As It Was, I Found The Tramp Steamers More Moving, And
It Was These That My Eye Preferably Sought Whenever I Crossed The Triana
Bridge.
VII
We were often crossing it on one errand or other, but now we were
especially going to see
The gipsy quarter of Seville, which disputes
with that of Granada the infamy of the loathsomest purlieu imaginable.
Perhaps because it was so very loathsome, I would not afterward visit
the gipsy quarter in Granada, and if such a thing were possible I would
willingly unvisit the gipsy quarter of Seville. All Triana is pretty
squalid, though it has merits and charms to which I will try eventually
to be just, and I must even now advise the reader to visit the tile
potteries there. If he has our good-fortune he may see in the manager of
one a type of that fusion of races with which Spain long so cruelly and
vainly struggled after the fall of the last Moorish kingdom. He was
beautifully lean and clean of limb, and of a grave gentleness of manner;
his classically regular face was as swarthy as the darkest mulatto's,
but his quiet eyes were gray. I carried the sense of his fine decency
with me when we drove away from his warerooms, and suddenly whirled
round the corner of the street into the gipsy quarter, and made it my
prophylactic against the human noisomeness which instantly beset our
course. Let no Romany Rye romancing Barrow, or other fond fibbing
sentimentalist, ever pretend to me hereafter that those persistent
savages have even the ridiculous claim of the North American Indians to
the interest of the civilized man, except as something to be morally and
physically scoured and washed up, and drained and fumigated, and treated
with insecticides and put away in mothballs. Our own settled order of
things is not agreeable at all points; it reeks and it smells,
especially in Spain, when you get down to its lower levels; but it does
not assail the senses with such rank offense as smites them in the gipsy
quarter with sights and sounds and odors which to eye and ear, as well
as nose, were all stenches.
Low huts lined the street, which swarmed at our coming with ragged
children running beside us and after us and screaming, "Minny, niooney,
_ money!"_ in a climax of what they wanted. Men leaned against the
door-posts and stared motionless, and hags, lean and fat, sat on the
thresholds and wished to tell our fortunes; younger women ranged the
sidewalks and offered to dance. They all had flowers in their hair, and
some were of a horrible beauty, especially one in a green waist, with
both white and red flowers in her dusky locks. Down the middle of the
road a troop of children, some blond, but mostly black, tormented a
hapless ass colt; and we hurried away as fast as our guide could
persuade our cabman to drive. But the gipsy quarter had another street
in reserve which made us sorry to have left the first.
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