The Eye Seeks The Bold, Familiar Legend, And One Suffers A
Certain Disappointment In Its Absence.
Otherwise Gibraltar does not and
cannot disappoint the most exacting tourist.
The morning which found us in face of it was in brisk contrast to the
bland afternoon on which we had parted from Madeira. No flocking
coracles surrounded our steamer, with crews eager to plunge into the
hissing brine for shillings or equivalent quarters. The whitecaps looked
snow cold as they tossed under the sharp north wind, and the tender
which put us ashore had all it could do to embark and disembark us
upright, or even aslant. But, once in the lee of the rocky Africa
breathed a genial warmth across the strait beyond which its summits
faintly shimmered; or was it the welcome of Cook's carriages which
warmed us so? We were promised separate vehicles for parties of three or
four, with English-speaking drivers, and the promise was fairly well
kept. The carriages bore a strong family likeness to the pictures of
Spanish state coaches of the seventeenth century, and were curtained and
cushioned in reddish calico. Rubber tires are yet unknown in southern
Europe, and these mediaeval arks bounded over the stones with a violence
which must once have been characteristic of those in the illustrations.
But the English of our English-speaking driver was all that we could
have asked for the shillings we paid Cook for him, or, if it was not, it
was all we got. He was an energetic young fellow and satisfyingly
Spanish in coloring, but in his eagerness to please he was less grave
than I could now wish; I now wish everything in Spain to have been in
keeping.
What was most perfectly, most fittingly in keeping was the sight of the
Moors whom we began at once to see on the wharves and in the streets.
They probably looked very much like the Moors who followed their caliph,
if he was a caliph, into Spain when he drove Don Roderick out of his
kingdom and established his own race and religion in the Peninsula.
Moslem costumes can have changed very little in the last eleven or
twelve hundred years, and these handsome fellows, who had come over with
fresh eggs and vegetables and chickens and turkeys from Tangier, could
not have been handsomer when they bore scimitars and javelins instead of
coops and baskets. They had baggy drawers on, and brown cloaks, with
bare, red legs and yellow slippers; one, when he took his fez off, had a
head shaved perfectly bald, like the one-eyed Calender or the Barber's
brother out of the _Arabian Nights;_ the sparse mustache and
short-forked beard heightened the verisimilitude. Whether they squatted
on the wharf, or passed gravely through the street, or waited for custom
in their little market among the hen-coops and the herds of rather lean,
dispirited turkeys (which had not the satisfaction of their American
kindred in being fattened for the sacrifice, for in Europe all turkeys
are served lean), these Moors had an allure impossible to any Occidental
race. It was greater even than that of their Semitic brethren, who had a
market farther up in the town, and showed that a Jewish market could be
much filthier than a' Moorish market without being more picturesque.
Into the web of Oriental life were wrought the dapper figures of the
red-coated, red-cheeked English soldiers, with blue, blue eyes and
incredible red and yellow hair, lounging or hurrying orderlies with
swagger-sticks, and apparently aimless privates no doubt bent 'upon
quite definite business or pleasure. Now and then an English groom led
an English horse through the long street from which the other streets in
Gibraltar branch up and down hill, for there is no other level; and now
and then an English man or woman rode trimly by.
The whole place is an incongruous mixture of Latin and Saxon. The
strictly South-European effect of the houses and churches is a mute
protest against the alien presence which keeps the streets so clean and
maintains order by means of policemen showing under the helmets of the
London bobby the faces of the native alguazil. In the shops the
saleswomen speak English and look Spanish. Our driver, indeed, looked
more Spanish than he spoke English.
His knowledge of our rude tongue extended hardly beyond the mention of
certain conventional objects of interest, and did not suffice to explain
why we could not see the old disused galleries of the fortifications. I
do not know why we wished to see these; I doubt if we really did so, but
we embittered life for that well-meaning boy by our insistence upon
them, and we brought him under unjust suspicion of deceit by forcing him
to a sort of time-limit in respect to them. We appealed from him to the
blandest of black-mus-tached, olive-skinned bobby-alguazils, who
directed us to a certain government office for a permit. There our
application caused something like dismay, and we were directed to
another office, but were saved from the shame of failure by incidentally
learning that the galleries could not be seen till after three o'clock.
As our ship sailed at that hour, we were probably saved a life-long
disappointment.
Everywhere the rock of the Prudential beetles and towers over the town;
but the fortifications are so far up in the sky that you can really
distinguish nothing but the Marconi telegraphic apparatus at the top.
Along the sea-level, which the town mostly keeps, the war-like harness
of the stronghold shows through the civil dress of the town in barracks
and specific forts and gray battle-ships lying at anchor in the docks.
But all is simple and reserved, in the right English fashion. The
strength of the place is not to be put forth till it is needed, which
will be never, since it is hard to imagine how it can ever be even
attempted by a hostile force.
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