I Will Not Follow It Beyond The
Historic Clue, For I Think The Reader Ought To Be Satisfied With Knowing
That the Moors held it as early as the seven hundreds and as late as the
thirteen hundreds, when the
Christians definitively recaptured it and
their kings became kings of Algeciras as well as kings of Spain, and
remain so to this day. At the end of the eighteenth century one of these
kings made it his lookout for watching the movements of the inimical
English fleets, and then Algeciras slumbered again, haunted only by "a
deep dream of peace" till the European diplomats, rather unexpectedly
assisted by an American envoy, made it the scene of their famous
conference for settling the Morocco question in. 1906.
I think this is my whole duty to the political interest of Algeciras,
and until I come to our excursion to Tarifa I am going to give myself
altogether to our pleasure in the place unvexed by any event of history.
I disdain even to note that the Moors took the city again from the
Christians, after twenty-five years, and demolished it, for I prefer to
remember it as it has been rebuilt and lies white by its bay, a series
of red-tiled levels of roof with a few church-towers topping them. It is
a pretty place, and remarkably clean, inhabited mostly by beggars, with
a minority of industrial, commercial, and professional citizens, who
live in agreeable little houses, with _patios_ open to the passer, and
with balconies overhanging him. It has of course a bull-ring, enviously
closed during our stay, and it has one of the pleasantest Alamedas and
the best swept in Spain, where some nice boys are playing in the
afternoon sun, and a gentleman, coming out of one of the villas
bordering on it, is courteously interested in the two strangers whom he
sees sitting on a bench beside the walk, with the leaves of the plane
trees dropping round them in the still air.
The Alameda is quite at the thither end of Algeciras. At the end next
our hotel, but with the intervention of a space of cliff, topped and
faced by summer cottages and gardens, is the station with a train
usually ready to start from it for Ronda or Seville or Malaga, I do not
know which, and with the usual company of freight-cars idling about,
empty or laden with sheets of cork, as indifferent to them as if they
were so much mere pine or spruce lumber. There is a sufficiently
attractive hotel here for transients, and as an allurement to the marine
and military leisure of Gibraltar, "The Picnic Restaurant," and "The
Cabin Tea Room," where no doubt there is something to be had beside
sandwiches and tea. Here also is the pier for the Gibraltar boats, with
the Spanish custom-house which their passengers must pass through and
have their packages and persons searched for contraband. One heard of
wild caprices on the part of the inspectors in levying duties which were
sometimes made to pass the prime cost of the goods in Gibraltar.
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