Of Like Actuality Is My Debt To Mr. Calvert's _Southern
Spain,_ Where He Quotes The Accounting Which The Great Captain Gave On
The Greedy King's Demand For A Statement Of His Expenses In The
Sicilies.
"Two hundred thousand seven hundred and thirty-six ducats and 9 reals
paid to the clergy and the poor who prayed for the victory of the army
of Spain.
"One hundred millions in pikes, bullets, and intrenching tools; 10,000
ducats in scented gloves, to preserve the troops from the odor of the
enemies' dead left on the battle-field; 100,000 ducats, spent in the
repair of the bells completely worn out by every-day announcing fresh
victories gained over our enemies; 50,000 ducats in 'aguardiente' for
the troops on the eve of battle. A million and a half for the
safeguarding prisoners and wounded.
"One million for Masses of Thanksgiving; 700,494 ducats for secret
service, etc.
"And one hundred millions for the patience with which I have listened to
the king, who demands an account from the man who has presented him with
a Kingdom."
It seems that Gonsalvo was one of the greatest humorists, as well as
captains of his age, and the king may very well have liked his fun no
better than his fame. Now that he has been dead nearly four hundred
years, Ferdinand would, if he were living, no doubt join Cordova in
honoring Gonzalo Hernandez de Aguila y de Cordova. After all he was not
born in Cordova (as I had supposed till an hour ago), but in the little
city of Montilla, five stations away on the railroad to the Malaga, and
now more noted for its surpassing sherry than for the greatest soldier
of his time. To have given its name to Amontillado is glory enough for
Montilla, and it must be owned that Gonzalo Hernandez de Aguila y de
Montilla would not sound so well as the title we know the hero by, when
we know him at all. There may be some who will say that Cordova merits
remembrance less because of him than because of Columbus, who first came
to the Catholic kings there to offer them not a mere kingdom, but a
whole hemisphere. Cordova was then the Spanish headquarters for the
operations against Granada, and one reads of the fact with a luminous
sense which one cannot have till one has seen Cordova.
VIII
After our visits to the mosque and the bridge and the museum there
remained nothing of our forenoon, and we gave the whole of the earlier
afternoon to an excursion which strangers are expected to make into the
first climb of hills to the eastward of the city. The road which reaches
the Huerto de los Arcos is rather smoother for driving than the streets
of Cordova, but the rain had made it heavy, and we were glad of our good
horses and their owner's mercy to them. He stopped so often to breathe
them when the ascent began that we had abundant time to note the
features of the wayside; the many villas, piously named for saints, set
on the incline, and orcharded about with orange trees, in the beginning
of that measureless forest of olives which has no limit but the horizon.
From the gate to the villa which we had come to see it was a stiff
ascent by terraced beds of roses, zinneas, and purple salvia beside
walls heavy with jasmine and trumpet creepers, in full bloom, and orange
trees, fruiting and flowering in their desultory way. Before the villa
we were to see a fountain much favored by our guide who had a passion
for the jets that played ball with themselves as long as the gardener
let him turn the water on, and watched with joy to see how high the
balls would go before slipping back. The fountain was in a grotto-like
nook, where benches of cement decked with scallop shells were set round
a basin with the figures of two small boys in it bestriding that of a
lamb, all employed in letting the water dribble from their mouths. It
was very simple-hearted, as such things seem mostly obliged to be, but
nature helped art out so well with a lovely abundance of leaf and petal
that a far more exacting taste than ours must have been satisfied. The
garden was in fact very pretty, though whether it was worth fifteen
pesetas and three hours coming to see the reader must decide for himself
when he does it. I think it was, myself, and I would like to be there
now, sitting in a shell-covered cement chair at the villa steps, and
letting the landscape unroll itself wonderfully before me. We were on a
shore of that ocean of olives which in southern Spain washes far up the
mountain walls of the blue and bluer distances, and which we were to
skirt more and more in bay and inlet and widening and narrowing expanses
throughout Andalusia. Before we left it we wearied utterly of it, and in
fact the olive of Spain is not the sympathetic olive of Italy, though I
should think it a much more practical and profitable tree. It is not
planted so much at haphazard as the Italian olive seems to be; its mass
looks less like an old apple orchard than the Italian; its regular
succession is a march of trim files as far as the horizon or the
hillsides, which they often climbed to the top. We were in the season of
the olive harvest, and throughout the month of October its nearer lines
showed the sturdy trees weighed down by the dense fruit, sometimes very
small, sometimes as large as pigeon eggs. There were vineyards and
wheat-fields in that vast prospect, and certainly there were towns and
villages; but what remains with me is the sense of olives and ever more
olives, though this may be the cumulative effect of other such prospects
as vast and as monotonous.
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