Chapter II

FROM Cordova may be made, by those who are especially favored, one of the most interesting expeditions possible to the Hermitage, or, as the Church authorities name it, the _Desierta_ (desert) of solitary monks, genuine anchorites, a few miles distant in the Sierra Morena. There are obstacles more formidable than the purely physical ones in the way of this excursion, the bishop of the diocese being averse to granting permission for the visit to any one who is not a good Catholic. Two Englishmen who came before us, relying on the potent gold piece, had made the toilsome ascent only to find that their sterling sovereigns were of no avail. I think the presence of the Novice helped our party; but it would be unwise to reveal the stratagem by which we all gained admittance. Let it be enough to say that we went to the bishop's palace after the usual hours of business, and by humble apologies obtained an audience with the secretary. While we were waiting we sat down under a frivolously gorgeous rococo ceiling, on a great double staircase of marble leading up from the _patio_, which was well planted with shrubs, and had walks paved with smooth round stones of various hue, set edgewise in extensive patterns. The vaulted ceiling resounded powerfully with every remark we made, which had the result of subduing our conversation to whispers, for an attendant soon came to warn us that the bishop was asleep, and that we must not speak loud on account of the echo. Profiting by the great man's siesta, we extracted the desired permission from his severe-faced but courteous secretary, who marked the document "Especial."

Our brief cavalcade of donkeys started the next morning at five, after we had taken a preternaturally early cup of chocolate. The donkeys appeared to know just where we were going, and would not obey the rein: the driver, walking behind, governed them by a system of negatives, informing them with a casual exclamation when they showed signs of turning where he didn't want them to. "Advance there, Baker!" he would cry. "Don't you know better than that? What a wretched little beast! Do as I tell you." The animal in question was named Bread-dealer, or Baker, and the one that I rode rejoiced in the eccentric though eminently literary appellation of "College."

"To the right, College!" our muleteer would shout, exercising a despotic power over my four-footed institution of learning. "Get up, little mule. _Arré burr-r-rico!_" Firing off a volley of _r_'s with a tremendous rising and falling intonation, which invariably moved the brute to take one or two rapid steps before dropping back into his customary slow walk. As the heat increased, and the way grew steeper, he sighed out his "arré"--gee up--in a long, melancholy drawl, which seemed to express profound despair concerning the mulish race generally. Muleteers in Spain are termed generically, from this surviving Arabic word, _arrieros_, or, as we may translate it, "gee-uppers."

In this manner we made our way along the dusty road among olive orchards, and a sort of oak called _japarros_, until we began to mount by a rough, stony path which sometimes divided itself like the branches of a torrent, though we more than once succeeded in prodding the donkeys into a lively canter. The white façades of villas--_quintas_ or _carmens_ they are denominated hereabout--twinkled out from nooks of the hills; but at that early hour everything was very still. We could almost _see_ the silence around us. Higher up, unknown birds began to sing in the sparse boscage that clothed the mountain flank or clustered in its narrow dells. Midway of the ascent, furthermore, Baker, on whom Velveteen was seated in solemn stride, with a blanket in place of saddle, paused ominously, and then began a nasal performance which shook our very souls. Why a donkey should bray in such a place it is hard to determine, but _how_ he did it will forever remain impressed on our tympana. There was something peculiarly terrible and unnerving in the sound; and just as it ceased, our guide, Manuel, observed that this had once been a great place for robbers. "A few years ago," said he, "no one would have dared to come up along this road as we are doing." He added that the marauders used to conceal themselves in the numerous caves in the region, and pointed out one fissure in the rocks which his liberal imagination converted into the entrance of a subterranean retreat running for several miles into the heart of the mountains. At the same instant, looking down across a gorge below our track, I saw a man with a gun moving through a patch of steep olives, as if to head us off at a point farther along; and on a jutting rock-rib above us a memorial cross rose warningly. Crosses were formerly put up in the most impossible places among these hills, to mark the spot where anybody fell a victim to bandits or assassins; a fact of which the elder Dumas makes telling use in one of his short stories.[6] Brigands were themselves punctilious in setting up these reminders, which were held to exert an expiatory influence. If any one would understand how hopelessly the Spanish mind at one time perverted the relations of crime and religion, he may read Calderon's "Devotion of the Cross," wherein the hero, Eusebio, a terrible renegade who murders right and left, born at the foot of one of these way-side crosses, is saved by his reverence for the holy symbol. He is enabled, by virtue of this pious sentiment, to rise up after he is dead, walk about, and confess his sins to a friar; after which he is caught up into heaven!

The whole conjunction was somewhat alarming, but Manuel explained away our man with a gun by saying that he was merely one of the armed watchmen usually attached to country estates to protect crops and stock from depreciation. As for the bandits, they had now been quite dispersed, he declared, by the Civil Guard. That name, it is true, called up new fears for Velveteen and myself as we thought of the two relentless men who were on our trail: but we knew that for the moment, at least, we were beyond their reach.

At last we gained the very summit, and drew up under a porch at the walled gate of the Desert, while a shower began to fall in large scattered drops, like the lingering contents of some gigantic watering-pot, but soon spent itself. Our second pull at the mournful-sounding bell was answered by a sad young monk, who opened a square loop-hole in the wall, and asked our errand in a voice enfeebled by voluntary privations. After inspecting our pass, he told us, with a wan but friendly smile, that we must wait a little. It was Friday, and we had to wait rather long, for the hermits were just at that time undergoing the weekly flagellation to which they subject themselves. But finally we were let in--donkeys, guide, _arriero_, and the colored maid "Fan" sharing the hospitality. An avenue of tall, sombre, cypresses opened before us, leading to the main building and offices. The Desert, in fact, was green enough; well supplied with olives and pomegranates; and hedges of the prickly-pear, with its thick, stiff leaves shaped like a fire-shovel, and heavy as wax-work, cinctured the isolated huts in which the brothers dwell each by himself. Precisely as we came to a triangular plot in front of the entrance we were confronted by a skull set up prominently in a sort of pyramidal monument, giving force by its dusty grin to an inscription in Spanish, which read:

"AS THOU LOOKEST, SO ONCE LOOKED I:
AS I LOOK NOW, SO WILT THOU APPEAR HEREAFTER.
PONDER UPON THIS, AND SIN NOT."

Shortly beyond stood a catacomb above-ground, in which a number of defunct hermits had been sealed up. It also bore a legend, but in Latin:

"THE DAY OF DEATH IS BETTER THAN THAT OF BIRTH."

In the vestibule of the house these drastic reminders of mortality were supplemented by two allegorical pictures--hanging among some portraits of evanished worthies who had ended their penitential days there--two crude paintings which exhibited "The Soul Tortured by Doubt," and "The Soul Blessed by Faith." It was not altogether in keeping with the unworldly and ascetic atmosphere of this spiritual refuge, that a tablet in the wall should record, with fulsome abasement of phrase, how her most Gracious Majesty Isabella II. had, some few years ago, deigned to visit the Desert, and how this stone had been placed there as a humble monument of her condescension. Certainly, considering the ex-Queen's character (if it may claim consideration), it is hard to see what honor the anchorites should find in her visiting their abode.

A gray-haired brother, robed in the coarse and weighty brown serge which he is obliged to wear in winter and summer alike, received us kindly and showed us the expensively adorned plateresque chapel. He knelt and bowed nearly to the threshold before unlocking the door, crossed himself, and knelt again on the pavement within; then, advancing farther, he dropped down once more on both knees, and bent over as if he had some intention of using his good-natured, simple old head as a mop to polish the black and white marble squares, but ended by another cross, and moving his lips in noiseless prayer. The national manner of making the cross is peculiar: after the usual touching of forehead and breast, the Spanish Catholic concludes by suddenly attempting to swallow his thumb, and then as hastily pulling it out of his mouth again, to save it up for some other time. This movement, I suppose, emblemizes the eating of the consecrated wafer, but it makes a grotesque impression that is anything but solemn. At times you will also see him execute a unique triple cross, with strange passes and dabs in the air which might easily be mistaken for preliminary strategy directed against some erring mosquito engaged in guerilla warfare on his eyebrow. We were obliged, in conformity, to do as our Catholic companions did--receiving the holy-water and making a simple cross--an act which, without being of their faith, one may perform with unsectarian reverence. Brother Esteban was on the watch to see that proper devotion was shown in this peculiarly sacred chapel, and in the midst of his adoration he turned quickly upon Manuel, asking, "Why don't you go down on _both_ your knees in the accustomed manner?"

Manuel, being a master of ready deception, answered, without an instant's delay, "Ah, that is my misfortune! I lately had an accident to that leg" (indicating the one which had not sunk far enough), "and that is why it is not easy to get down on both knees." However, he spread his handkerchief wider, and painfully brought the offending member into place.

Esteban frankly apologized, and then the praying went on again.

When we got out into the corridor, and our monkish friend was well in advance, black Fan's repressed heresy broke into a startling reaction. She dipped her hand again and again into the basin of holy-water, wastefully dropping some of it on the floor, and began outlining unlimited crosses from her sable forehead downward--covering her breast with an imaginary armor of them--enough to keep her supplied for a month, and proof against every possible misfortune. Her broad grin of delight, exposing her vermilion lips and white teeth like a slice of unripe watermelon, added to the horror of the situation, and I protested against such uncouth profanity.

"Might's well keep goin' now I begun," she chuckled in reply. "I's 'fraid I'll forgit how!" She was making another plunge for the font, when our pale, gentle-featured Novice stopped her in mid-career.

Fortunately good Esteban had not observed this small orgy going on. He was as pleasant as ever when we went with him into a little room to buy rosaries and deposit some silver pieces for charity; and there he made farther and profuse apologies to Manuel. "Of course you see it was impossible I should know there was anything the matter with your leg," he said, quite plaintively. And Manuel accepted his contrition with double pleasure because he knew it to be wholly undeserved.

The hermits, as I have said, have their separate cottages scattered about the grounds, each with a small patch of land to be cultivated. There they raise fruit, which their rules forbid them to eat, and so it is carried down as a present to some wealthy Cordovan families who support the hermitage by their largesses. Every day poor folk toil up from the plain, some five miles, to this airy perch, and are fed by the monks; but they themselves eat little, abstaining from meat, wine, coffee, tea--everything, indeed, except some few ounces of daily bread, a pint of _garbanzos_ (the tasteless, round yellow bean which is the universal food of the poor in Spain), and a soup made of bread, water, oil, and garlic. They live on nothing and prayer. They rise at three in the morning, and thrice a week they fast from that hour until noon. Their step is slow, and their voices have a strange, inert, sickly sound; but they appeared cheerful enough, and joked with each other. I asked Esteban the name of a tiny yellow flower growing by the path, and he couldn't tell me; but he plucked it tenderly, and began discoursing to Manuel on its beauty. "_Tan chiquita_," he said, in his poor soft voice. "So _little, little_, and yet so precious and so finely made!" Another brother was deeply absorbed in snipping off bits of coiled brass wire with a pair of pincers. "These are for the 'Our Fathers,'" he explained, meaning the large beads in the rosary, separated from the smaller "Ave Maria" ones by links of wire. The cottages or huts, surrounded by an outer wall, contain a cell, sometimes cut out of a bowlder lying on the spot, where there is a rude cot, a shelf for holy books and the crucifix, and a grated window, across which waves, perhaps, the broad-leaved bough of a fig-tree. An anteroom, provided with a few utensils and the disciplinary scourge hanging mildly against the wall, completes the strange interior. The lives of the hermits of the Sierra are reduced to the ghastly simplicity of a skeleton; a part of their time is spent in contemplating skulls, and they have a habit of digging their own graves, in order to keep more plainly before their minds the end of all earthly careers. Mistaken as all this seems to many of us, there was a peacefulness about the Hermitage for which many a storm-tossed soul sighs in vain; and I am glad that some few creatures can find here the repose they desire while waiting for death. Some of the hermits are men of rank, who have retired hither disheartened with the world; others are low-born--men afflicted by some form of misfortune or misdemeanor of their own, who wish to hide from life; but all assemble in a pure democracy of sorrow and penitential piety, apparently contented.

We breakfasted at ten in a room hospitably put at our disposal, the windows of which admitted a delicious breeze and opened upon a magnificent view of the plain far below, where the distant city rested like a white mist--an impalpable thing. Brother José brought some olives, to add to the refection which our sumpter-mule had carried to this height. They had a ripe, acid, oily flavor, which made one think of homely things and of patient housewives in remote American hills, who lead lives as monotonous, as self-denying and unnoticed as those which pass on this ridge of the Sierra in Andalusia. Our Novice thought the olives had "a holy flavor;" and I could understand her feeling. Find me a site more fitted for meditation on the volatility of mundane things than this eyry on the mountain-head overlooking the historic valley! There lies Cordova, a mere spot in the reach of soft citron and straw-tinted fields; and the Guadalquivir, winding like a neglected skein of tawny silk thrown down on the mapped landscape. The plain is calm as oblivion. It is oblivion's self; for there the earth has absorbed Cordova the Old, so that not a vestige remains where compressed masses of human dwellings once stood. They are crumbled to an indistinguishable powder. That soft autumnal soil has swallowed up the bones of unnumbered generations, and no trace of them is left. We imagined the glittering legions of Cæsar as they moved slowly through the country, flashing the sun from their compact steel, at that time when they put to the sword twenty-five thousand inhabitants of the city, which had sided with Pompey. We saw the Moors once more envelop it with arms and banners and the fluttering of snowy garments. But all these vanished again like a moving cloud, or a smoke from burning stubble; and the sun still pours its uninterrupted flood of splendor over the land, bringing life and bringing death, with impartial ray.

The Spanish word for "crowded" or "populated" is still used to signify "dense" in any ordinary connection, as the phrase _barba poblada_, for a thick beard, testifies. The implication is that, when there is any population at all, it must be crowded; a direct transmission, apparently, from periods when inhabitants clustered in immense numbers around the centres of civil power for safety. And the word holds good to-day; for one finds, in the present shrunken human force of the Peninsula, closely packed assemblages of people in the towns and cities, with wide domains of comparatively untenanted country around.

When night closed above us again in the city; when mellow lamps glowed, and a tropical fragrance flowed in from the gardens; when in the long dusky pauses of warm nocturnal silence the watchman's weary and pathetic cry resounded, or hollow-toned church-bells rung the hour, the romance of Cordova seemed to concentrate itself, and fell upon me, as I listened, in chords that took this form:

FLOWER OF SPAIN.

Like a throb of the heart of midnight
I hear a guitar faintly humming,
And through the Alcazar garden
A wandering footstep coming.

A shape by the orange bower's shadow--
Whose shape? Is it mine in a dream?
For my senses are lost in the perfumes
That out of the dark thicket stream.

'Mid the tinkle of Moorish waters,
And the rush of the Guadalquivir,
The rosemary breathes to the jasmine,
That trembles with joyous fear.

And their breath goes silently upward,
Far up to the white burning stars,
With a message of sweetness, half sorrow,
Unknown but to souls that bear scars.

Here, midway between stars and flowers,
I know not which draw me the most:
Shall my years yield earthly sweetness?
Shall I shine from the sky like a ghost?

A spirit I cannot quiet
Bids me bow to the unseen rod;
I dream of a lily transplanted,
To bloom in the garden of God.

Yet the footsteps come nearer and nearer;
Still moans the soft-troubled strain
Of the strings in the dusk. Well I know it:
'Twas called for me "Flower of Spain."

Ah, yes! my lover he made it,
And called it by my pet name:
I hear it, and--I'm but a woman--
It sweeps through my heart like a flame.

The night's heart and mine flow together;
The music is beating for each.
The moon's gone, the nightingale silent;
Light and song are both in his speech.

As the musky shadows that mingle,
As star-shine and flower-scent made one,
Our spirits in gladness and anguish
Have met: their waiting is done.

But over the leaves and the waters
What echoes the strange clanging bells
Send afloat from the dim-arched Mezquita!
How mournful the cadence that swells

From the lonely roof of the convent
Where pale nuns rest! On the hill,
Far off, the hermits in vigil
Are bowed at the crucifix still;

And the brown plain slumbers around us....
O land of remembrance and grief,
If I am truly the flower,
How withered are you, the leaf!

There was a good deal of discussion among our group of pilgrims as to the propriety of a foundation like the Hermitage of the Sierra continuing to exist in an age like the present one. Whetstone, who had declined to visit it, was of opinion that men who led such idle lives should be suppressed by law, and even went so far as to talk about hanging them. So singular a theory, emanating from a citizen of a free republic, met with some opposition; but this was not pushed too far, because we understood that Whetstone kept a hotel at home, and dreaded lest some day we should be at his mercy. As for the rest of us, it was not easy to pronounce that we were of much more value than the hermits; and assuredly those earnest ascetics compared favorably with our mule-driver, who was remarkable only for an expression of incipient humor that was never able to attain the height of actual expression. I was sure that, as he sighed out his final "Arré" in this world, he would pass into the next with that vacant smile on his face, and the joke which he might have perpetrated under fortunate circumstances still unuttered. Nor did the average life of Cordova strike us as signally indispensable to the world's progress. It was doubtless a very pleasant, lazy life so far as it went, and we did not decide to hang the inhabitants! They have a charming fashion there of building houses with pleasant interior courts, in which the _sclinda_, a vine with pale lavender clusters of blossoms suggesting the wistaria, droops amid matted foliage, and lends its grace alike to crumbling architecture or modern masonry. In these courts, separated from the street by gates of iron grating beautifully designed, you will see pleasant little domestic groups, and possibly a whole dinner-party going on in the fresh air. It was likewise agreeable to repair to a certain restaurant--restored in the Moorish manner--and there, while clapping hands echoed through the light arcades, drink iced beer and lemon--a refreshing beverage, which might reasonably take the place of fiery punches (in America) for hot weather. "Neither will I deny," said Velveteen, "that it is a wonderful sensation to stray into the Plaza de Geron Paez and come up suddenly against that glorious old Roman gate--growing up as naturally as the trees in front of it, but so much more wonderful than they--with its fine crumbling yellow traceries. How nicely it would tell in a sketch, eh, with some of the royal grooms--the _remontistas_--walking through the foreground in their quaint costumes!"

The men to whom he referred wear, in the best sense, a thoroughly theatrical garb of scarlet and black, finished off by boots of Cordovan leather in the style of sixteenth-century Spain, turned down at the top, laced, tasselled, and slashed open by a curve that runs from the side down to the back of the heel. This shows the white stocking under short trousers, giving to the masculine calf and ankle a grace for which they are usually denied all credit.

For the rest, dwellers in modern Cordova attend mass and vespers, stroll around to the confectioners' of an afternoon to eat sweetmeats, especially sugared _higochumbos_ (the unripe prickly-pear boiled in syrup), or the famed and fragrant preserve of budding orange-blossoms known as _dulces de alzahar_; and the remainder of the time they while away pleasantly in loitering on the Street of the Great Captain, or in peering from their windows at whatever passes beneath. Throughout the kingdom, it should be said, a most extraordinary persistence will be observed in dawdling, strolling, and general contemplation. The Spaniard appears to be born with his legs in a walking position, and with loaded eyes that compel him to look out of the window whether he wants to or not.

One of the more remarkable observations, finally, that I collected in Cordova came from Manuel. It was his reflection as he gazed down from the Desierta into the plain: "Ah, that was where John Dove (Juan Palom) did such splendid things!" he sighed. "You don't know about John Dove? Well, he was one of the _very greatest_ men Spain ever had; he was a robber--and oh, what a beautiful robber!"

_ANDALUSIA AND THE ALHAMBRA._