Chapter I

It was of Spain's past and present that we were speaking, and "What," I asked, "have we given her in return for her discovery of our New World?"

"The sleeping-car and the street tramway," answered Velveteen, with justifiable pride.

He was right; for we had seen the first on the railroad, and the second skimming the streets of Madrid. Still, the reward did not appear great, measured by the much that Spain's ventures in the Western hemisphere had cost her, and by the comparative desolation of her present. The devoted labors of Irving and Prescott, which Spaniards warmly appreciate, are more in the nature of an adequate return.

"It strikes me, also," I ventured to add, "that we are rendering a service in kind. She discovered us, and now we are discovering her."

If one reflects how some of the once great and powerful places of the Peninsula, such as Toledo and Cordova, have sunk out of sight and perished to the modern world, this fancy applies with some truth to every sympathetic explorer of them. It had been all very well to imagine ourselves conversant with the country when we were in Madrid, and even an occasional slip in the language did not disturb that supposition. When I accidentally asked the chamber-maid to swallow a cup of chocolate instead of "bringing" it, owing to an unnecessary resemblance of two distinct words, and when my comrade, in attending to details of the laundry, was led by an imperfect dictionary to describe one article of wear as a _pintura de noche_, or "night scene," our confidence suffered only a momentary shock. But, after all, it was not until we reached Toledo that we really passed into a kind of forgotten existence, and knew what it was to be far beyond reach of any familiar word.

With the first plunge southward from the capital the reign of ruin begins--ruin and flies. The heat becomes intense; the air itself seems to be cooked through and through; the flies rejoice with a malicious joy, and the dry sandy hills, bearing nothing but tufts of blackened weeds, resemble large mounds of pepper and salt. Here and there in the valley is the skeleton of a stone or brick farm-house withering away, and perhaps near by a small round defensive hut, recalling times of disorder. Between the hills, however, are fields still prolific in rye, though wholly destitute of trees. Verdure re-asserts itself wherever there is the smallest water-course; and a curve of the river Tagus is sure to infold fruit orchards and melon vines, while the parched soil briefly revives and puts forth delightful shade-trees. But although the river-fed lands around Toledo are rich in vegetation, the ancient city itself, with the Tagus slung around its base like a loop, rises on a sterile rock, and amid hills of bronze. So much are the brown and sun-imbued houses and the old fortified walls in keeping with the massy natural foundation that all seem reared together, the huge form of the Alcazar, or castle--where the Spanish national military academy is housed--towering like a second cliff in one corner of the round, irregularly clustered city. Our omnibus scaled the height by a road perfectly adapted for conducting to some dragon stronghold of misty fable, and landed us in the Zocodover, the sole open space of any magnitude in that tangle of thread-like streetlets, along which the houses range themselves with a semblance of order purely superficial. Most of Toledo is traversable only for pedestrians and donkeys. These latter carry immense double baskets across their backs, in which are transported provisions, bricks, coal, fowls, water, bread, crockery--everything, in short, down to the dirt occasionally scraped from the thoroughfares. I saw one peasant, rather advanced in years, helping himself up the steep rise of a street on the hill-side by means of a stout cane in one hand and the tail of his heavy-laden donkey grasped in the other. To make room for these useful beasts and their broad panniers, some of the houses are hollowed out at the corners; in one case the side wall being actually grooved a foot deep for a number of yards along an anxious turning. Otherwise the panniers would touch both sides of the way, and cause a blockade as obstinate as the animal itself.

From a Drawing by William M. Chase.]

Coming from the outer world into so strange a labyrinth, where there is no echo of rolling wheels, no rumble of traffic or manufacture, you find yourself in a city which may be said to be without a voice. Through a hush like this, history and tradition speak all the more powerfully. Toledo has been a favorite with the novelists. The Zocodover was the haunt of that typical rogue Lazarillo de Tormes; and Cervantes, oddly as it happens, connects the scene of _La ilustre Fregonde_ with a shattered castle across the river, which by a coincidence has had its original name of San Servando corrupted into San Cervantes.

Never shall I forget our walk around the city walls that first afternoon in Toledo. A broad thoroughfare skirts the disused defences on the south and west, running at first along the sheer descent to the river, and a beetling height against which houses, shops, and churches are crammed confusedly. I noticed one smithy with a wide dark mouth revealing the naked rock on which walls and roof abutted, and other houses into the faces of which had been wrought large granite projections of the hill. After this the way led through a gate of peculiar strength and shapeliness, carrying up arches of granite and red brick to a considerable height--a stout relic of the proud Moorish dominion so long maintained here; and then, when we had rambled about a church of Santiago lower down, passing through some streets irregular as foot-paths, where over a neglected door stood a unique announcement of the owner's name--"I am Don Sanchez. 1792"--we came to the Visagra, the country gate. This menacing, double-towered portal is mediæval; so that a few steps had carried us from Mohammedan Alimaymon to the Emperor Charles V. Just outside of it again is the Alameda, the modern garden promenade, where the beauty and idleness of Toledo congregate on Sunday evenings to the soft compulsion of strains from the military academical band. Thin runnels of water murmur along through the hedges and embowered trees, explaining by their presence how this refreshing pleasure-ground was conjured into being; for on the slope, a few feet below the green hedges, you still see the sun-parched soil just as it once spread over the whole area. The contrast suggests Eden blossoming on a crater-side.

At the open-air soirées of the Alameda may be seen excellent examples of Spanish beauty. The national type of woman appears here in good preservation, and not too much hampered by foreign airs. Doubtless one finds it too in Burgos and Madrid, and in fact everywhere; and the grace of the women in other places is rather fonder of setting itself off by a fan used for parasol purposes in the street than in Toledo. But on the _pasco_ and _alameda_ all Spanish ladies carry fans, and it is something marvellous to see how they manage them. Not for a moment is the subtle instrument at rest: it flutters, wavers idly, is opened and shut in the space of a second, falls to the side, and again rises to take its part in the conversation almost like a third person--all without effort--with merely a turn of the supple fingers or wrist, and contributing an added charm to the bearer. The type of face which beams with more or less similarity above every fan in Spain is difficult to describe, and at first difficult even to apprehend. One has heard so much about its beauty that in the beginning it seems to fall short; but gradually its spell seizes on the mind, becoming stronger and stronger. The tint varies from tawny rose or olive to white: ladies of higher caste, from their night life and rare exposure to the sun, acquire a deathly pallor, which is unfortunately too often imitated with powder. Chestnut or lighter hair is seen a good deal in the south and east, but deep black is the prevalent hue. And the eyes!--it is impossible to more than suggest the luminous, dreamy medium in which they swim, so large, dark, and vivid. But, above all, there is combined with a certain child-like frankness a freedom and force, a quick mobility in the lines of the face, equalled only in American women. To these elements you must add a strong arching eyebrow and a pervading richness and fire of nature in the features, which it would be hard to parallel at all, especially when the whole is framed in the seductive folds of the black mantilla, like a drifting night-cloud enhancing the sparkle of a star.

As we continued along the Camin de Marchan we looked down on one side over the fertile plain. The pale tones of the ripe harvest and dense green of trees contrasted with the rich brown and gray of the city, and dashes of red clay here and there. In a long field rose detached fragments of masonry, showing at different points the vast ground-plan of the Roman Circus Maximus, with a burst of bright ochre sand in the midst of the stubble, while on the left hand we had an old Arab gate pierced with slits for arrows, and on the crest above that a nunnery--St. Sunday the Royal--followed by a line of palaces and convents half ruined in the Napoleonic campaign of 1812. Out in the plain was the roof of the sword factory where "Toledo blades" are still forged and tempered for the Spanish army; although in the finer details of damascening and design nothing is produced beyond a small stock of show weapons and tiny ornamental trinkets for sale to tourists. Nor was this all; for a little farther on, at the edge of the river, close to the Bridge of St. Martin and the Gate of Twelve Stones, the broken remains of an old Gothic palace sprawled the steep, lying open to heaven and vacant as the dull eye-socket in some unsepulchred skull. Our stroll of a mile had carried us back to the second century before Christ, the path being strewn with relics of the Roman conquest, the Visigothic inroad, the Moorish ascendency, and the returning tide of Christian power. But the Jews, seeking refuge after the fall of Jerusalem, preceded all these, making a still deeper substratum in the marvellous chronicles of Toledo; and some of their later synagogues, exquisitely wrought in the Moorish manner, still stand in the Jewish quarter for the wonderment of pilgrim connoisseurs.

It was from a terrace of this old Gothic palace near the bridge that, according to legend, Don Roderick, the last of the Goths in Spain, saw Florinda, daughter of one Count Julian, bathing in the yellow Tagus under a four-arched tower which still invades the flood, and goes by the name of the Bath of Florinda. From his passion for her, and their mutual error, the popular tale, with vigorous disregard of chronology, deduces the fall of Spain before the Berber armies; and as most old stories here receive an ecclesiastical tinge, this one relates how Florinda's sinful ghost continued to haunt the spot where we now stood, until laid by a good friar with cross and benediction. The sharp fall of the bank at first glance looked to consist of ordinary earth and stones, but on closer scrutiny turned out to contain quantities of brick bits from the old forts and towers which one generation after another had built on the heights, and which had slowly mouldered into nullity. Even so the firm lines of history have fallen away and crumbled into romance, which sifts through the crannies of the whole withered old city. As a lady of my acquaintance graphically said, it seems as if ashes had been thrown over this ancient capital, covering it with a film of oblivion. The rocks, towers, churches, ruins, are just so much corporeal mythology--object, lessons in fable. A little girl, becomingly neckerchiefed, wandered by us while we leaned dreaming above the river; and she was singing one of the wild little songs of the country, full of melancholy melody:

"Fair Malaga, adios!
Ah, land where I was born,
Thou hadst mother-love for all,
But for me step-mother's scorn!"

All unconscious of the monuments around her, she stopped when she saw that we had turned and were listening. Then we resumed our way, passing, I may literally say, as if in a trance up into the town again, where we presently found ourselves in front of St. John of the Kings, a venerable church, formerly connected with a Franciscan monastery which the French burnt. On the outer wall high up hangs a stern fringe of chains, placed there as votive tokens by released Christian captives from Granada, in 1492; and there they have remained since America was discovered!

To this church is attached a most beautiful cloister, calm with the solitude of nearly four hundred years. Around three sides the rich clustered columns, each with its figures of holy men supported under pointed canopies, mark the delicate Gothic arches, through which the sunlight slants upon the pavement, falling between the leaves of aspiring vines that twine upward from the garden in the middle. There the rose-laurel blooms, and a rude fountain perpetually gurgles, hidden in thick greenery; and on the fourth side the wall is dismantled as the French bombardment left it. Seventy years have passed, and though the sculptured blocks for restoration have been got together, the vines grow over them, and no work has been done. We mounted the bell-tower part way with the custodian, and gained a gallery looking into the chapel, strangely adorned with regal shields and huge eagles in stone. On our way, under one part of the tower roof, we found a hen calmly strutting with her brood. "It was meant for celibacy," said the custodian, "but times change, and you see that family life has established itself here after all."

I don't know whether there is anything particularly sacred about the hens of this district, but after seeing this one in the church-tower I began to think there might be, especially as on the way home we discovered another imprisoned fowl disconsolately looking down at us from the topmost window of a venerable patrician residence.