fountains, marble vases and statuary, and its dwarf-like vegetations is all in striking contrast with the wild scenery on every side. In order to form these grounds, rocks were levelled and bored for the water pipes to feed the fountains, and hollowed to admit the roots of trees. One fountain--the Baños--which shoots up water to a height of 130 feet, cost Philip V. three millions of pesetas (over £100,000), but that monarch confessed that the display had amused him for three minutes. The cost of the gardens alone reached the enormous total of forty-five million pesetas; and on the death of Philip V. his debts were found to be within a couple of pesetas of that amount.

After the magnificent scenery of the Alpine Nava Cerrada, the chain of pine-clad mountain and the road, indescribably beautiful, that winds through the dark woods to La Granja, the 6 miles that still separate the traveller from Segovia are flat and uninteresting. But the dull, bare country changes as if by magic when a sharp corner is turned and the city bursts upon the view. The first sight of Segovia from La Granja fills one with a thrill of rapturous awe. The rocky gorge, by which the city is approached, is spanned by Trajan’s noble aqueduct; and beyond it, from the bosom of a soft, green vale, rises the rocky ridge upon which the fine old Castilian stronghold commands the surrounding country. The prospect is indescribably impressive, and one fears that the magic of the spectacle will disappear as we near it. But in this one is agreeably disappointed. The drive under the huge aqueduct gives one a momentary flash of realisation of the might of its Roman builders; and then the road struggles ever upwards, past red, sunlit plazas and curiously-fronted houses, beneath nodding roofs and under archways, into the _Plaza Mayor_, over which lies the shadow of the grim Gothic cathedral. The wonderful fairy-like “Puente del Diablo,” with its 320 arches, which rise, tier upon tier, to a height of 102 feet, is constructed of granite, without cement or lime. It is indeed a lasting monument to the enterprise, the resolution, and the architectural genius of its creators. The great cathedral, one of the largest in Spain, the old Alcázar which successfully stood out against the plundering _Comuneros_ who sacked the city in 1520, and the eighteen lesser churches, are for antiquarians and ecclesiologists: but the aqueduct is a separate ecstacy that appeals alike to the layman and the expert.

Although it has points in common with Segovia, Cuenca, and all these ancient cities of Castile, Avila, the home of the saint-like Teresa, Spain’s lady patroness, with its granite approach and its massive granite walls, its memories, its fortified cathedral, and its severe menacing air, is as well worthy a visit as any city in Spain.

The Avila of to-day is the Avila of a thousand years ago--a mediæval wall-girt city. Its frowning ramparts wear a strangely forbidding appearance, and its countenance is an index of its character. Protected by walls forty feet high and twelve feet thick, pierced by ten gateways, and studded by no less than eighty-six towers, commanding at every point the plain below, it stood from its foundation, until the era of artillery, a city impregnable. Local tradition has it that Avila was originally called Abula, after the mother of Hércules, and it is not incongruous to associate this brave old fortress town with all the heroes of mythology. The earliest authentic records of the city date back to B.C. 1660. The cathedral, dedicated to San Salvador, the Prince of Peace, reminds one of the futile voice that cries

“Peace, peace,” where there is no peace. Nor did Alva Garcia, its architect, gamble on its peace prospects; for its strong _cimborio_ was evidently built for defence, and its apse, with castellated machicolations, forms one of the towers of the city walls. From the general character of the cathedral it is evident that although it was commenced in A.D. 1091, it was not completed until the early part of the thirteenth century, and it is much disfigured by some poor patchwork restoration. Don Ramon of Burgundy, who rebuilt the city at the same time as the cathedral, endeavoured to secure peace by preparing for war, and the old church was pressed into the defence of the town.