Part 2

“I am the book.”

We turned and saw Old Scorp.

“I am the _Century_.”

“Looks old enough to be,” murmured Patsy.

“I am _Harper’s Magazine_.”

“Indeed? You scarcely look it,” said J.

“Don’t you see?” I cried, “he is the _guide_, he has been mentioned in _Harper_ and the _Century_.”

“Take him along!” begged Patsy. “He knows the ropes; he’ll keep us from getting into any more scrapes.”

Old Scorp had crawled in our wake all the morning; his time had come; he claimed us for his own. From that moment till we left the Rock, we were scarcely out of his company, except when asleep or at meals. When not busy guiding travelers, he acted as Moorish interpreter of the law court. A little gliding man, like a composite of all the peoples who have held the Rock, his clothes were English, his manners Spanish, his fanatical eyes were Berber, his energy, in spite of his age, ancient Roman, his keenness as to pounds, shillings, and pence was Phœnician, his manner of cracking a nut--where had I seen that action? In the monkey cage at the Zoo.

The original inhabitants of Gibraltar, a tribe of half-tame, tailless apes, still hold the steep west front of the Rock. They are descended from those apes of Tarshish sent to Solomon, together with peacocks, ivory, and gold, every three years. They live on the summit, where the sweet palmetto and the prickly pear grow. In summer, when man and monkey grill upon the arid Rock, the soldiers at the Signal Station save water for their poor relations, and look the other way when the simian troop goes on a raid to rob the Governor’s fruit garden; they even keep a sort of parish register of monkey births and deaths. How these blue Barbary apes, the only African monkeys in Europe, ever found their way here, is a mystery, like the presence of the Basques in the Pyrenees.

“I wonder if they were here before the convulsion of nature that tore apart the coasts of Africa and Europe,” Patsy ruminated.

Why not say, when Hercules tore them apart? It’s so much prettier!

From the market-place we went to the parade-ground, a quadrangle surrounded by solid stone barracks, where a squad of the King’s Own were drilling. Inside the barracks a military band played Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.” The King’s Own were brisk, young, and fresh-looking newcomers, with the beef and beer of Old England still in their blood; they will not have such pretty complexions when they leave, after three summers on the Rock. The climate that we found delicious in December must be terrific in July. Scorp admitted that it was a trifle warm, though it suited him; we could fancy him basking on the Rock, as if he belonged in one of its crevices. At luncheon we asked Bracelet how he found the summer here. From what he said, Gibraltar cannot be a nice place when the black levanter blows, the dark cloud cap settles on the summit, the clamminess comes into the air, and the stifling east wind takes the heart out of a man and sets his nerves jangling, till he feels like Prometheus chained to the burning Rock. They make out very well in the winter, Bracelet said, with the warships coming and going, people from home running down to the Hotel Maria Cristina over in Algeciras, and occasional shooting trips in the Atlas Mountains. Of course, the great institution is the Calpe Hunt.

“Fox hunting _here_?” Patsy interrupted.

“No, no, over there.” Bracelet nodded towards the narrow ribbon of sand that ties the Rock to Spain. “In the old days, though, the place swarmed with foxes. Rockwood and Ranter, the first couple of hounds an old parson had out from England, gave ’em some rattling good runs up the face of the Rock.”

More ghosts--the ghosts of the first two foxhounds whose names, Rockwood and Ranter, are a matter of history. Never was such a place for ghosts as Mons Calpe!

Patsy catechized Bracelet about the hunting half through luncheon; that was not fair. He asked more than his share of questions; when it comes to dogs, horses, or sport of any kind, men never are fair, they are so greedy. I had a hundred questions I wanted to ask, but I had to listen and pretend to be interested. From November, after the rains are over, till March, when the ground is too dry to carry the scent, they have two joyous runs a week. It’s the only thing that makes life here possible. The ride to the meets is almost always along the Spanish beach; some of them are a goodish distance; Long Stables, for instance, is thirteen miles away, Almoraima is twelve. We could imagine the relief of a gallop in the salt air after being cooped up on the Rock. There is every sort of country,--thick woods, coverts, crags; only, Bracelet complained, no jumping, because there are no fences or hedges in this benighted land. Everybody hunts, of course. An old gentleman, a sort of Nestor of the chase, died as he had lived, following the hounds. He was drowned at Washerwoman’s Ford the other day, on his way home from the meet. Quite a decent exit, wasn’t it? To die in the saddle at the end of a day’s hunting. He was a goodish age, too, turned seventy-six.

We had one disappointment: demanding to be taken to St. Michael’s Cave, we learned that it was no longer shown. Scorp, who in his far-off youth had known it well, was easily led to talk of the mysterious cave. I was the only one of the party who had grace to listen. The others were welcome to monopolize Bracelet--young, handsome, full of delicious insularity; I preferred the little old gray man. There are many impetuous merry lads; there is but one Rock Scorpion! There was something reptilian about the man. His language, full of Oriental allegory, moved sluggishly along, then broke into sudden bursts of antediluvian slang, and on every possible occasion stung us with the words, “You tip the hand.”

“‘_Metuendus acumine caude_,’ Ovid says of the scorpion,” Patsy quoted, “or, as one might say, Fearful with the sting of his tip!”

According to Old Scorp, the entrance to St. Michael’s Cave is now one thousand feet above the sea, about two thirds up the face of the mountain. Once upon a time the sea was level with the cave. Had not he and his brother, when they were boys, found fossil shells there, and the remains of a sea beach outside? The entrance was low, he remembered, but inside it was big as the Mosque of Cordova. Its wonderful stalactite columns, fifty feet high, looked like yellow alabaster; there were pointed arches springing from column to column. Lighted up with blue fire, as he had once seen the cave, it was a sight that, man or boy, he had never seen equalled. Except for its being so dark, those who lived here had a fine commodious dwelling. Yes, men have lived, fought, and died in the great cave, and left their flint knives, their stone axes, and their bones to tell the tale. Women have lived and worked there; they left their necklaces, their anklets, their bone needles, their household pottery behind them. There have been feasts here, for amphoræ with traces of wine have been found. There were other caves--oh, many! sea caves and land caves; some “professors” say that the old name Calpe means caved mountain. Whether or not that is true, Scorp, of his own knowledge, assured us that the Rock is full of secret caverns. As if these were not enough, the English are always burrowing and tunnelling. They have dug three tunnels under the Rock; in one they found what is more precious than gold, good water. No, we might not see the tunnels, not even the last of the smaller caves--the secrets of the mountain are jealously guarded.

Listening to the old man’s talk, we climbed a street of stairs cutting directly through a tangle of narrow alleys where Jews and other aliens live, to the upper level of North Town, where we found the Church of the Sacred Heart, its doors hospitably open. As it was the only door in Gibraltar, except the Cecil’s, that had not been shut and barred against us, we went in. The smell of the incense, the red light of the candles, was pleasantly familiar; the statues of saints and Virgin greeted us like old friends.

“I haf a friend in Brooklyn, Unity States,” said a voice beside us. “He send me weekly paper. I hope you know my friend--his name is----. Mebbe he spoke with you of Father Jims, of the Sacred Heart?”

Father Jims was young and soft-eyed, with a face such as Murillo painted in his “St. Joseph and the Holy Child.” He was so sure we had come to find him out, with some message from his friend, that it went to our hearts to undeceive him. He said he meant shortly to go to Brooklyn; from what his friend wrote, _there_ was a rare field for missionary work! Father Jims was a Catalan; his eyes burned with a zeal that augured well for his mission among the heathen of Brooklyn. He showed us the modest treasures of his church, and presented us with a picture of St. Bernard, the patron of Gibraltar. As we parted we gave him a little money for his poor; he took it with a radiant smile I shall not soon forget. Among all the tremendous impressions we brought away from Gibraltar, the smile of the little Spanish servant maid in the market-place, and the smile of the poor Catalan priest in the church, are the kindest, and will perhaps remain with us the longest.

Near the church is the fine new hospital; an inscription tells that Lord Napier, of Magdala, laid the foundation stone.

In Lord Napier’s hospital there are women nurses. Teaching and nursing nuns are in charge of several charitable institutions, and in the post office reigns a postmistress; so, though Gibraltar is the most mannish, English-speaking place I know, there is plenty of civic and charitable work for women. It was strange to learn that the place is a colony and a port, as well as a fortress. On this tiny speck of earth you can find all the complex machinery of civil, military, and colonial existence, as neatly organized as life in an ant-hill. As to the port, it is now of consequence as a coaling station only. Prosaic enough, compared to the palmy days when it was the first smugglers’ headquarters of the Mediterranean! Tobacco is still smuggled into Spain, where it is a government monopoly, and is, consequently, very bad and very dear. The smuggling is largely carried on by dogs. The poor innocents are taken out in a boat at night from Gibraltar; when near the Spanish coast, small water-tight casks filled with contraband tobacco are fastened on either side of them, they are put overboard and swim to land. They learn not to bark or make a noise, but to scramble silently ashore into the arms of their _contrabandista_ partners, just as in the days of the Deerfield Massacre, babies in New England were taught not to cry on account of the Indians.

After luncheon we went to see the “Galleries.” Our Scorp convoyed us; Gunner Wilkinson, a lean old war dog, received us and led the way into a dim passage, with sanded floor and whitewashed roof, tunnelled out of the bowels of the Rock. The narrow gallery ascends at an easy slope, now and again widening out into a small chamber, as a Roman catacomb expands into the chapel of Christian martyr or saint. Only here, in this aerial catacomb, instead of the statue of a saint, stands a great gun, its black nozzle poking through a loophole. The Gunner explained the working, patting the gun as one pats a favorite horse. At the lightest touch the monster swung smoothly on its swivel, and the loophole was free for us to look out at the magnificent view. Below us was Gibraltar Bay, the cork woods of Algeciras, and the blue line of Sierras beyond. We were in no hurry to leave the gallery, as we should probably never be here again. Gunner Wilkinson refused a shilling, but accepted a cigar; and finally understanding that we really were interested in his wonderful Cyclopean galleries, he unbent and gossiped about them in a friendly way.

During the “Great Siege,” a non-commissioned officer, Sergeant Ince, heard the commandant, General Eliott, say that he would give a thousand dollars to be able to drop shells on the enemy from a certain point where the Rock’s face was a sheer precipice. The practical genius of the plain soldier found out the way. If there was no place for the guns on the Rock, make a place for them in the Rock. So the famous Rock Batteries, at Ince’s suggestion, were blasted out of the living cliffs. They had done great service in their day, but now, frankly, this cannon, that to me looked so deadly, was quite out of date. The real guns were mounted--elsewhere! Yes, La Vieja (the old dog) had a new set of teeth; she could bite now as well as bark. Beyond this the Gunner would say nothing of the modern defences, nor of those secret forbidden parts of “Gib” I longed to see. His talk was all of old wars, old heroes, of Ince, who rose from the ranks and was made an ensign of the Royal Garrison Battalion as a reward for his batteries. One day, when he was an aged man, riding to his work on an ancient nag, he met the Governor, the Duke of Kent, the father of “_the_ Queen.”

“That horse is too old for you, Mr. Ince,” said the Duke.

“I like to ride easy, your Royal Highness,” Ince answered meekly.

“Right,” said the Duke, “but you deserve a better mount.”

A few days later the Duke sent Ince a fiery young horse, far too spirited for the old overseer to manage. The next time the Duke met Ince he was riding his shambling nag. The Duke stopped and asked where the new horse was. Ince confessed that it was more than he could manage, and begged leave to send it back to the Duke’s stable.

“No, no, Overseer, if you can’t ride him, put him in your pocket,” said the Duke handsomely. Ince took the hint and sold the horse for a good price.

Gunner Wilkinson talked of Nelson’s visit and the banquet given him in St. George’s Hall, the magnificent rock chamber at the end of the galleries, as if it had all happened last year, and first, last, and always he talked of the great siege.

A red flash, a puff of white smoke, a dull roar told that a yacht had just entered the harbor. As I looked through the narrow loophole, watching the sailors furl the sails, I glanced across the bay to the cork woods of Algeciras, and the lower foothills of the Sierras--and again I _remembered_ the past. This is the thirteenth of April, 1783, the great day of the “Great Siege,” that began on a September morning three years before, when Mrs. Skinner touched off the first gun of the defence to General Eliott’s signal, “Britons strike home.” This day, the allies believe, will see the obstinate garrison that has held out so long, against scurvy and starvation within, as well as the enemy’s guns without, come to terms. The old General who has lived for more than a week on four ounces of rice per diem, just to prove how little a man need eat to live and fight, will hoist the white flag before evening gunfire. Down there in the bay lies the combined fleet of France and Spain, forty-seven “sail of the line”--real line of battleships, with white figureheads and wings and pleasant windowed balconies astern, and nice brass cannon shining through long rows of portholes. Alongside these three deckers and frigates are the strangest craft Gibraltar Bay has ever seen--ten famous unsubmergible, incombustible, floating batteries; uncouth monsters with bulging sides padded with wet sand, and hanging roofs covered with damp hides. Those Algeciras hills are crowded with spectators, come from all over Spain, to see the fall of Gibraltar. For eight hours the besiegers’ five hundred guns roared and spat fire and shells, and the garrison’s ninety and six answered with Boyd’s deadly hot shot. The bay was a gallant sight at sunrise--who would have seen it at evening gunfire? Not the people who had come to watch the great victory; they melted away from the hills like summer snow, for the victory was to the “old dog!” The indestructible floating batteries were destroyed, the beautiful ships sunk or in flames, their sides blackened, their sails tattered. That day’s fight cost the garrison something less than two hundred men, and the allies more than two thousand.

“Old Eliott stood there on the King’s Bastion during the fight,” the Gunner said. I wondered if he had shouted the slogun of his people in the debatable land. The Gunner asked what that might be. I gave him the old border cry of the Black Eliotts:

“My name is little Jock Eliott, and wha’ daur meddle wi’ me?”

Wilkinson, chuckling grimly, repeated it, surmised that “per’aps ’ee did,” and gave this parting anecdote:

When, after peace was declared, the French commander, Duc de Crillon, visited Gibraltar, Eliott showed him Ince’s galleries. De Crillon called the attention of his suite with these words:

“Notice, gentlemen, that these works are worthy of the Romans.”

(Shade of Scipio Africanus! didst hear and wert appeased?)

While in the Gunner’s company we heard much rolling of drums and sounding of “tuckets”; some military business was going on not far away. It was stirring to the pulses, and made us feel martial and bloodthirsty. We parted with the Gunner at evening gunfire; when we shook hands my bones crunched in his mighty grip, but I believe I did not flinch. We marched back to the hotel, keeping step to the march a military band was playing in the Alameda. That night, just as the floor of my room at the Cecil began to heave with the slow even roll of the _Kaiser_, a strain of sleepy lullaby music melted into my dream. I roused and looked at the watch. It was ten o’clock; the bugler at the barracks was playing “taps” on a silver bugle. It was all true! We were here, sleeping in the “Key to the Mediterranean!”

II

A SIBYL OF RONDA

Dawn in a garden of Andalusia.... To the south, across the Straits of Gibraltar, the faint purple outlines of the Atlas Mountains mark the mysterious coast of Africa. To the north, beyond the green _vega_, four ranges of clear cut Sierras Gazoulos rise, one behind the other, from gray, vaporous valleys of mist. The only sounds are the rhythmic breaking of waves on the beach; the short breathing of a herd of goats--black, tawny, and white, with coarse hair and fierce, yellow eyes, and the crisp crunch, crunch of their teeth cropping the roadside grass. The night flowers hang their heads and go to sleep, the day flowers lift their faces to the sun; the smell of heliotrope drenched in dew is an unforgetable thing. Breakfast is memorable, too; dates from Morocco, and rich Spanish coffee flavored with cinnamon, served under an arbor of Marechal Neil roses.

So began our first day in Spain, at a place the Romans called Portus Albus, and the Moors--they settled here soon after landing on Gibraltar, Jezirat-I-Kadra--“the green island.” Can you derive the modern name of Algeciras from that? You must. Our old friend Tarik was here,--witness the great aqueduct he built, that still brings Algeciras his royal gift of water, always the legacy of Roman or of Moor.

To-day, Gibraltar is England’s key to the Mediterranean; yesterday, Algeciras was the Moors’ key to Spain. They held the Peninsula seven hundred years, think of it!--nearly twice as long as white men have held America; then it was wrenched from them, the door was locked against them. Less than three hundred years ago our ancestors landed on Plymouth Rock, but how should we, in New England, feel if the Indians, the Mexicans, or the Canadians rose up and drove us out of our stately cities, our green pastures, our fertile wheat fields? The Moors made a brave stand at Algeciras--it was their last ditch--and put up a good fight here. In the year 1344, the town was besieged by Alonzo XI of Castile, with the help of crusaders from every part of Christendom. The siege lasted twenty months. Chaucer, writing forty years later, describes a true knight as one who “had fought at Algecir,” as we might say of one of Thermopylæ’s Three Hundred or of Balaclava’s Six Hundred. In 1760, four hundred years afterwards, the Spanish King, Charles III, rebuilt and fortified the place, “to be a hornet’s nest against the English.” For one hundred years Gibraltar and Algeciras--now deadly places, both of them bristling with guns, full of dynamite--have glowered at each other across the bay. The other day the English came again to Algeciras. Armed this time with British capital, they have built one of the hotels of the world here, and called it the Reina Maria Cristina, as a compliment to the Spanish Queen Mother.

“We did not expect to find such a fine hotel in Spain,” I said to the capable English manageress.

“Ah, well! we hardly count this as Spain, you know!” she answered, with a fine insular contempt for all things “foreign.”

“She’s right!” cried Patsy. “_Por Dios._ Shall we never get out of England?” and willy-nilly he carried us off to lunch at Don Jaime’s _fonda_, in the old part of the town.

The Don was waiting for us on a bench outside the inn door, smoking his inevitable cigarette, in the soft spring air. He looked a little bleary about the eyes, as if he had not had enough sleep.

“Don Jaime is up early to-day for our sake,” Patsy explained; “as he goes to bed at four in the morning, he does not usually appear before two in the afternoon.”

“The morning is a disease,” said the Don. “I find it best not to go out until the day is well aired.”

“Please observe,” Patsy interrupted, “that this place has a proper odor of garlic; at last we are out of the smell of English roast beef!”

The Don sighed. “Nevertheless, I comfortably recall the roast beef we had at school in Stoneyhurst,” he said; “it was rare, with plenty good, red gravy.”

“That was all right in England; we’re in Andalusia now. Let’s begin with an _olla_, then a dish of rice, saffron, _pimientos_, and little birds,--and wine from that fattest wineskin. I counted ten of them outside in the road, leaning jovially together against the wall of the _fonda_.”

When he got his wine from the “fattest wineskin”--it tasted a little of the “leather botelle”--Patsy raised his glass.

“We will drink,” he cried, “to everything Spanish, _muchachas_, _ollas_, _dons_, _torrones_, and _fondas_, and confusion to all interlopers. Isn’t this jolly little place better than the Maria Cristina? Isn’t the company more friendly and far more diverting? See the notary and the doctor at the table near the door; at the next, the priest and the professor (they’re both taking snuff); that fat, military man with the green gloves is a colonel of infantry. Those swell English officers you admired so much at the Reina Cristina simply own the hotel! We’re admitted to the smoking and billiard rooms purely on sufferance. I like your inn best, Don Jaime.”

“Ah, well,” said the Don, “I like bath every morning, and all that luxushness when I stayed at the Reina, though it was much pain to put on cocktail coat every night for dinner.”

“Treasure every gem of speech he lets fall,” murmured Patsy, “they grow rarer--don’t you notice?--as his English comes back to him.”

“He’s always been like that,” said J., “it’s because he learned English when he was young.” “Some days he speaks as well as you or I, then again he talks a hodge podge no man can understand.”

“What’s the matter with the wine, Don?” cried Patsy. “You don’t like it.”

“Wine is not agreeable to my belly,” said the Don. “I will take to keep you company, _un poco de ginebra, de campaña_, with much water.”

“You must not expect ice,” Patsy explained.

“You will not hanker for it,” said the Don, taking a clay water bottle from the shelf behind him. “This _alcarraza_ is--how you say? holey--no, porous, keeps water as cold as you might drink him, by evaporation.” He poured out the water and put the _alcarraza_ back. It had a rounded bottom and could not stand upright. The Romans used the same kind of vessel; you see them at Pompeii. They were made in this shape because they were used to pour libations of lustral water to Vesta, and would have been defiled if they had been set down on the ground.