He Smoked Incessant
Cigarettes, And He Showed Us Especially The Pavilion Of Charles The
Fifth, Whom, After That Use Of All English-Speaking Spanish Guides, He
Called Charley Fift.
It appeared that the great emperor used this
pavilion for purposes of meditation; but he could not always have
meditated there, though the frame of a brazier standing in the center
intimated that it was tempered for reflection.
The first day we found a
small bird in possession, flying from one bit of the carved wooden
ceiling to another, and then, taking our presence in dudgeon, out into
the sun. Another day there was a nursery-girl there with a baby that
cried; on another, still more distractingly, a fashionable young French
bride who went kodaking round while her husband talked with an
archaeological official, evidently Spanish. In his own time, Charley
probably had the place more to himself, though even then his thoughts
could not have been altogether cheerful, whether he recalled what he had
vainly done to keep out of Spain and yet to take the worst of Spain with
him into the Netherlands, where he tried to plant the Inquisition among
his Flemings; he was already much soured with a world that had cloyed
him, and was perhaps considering even then how he might make his escape
from it to the cloister.
III
We did not know as yet how almost entirely dramatic the palace of the
Alcazar was, how largely it was representative of what the Spanish
successors of the Moorish kings thought those kings would have made it
if they had made it; and it was prohably through an instinct for the
genuine that we preferred the gardens after our first cries of wonder.
What remains to me of our many visits is the mass of high borders of
box, with roses, jasmine, and orange trees, palms, and cypresses. The
fountains dribbled rather than gushed, and everywhere were ranks and
rows of plants in large, high earthen pots beside or upon the tiled
benching that faced the fountains and would have been easier to sit on
if you had not had to supply the back yourself. The flowers were not in
great profusion, and chiefly we rejoiced in the familiar quaintness of
clumps of massive blood-red coxcombs and strange yellow ones. The walks
were bordered with box, and there remains distinctly the impression of
marble steps and mosaic seats inlaid with tiles; all Seville seems
inlaid with tiles. One afternoon we lingered longer than usual because
the day was so sunnily warm in the garden paths and spaces, without
being hot. A gardener whom we saw oftenest hung about his flowers in a
sort of vegetable calm, and not very different from theirs except that
they were not smoking cigarettes. He did not move a muscle or falter in
his apparently unseeing gaze; but when one of us picked a seed from the
ground and wondered what it was he said it was a magnolia seed, and as
if he could bear no more went away.
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