It Paralleled The
River, And Into The Center Of It Every Manner Of Offal Had Been Cast
From The Beginning Of Time To Reek And Fester And Juicily Ripen And Rot
In Unspeakable Corruption.
It was such a thoroughfare as Dante might
have imagined in his Hell, if people in his time had
Minded such
horrors; but as it was we could only realize that it was worse than
infernal, it was medieval, and that we were driving in such putrid
foulness as the gilded carriages of kings and queens and the prancing
steeds and palfreys of knights and ladies found their way through
whenever they went abroad in the picturesque and romantic Middle Ages. I
scarcely remember now how we got away and down to the decent waterside,
and then by the helpful bridge to the other shore of the Guadalquivir,
painted red with the reflections of those consoling tramp steamers.
After that abhorrent home of indolence, which its children never left
except to do a little fortune-telling and mule and donkey trading, eked
out with theft in the country round, any show of honest industry looked
wholesome and kind. I rejoiced almost as much in the machinery as in the
men who were loading the steamers; even the huge casks of olives, which
were working from the salt-water poured into them and frothing at the
bung in great white sponges of spume, might have been examples of toil
by which those noisome vagabonds could well have profited. But now we
had come to see another sort of leisure - the famous leisure of fortune
and fashion driving in the Delicias, but perhaps never quite fulfilling
the traveler's fond ideal of it. We came many times to the Delicias in
hope of it, with decreasing disappointment, indeed, but to the last
without entire fruition. For our first visit we could not have had a
fitter evening, with its pale sky reddening from a streak of sunset
beyond Triana, and we arrived in appropriate circumstance, round the
immense circle of the bull-ring and past the palace which the Duc de
Montpensier has given the church for a theological seminary, with long
stretches of beautiful gardens. Then we were in the famous Paseo, a
drive with footways on each side, and on one side dusky groves widening
to the river. The paths were lit with gleaming statues, and among the
palms and the eucalyptuses were orange trees full of their golden
globes, which we wondered were not stolen till we were told they were of
that bitter sort which are mostly sent to Scotland, not because they are
in accord with the acrid nature of man there, but that they may be
wrought into marmalade. On the other hand stretched less formal woods,
with fields for such polite athletics as tennis, which the example of
the beloved young English Queen of Spain is bringing into reluctant
favor with women immemorially accustomed to immobility. The road was
badly kept, like most things in Spain, where when a thing is done it is
expected to stay done.
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