That Is, If You Leave Out Of The Count
The Irregular, To And Fro, Up And Down, Narrow Lanes, Passing
The blank
walls of low houses, and glimpsing leafy and flowery _patios_ through
open gates, and suddenly expanding into broader
Streets and unexpected
plazas, with shops and cafes and churches in them.
Tarifa is perhaps the quaintest town left in the world, either in or out
of Spain, but whether it is more Moorish than parts of Cordova or
Seville I could not say. It is at least pre-eminent in a feature of the
women's costume which you are promised at the first mention of the
place, and which is said to be a survival of the Moslem civilization. Of
course we were eager for it, and when we came into the first wide
street, there at the principal corner three women were standing, just as
advertised, with black skirts caught up from their waists over their
heads and held before their faces so that only one eye could look out at
the strangers. It was like the women's costtime at Chiozza on the
Venetian lagoon, but there it is not claimed for Moorish and here it was
authenticated by being black. "Moorish ladies," our guide proudly
proclaimed them in his scanty English, but I suspect they were Spanish;
if they were really Orientals, they followed us with those eyes single
as daringly as if they had been of our own Christian Occident.
The event was so perfect in its way that it seemed as if our guiding
policeman might have especially ordered it; but this could not have
really been, and was no such effect of his office as the immunity from
beggars which we enjoyed in his charge. The worst boy in Tarifa (we did
not identify him) dared not approach for a big-dog or a little, and we
were safe from the boldest blind man, the hardiest hag, however
pockmarked. The lanes and the streets and the plazas were clean as
though our guide had them newly swept for us, and the plaza of the
principal church (no guide-book remembers its name) is perhaps the
cleanest in all Spain.
VI
The church itself we found very clean, and of an interest quite beyond
the promise of the rather bare outside. A painted window above the door
cast a glare of fresh red and blue over the interior, and over the
comfortably matted floor; and there was a quite freshly carved and
gilded chapel which the pleasant youth supplementing our policeman for
the time said was done by artists still living in Tarifa. The edifice
was of a very flamboyant Gothic, with clusters of slender columns and a
vault brilliantly swirled over with decorations of the effect of peacock
feathers. But above all there was on a small side altar a figure of the
Child Jesus dressed in the corduroy suit and felt hat of a Spanish
shepherd, with a silver crook in one hand and leading a toy lamb by a
string in the other. Our young guide took the image down for us to look
at, and showed its shepherd's dress with peculiar satisfaction; and then
he left it on the ground while he went to show us something else. When
we came back we found two small boys playing with the Child, putting its
hat off and on, and feeling of its clothes. Our guide took it from them,
not unkindly, and put it back on the altar; and whether the reader will
agree with me or not, I must own that I did not find the incident
irreverent or without a certain touchingness, as if those children and
He were all of one family and they were at home with Him there.
Rather suddenly, after we left the church, by way of one of those
unexpectedly expanding lanes, we found ourselves on the shore of the
purple sea where the Moors first triumphed over the Goths twelve hundred
years before, and five centuries later the Spaniards heat them back from
their attempt to reconquer the city. There were barracks, empty of the
Spanish soldiers gone to fight the same old battle of the Moors on their
own ground in Africa, and there was the castle which Alfonso Perez de
Guzman held against them in 1292, and made the scene of one of those
acts of self-devotion which the heart of this time has scarcely strength
for. The Moors when they had vainly summoned him to yield brought out
his son whom they held captive, and threatened to kill him. Guzman drew
his knife and flung it down to them, and they slew the boy, but Tarif a
was saved. His king decreed that thereafter the father should be known
as Guzman the Good, and the fact has gone into a ballad, but the name
somehow does not seem quite to fit, and one wishes that the father had
not won it that way.
We were glad to go away from the dreadful place, though Tangier was so
plain across the strait, and we were almost in Africa there, and hard
by, in the waters tossing free, the great battle of Trafalgar was
fought. From the fountains of my far youth, when I first heard of
Guzman's dreadful heroism, I endeavored to pump up an adequate emotion;
I succeeded somewhat better with Nelson and his pathetic prayer of "Kiss
me, Hardy," as he lay dying on his bloody deck; but I did not much
triumph with either, and I was grateful when our good little policeman
comfortably questioned the deed of Guzman which he said some doubted,
though he took us to the very spot where the Moors had parleyed with
Guzman, and showed us the tablet over the castle gate affirming the
fact.
We liked far better the pretty Alameda rising in terraces from it with
beds of flowers beside the promenade, and boys playing up and down, and
old men sitting in the sun, and trying to ignore the wind that blew over
them too freshly for us.
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