Four Months Afoot in Spain Part 7

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Plaza, San Fernando. "A'ua! A'ua fresca! Quien quiere beber?"]

Thus wanes the night in the Plaza San Fernando, marked by the boom of the Giralda's bells, the bawling of vendors of lottery-tickets, of t.i.tbits, of matches, of _azucarillos_, of _naranjeros_ crying their oranges, of boys carrying miniature roulette-wheels with a cone of sherbet as prize, that the little children may be taught to gamble early in life; and sharply above all else and most incessantly the alpargata-shod water-seller, with his vessel like a powder-can slung across one shoulder, his gla.s.ses clinking musically, crying, crying always in his voluptuous, slovenly dialect:

"A'ua! A'ua fresca! A'ua fresca como la nieve! Quien quiere beber?"

We have street calls in the United States, but he whose ear is daily a.s.saulted therewith would have difficulty in imagining how musical these may be when filled, like the thrum of the guitar, the street ballad, the "carol of the l.u.s.ty muleteer," and the wail of the railway announcer, with the inner soul of Andalusia.

There is to-day very little left of the national costume of Spain. One may except the stiff, square-cut sombrero, the alpargata of workman and beggar, the garb of the arriero, fitting and suiting him as if it had grown on him, the blanket which the peasant wears thrown over one shoulder, not because he realizes what a charm this adds to his appearance, but because he often sleeps out of doors or on the stone floor of public stables. Last, and least to be forgotten, is the mantilla. Except for it the women of Spain have succ.u.mbed to the ugly creations of Paris; may that day be centuries distant when the abomination masquerading under the name of woman's hat makes its way into the peninsula. Yet there is never among Spanish women that gaudy affectation of style so frequent elsewhere. Give her the merest strip of gay calico and the espanola will make it truly ornamental; with a red flower to wear over one temple and a mantilla draped across the back of her head she is more pleasingly adorned than the best that Paris can offer.

There is something unfailingly coquettish about the mantilla. It sets best, perhaps, with a touch of Arab blood; and in the Plaza San Fernando this is seldom lacking. Everywhere are morisco faces framed in the black mantilla and, as if in further reminder of Mohammedan days, there still remains the instinctive habit of holding a corner of the shawl across the chin. Thus accoutered only the Castilian "ojear" can in any sense express the power given the andaluza by her Oriental ancestry to do or say so much with a glance of her black eye. With the fan, too, she is an adept. The j.a.panese geisha is in comparison a bungler. The woman of Spain has her fan in such fine training that it will carry on extended conversations for her without a word from her lips, as Spanish peasants can talk from two hilltops miles apart by the mere motions of their arms.

But who of all the misinformers of humanity first set afoot the rumor that the sevillana is beautiful? "Salada" she is, br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with that "salt" for which she is so justly renowned; chic, too, at times, with her tiny feet and hands and graceful carriage; and always voluptuous. But one might wander long in the music-livened Plaza San Fernando without espying a woman to whom could be granted the unqualified adjective beautiful. On the other hand it is rare that one meets a sevillana, unless she be deeply marked by the finger of time, who is ugly; never, if my search was thorough, one scrawny or angular.

In Spain is never that blending and mixture of all types as in our land of boundless migration; hence one may generalize. Salada, graceful, full of languor, above all wholly free from pose, is the sevillana in her mantilla. Of education in the bookish sense she has little, of the striving after "culture" to the divorce of common sense none whatever.

She may--and probably does--know nothing of the sciences, or the wrinkle-browed joys of the afternoon club. But she is br.i.m.m.i.n.g with health and sound good sense, above all she is incontestably charming; and is not this after all--whisper it not in New England--the chief duty of her s.e.x?

The Andalusian is primarily an out-door people; not merely in the plain and physical sense, but in life and character. He lives his life openly, frankly, setting his face in no mask of Puritanical pretension when he sallies forth into the world, being himself always, in public or in private. All in all among the sincerest, he is also the most abstemious and healthiest of peoples; not yet spoiled by luxury. His existence is reduced to simplicity; more exactly he has never lost touch with eternal nature. He takes time to live and never admits the philosophy that he must work before resting, but hinges his conduct on the creed that he must live first, and do whatever of work there is time left to do. In no sense is he lazy; rather in his sound sanity he has a real appreciation of the value of life. To-day is the great day to him.

Live now is his motto, not put off living until he has earned enough to live, only to find it too late to begin. One would seek through Seville in vain for that strained, devil-chased air so stamped on our own national physiognomy. Whatever his vocation, or the hour of the day, the Spaniard has always time to choose the shady side of the street, time to halt and talk with his friends. As I watched him night by night in the Plaza San Fernando--and this is largely typical of all Spain--there came the reflection that the lands of continual striving, the lands where "culture" demands the repression of every natural emotion and enthusiasm, are dreary realms, indeed, compared with the Living Latin South. Here is not merely animation, but life, real life everywhere, no mere feigned living.

On my second Sunday in Seville I attended my second bullfight. The first I had seen from the depths of the _sombra_, believing the a.s.sertion that none but a man with Arabic blood in his veins could endure the unshaded side of the arena. But my fear of sun-stroke had melted away; moreover, the sun-side gate keeper is most easily satisfied. I bought a ticket at a corner of las Sierpes and entered the plaza as soon as the doors were opened.

Not a half-dozen had preceded me when I took a place on the stone bank directly behind the red _tablas_. On my heels appeared a rabble of ragged, joyful fellows, who quickly demonstrated that I had not, as I supposed, chosen the foremost seat, by coming to roost along the top of the barrier in front of me. One shudders to reflect what would befall individuals in an American baseball crowd who should conduct themselves as did these habitues of the Sevillian _sol_. But to the mercurial andaluz, accustomed always and anywhere to give his idiosyncrasies and enthusiasms full play, the wildest antics seem quite in place.

If, as many reputed authorities will have us believe, the Spaniard's love for "toros" is dying out, what must it have been before the dissolution began? At any rate it has not yet sunk to that point where the vast plaza of Seville will hold all who would come, even to these _novilladas_ in which the bulls are young and the fighters not yet more famous than a member of the cortes. From a dozen entries the spectators poured into the enclosure; in the blazing semicircle bronzed peasants and workmen with wine-swollen _botas_, across the s.h.i.+mmering sand richly attired senoritas in the white mantilla of festival, attended by middle-aged duenas and, at respectful distance, by caballeros of effeminate deportment. The espanola is as ardent a lover of bulls as the men. One must not, however, jump to the conclusion that she is cruel and inhuman. On the contrary she is in many things exceedingly tender-hearted. Habit and the accustomed way of thinking make vast differences, and the fact that Spain was for seven hundred years in continual warfare may account for a certain callousness to physical suffering.

The Spanish plaza de toros is the nearest modern prototype of the Roman Coliseum; when it is filled one may easily form a mental picture of the scene at a gladiatorial combat. By four-thirty the voice of the circular mult.i.tude was like the rumble of some distant Niagara. Howling vendors of thirst-quenching fruits climbed over our blistering knees; between the barriers circulated hawkers of everything that may be sold to the festive-humored. Spain may be tardy in all else, but her bullfights begin sharply on time. At the first stroke of five from the Giralda a bugle sounded, the barrier gates swung open, and the game was on.

It would be not merely presumptuous, which is criminal, but trite, which is worse, to attempt at this late day to picture a scene that has been described a hundred times in every civilized tongue and in all the gamut of styles from Byronic verse to commercial-traveler's prose. But whereas every bullfight is the same in its general features, no two were ever alike in the unexpected incidents that make the sport of perennial interest to the _aficionados_. An "aficionado," be it noted in pa.s.sing, is a "fan," a being quite like our own "rooter" except that, his infirmity being all but universal, he is not looked down upon with such pity by his fellow-countrymen.

Seville is the acknowledged headquarters of the taurine art. In our modern days of migratory mixture of races and carelessness of social lines, toreros have arisen from all cla.s.ses and in all provinces--nay, even in foreign lands. One of Spain's famous _matadores_ is a Parisian, and one even more renowned bears the nickname of the "Mexican Millionaire." But the majority of bullfighters are still sons of peasants and small landholders of Andalusia in general and the vicinity of Seville in particular. The torero touring "the provinces" is as fond of announcing himself a sevillano as are our strolling players of claiming "New Yawk" as home. Nowadays, too, the bulls are bred in all parts of Spain and by various cla.s.ses of persons. But the _ganaderias_ of Andalusia still supply most of the animals that die in the plazas of Spain, and command the highest prices. Among the princ.i.p.al raisers is the Duke of Veragua, who boasts himself--and can, it is said, make good the boast--a lineal descendant of that Christopher Columbus whose wandering ashes now repose in the cathedral of Seville. The duke, however, takes second place to one Eduardo Miura, whose bulls are so noted for their fury that a movement has for some time been on foot to demand double fees for facing animals from his pastures.

The bulls of both my Sundays in Seville were "miuras," and fully sustained the fame of their ganadero. Each corrida began with the usual caparisoned parade, the throwing of the key, the fleeing of the over-cautious _alguaciles_ amid the jeering of the mult.i.tude. Is there another case in history of a national sport conducted by the vested authorities of government? Perhaps so, in Nero's little matinees in the toasting of Christians. But here the rules of the game are altered and to some extent framed by those authorities. Imagine the city fathers of, let us say Boston, debating with fiery zeal whether a batter should be allowed to run on the third strike! Then, too, the mayor or his representative is the umpire, safely so, however, for he is securely locked in his box high above the rabble and there is never a losing team to lie in wait for him beyond the club-house.

It is the all but universal custom, I note in skimming through the impressions of a half-hundred travelers in Spain, to decry bullfighting in the strongest terms. Nay, almost without exception, the chroniclers, who appear in most cases to be full-grown, able-bodied men, relate how a sickness nigh unto death came upon them at about the time the first bull was getting warmed up to his business which forced them to flee the scene forever. One must, of course, believe they are not posing before the gentle reader, but it comes at times with difficulty. To be sure, the game has little in common with croquet or dominoes; there are stages of it, particularly the disemboweling of helpless hacks, that give the newcomer more than one unpleasant quarter of an hour. Indeed, I am inclined to think that had I a dictator's power I should abolish bullfighting to-morrow, or next Monday at least; but so, for that matter, I should auto races and country billboards, Salome dancers and politicians, train-boys and ticket speculators. Unfortunately--

At any rate, I came out to this second corrida in Seville and left it with the hope of seeing several more. Certainly there is no other "sport" that can more quickly and fully efface from the mind of the spectator his personal cares and problems; and is not this, after all, the chief, if not the only raison d'etre of professional sport? There is an intensity in the moment of a matador standing with steeled eye and bared sword before a bull panting in tired anger, head lowered, a hush of expectancy in the vast audience, the _chulos_ poised on tiptoe at a little distance, an equine corpse or two tumbled on the sand to give the scene reality, compared with which the third man, third strike in the ninth inning of a 0-0 contest is as exciting as a game of marbles. It is his hunger for such moments of frenetic attention that makes the Spaniard a lover of the corrida, not the sight of blood and the injuries to beast and man, which, in his intoxication at the game itself, he entirely loses sight of.

The newcomer will long remember his first bull--certainly if, as in my own case, the first bandarillero slips at the moment of thrusting his barbed darts and is booted like a soccer football half across the ring by the snorting animal. Still less shall I forget the chill that shot through me when, with the fifth bull at the height of his fury, a gaunt and awkward boy of fifteen sprang suddenly over the barriers and shook his ragged blouse a dozen times in the animal's face. As many times he escaped a goring by the closest margin. The toreros did not for a moment lose their heads. Calmly and dexterously they maneuvered until one of them drew the bull off, when another caught the intruder by the arm and marched him across the ring to the shade of the mayor's box.

There the youth, who had taken this means of gaining an audience, lifted up a mournful voice and asked for food, a.s.serting that he was starving--a statement that seemed by no means improbable. The response was thumbs down. But he gained his point, in a way, for he was given a fortnight in prison. Incidents of the sort had grown so frequent of late in the plaza of Seville as to make necessary a new law, promulgated in large letters on that day's programme. Printed words, in all probability, meant nothing to this neglected son of Seville. Such occurrences are not always due to the same motive. The impulsive andaluz is frequently not satisfied with being a mere spectator at the national game. A score of times the tattered aficionados about me pounced upon one of their fellows and dragged him down just as he was on the point of bounding into the ring. Indeed, as at any spectacle the world over, the audience was as well worth attention as the performance itself. On the blistering stone terraces of an Andalusian sol animation and comedy are never lacking. In his excitement at a clever thrust the Sevillian often sees fit to fall--quite literally--on the neck of a total stranger; friends and foes alike embrace each other and dance about on the feet, shoulders, or heads of their uncomplaining neighbors.

There is a striking similarity between the bantering of a famous torero by the aficionados and the "jos.h.i.+ng" of a favorite pitcher in an American ball park, but the good day has yet to come when the recorder of a home-run will be showered in his circuit of the bleachers with hats and wine-skins, handfuls of copper coins, and tropical deluges of cigars. Nor does the most inexcusable fumble call forth such a storm of derision as descends upon a cowardly bull. The jibes have in them often more of wit than vulgarity, as when an aficionado rises in his place and solemnly offers the animal his seat in the shade. The height of all insults is to call him a cow. Through it all, the leather wine-bottles pa.s.s constantly from hand to hand. A dozen of these I had thrust upon me during the fight, and tasted good wine each time. The proceeding is so antiseptic as to warm the heart of the most raving germ-theorist, for the bota is fitted with a tiny spout out of which the drinker, holding the receptacle high above his head, lets the wine trickle down his throat. The skins so swollen when the corrida begins are limp and flaccid when it ends.

It seems the custom of travelers to charge that the apparent bravery of the bullfighter is mere pseudo-courage. Of all the detractors, however, not one records having strolled even once across the arena while the fight was on. In truth, the torero's calling is distinctly dangerous.

The meanest bull that enters a Spanish ring, one for whom the spectators would demand "banderillas de fuego"--explosives,--is a more fearful brute than the king of a Texas ranch. Their horns are long, spreading and needle-pointed; the _empresa_ that dared turn into the ring a bull with the merest tip of a horn blunted or broken would be jeered into oblivion. Not a year pa.s.ses that scores of toreros are not sent to the hospital.

The Spanish espada is almost invariably "game" to the last. The sixth bull of this Sunday's tournament was, as often happens, the most ferocious. He killed six horses, wounded two _picadores_, tossed a chulo as high as a one-story house and, at the first pa.s.s of Vasquez, the matador, knocked him down and gored him in the neck. A coward, one fancies, would have lost no time in withdrawing. Vasquez, on the contrary, crawled to his feet and swung half round the circle that all might see he was unafraid, though blood was streaming down his bespangled breast. The alguaciles between the barriers commanded him to retire, but it was to be noted that not one of them showed the least hint of entering the ring to enforce the order. The diestro advanced upon the defiant brute, unfurled his red muleta, poised his sword--and swooned flat on the sand. The bull walked slowly to him, sniffed at his motionless form, and with an expression almost human of disdain, turned and trotted away.

"Palmas al toro!" bawled a boisterous fellow at my elbow, and the vast circle burst out in a thunder of hand-clapping and cries of "Bravo, toro!" while the wounded espada still lay senseless in the center of the ring.

He was carried off by his _cuadrilla_, and the _sobresaliente_, which is to say the "jumper-over," or subst.i.tute, marched as boldly into the ring as if accidents were unknown. Once begun a corrida knows no intermission, even though a man is killed. The newcomer took steady aim and drove the three-foot sword to the very hilt between the heaving shoulders; then nonchalantly turned his back and strolled away. The bull did not fall, but wabbled off into the shade to lean up against the tablas as if he had suddenly grown disillusioned and disgusted with life, and the spectators, no longer to be restrained, swarmed head-long into the arena. I pushed toward the animal with the rest and just as I paused a few feet from him he dropped suddenly dead, his blood-smeared horns rattling down along the barrier.

On rare occasions the matador, disobeying the unwritten law that the animal must be despatched by a thrust down through the body, places the point of his sword just behind the horns and with the slightest of thrusts kills the bull so suddenly that his fall sounds like the thump of a barrel dropped from a height. Then does the spectator, the unseasoned at least, experience an indefinable depression as if this striking of a great brute dead by a mere p.r.i.c.k in the back of the neck were a warning of how frail after all is the hold of the most robust on life.

As we poured out of the plaza, I halted in the long curving chamber beneath the tribunes. Twenty-two horses, gaunt, mutilated things, lay tumbled pellmell together in a vast heap. Brawny men in sleeveless s.h.i.+rts were pawing them over. Whenever they brought to light a mane or tail they slashed off the hair and stuffed it into sacks; when they dragged forth a hoof the shoe was quickly added to the heap of old iron in a corner. The bulls were treated with far more deference. Each lay in his own s.p.a.ce, and the group gathered about him wore the respectful mien of soldiers viewing the last remains of some formidable fallen enemy. On my heels arrived the jingling mules with the last victim. Two butchers skinned, quartered, and loaded this into a wagon from the central markets in exactly eleven minutes, the vehicle rattled away, and the week's corrida was over.

The Spanish torero is all but idolized by the rank and file, being in this respect vastly above our professional ball players. There is little society except the purely bluestocking to which he has not the entree; wherever and whenever he appears he is sure to be surrounded or followed by admiring crowds. The famous, the Bombita family, for example, which has given four renowned matadores to the ring--and one to each of my Sevillian corridas--Machaquito of Cordoba, and a half-dozen others of highest rank are distinctly more popular and honored than the king. Nor is this popularity, however clouded by a bad thrust, transient or fleeting. Pepete, who departed this life with exceeding suddenness back in the sixties because a bull bounded after him over the tablas and nailed him to the inner barrier, is to this day almost a national hero.

Of course every red-blooded Spanish boy dreams of becoming a bullfighter and would not think of being unfamiliar with the features, history, peculiarities, and batting av--I mean number of _cogidas_ or wounds of the princ.i.p.al fighters. Rare the boy who does not carry about his person a pack of portraits of matadores such as are given away with cigarettes. On the playground no other game at all rivals "torero" in popularity. There is something distinctly redolent of the baseball diamond in the dialogues one is sure to hear several times on the way home after a corrida. A boy whom fate or the despotism of the family woodpile has deprived of the joys of the afternoon, greets his inhuman father outside the gates with a shout of, "Hola! Papa! Que tal los toros?--How goes it with the bulls--what is the score?" To which father, anxious now to regain his popularity, answers jovially, "Bueno, chiquillo! Tres cogidas y dos al hospital.--Fine, son! Three wounded and two in the hospital."

Having thus trod the very boards of the last act of "Carmen" and pa.s.sed a splendid setting for the third in my tramp through the Sierra de Ronda, I decided to celebrate the otherwise unglorious Fourth by visiting the scene of the third. The great government Fabrica de Tabacos of Seville is one of the most ma.s.sive buildings in Spain, and furnishes well-nigh half the cigarettes and cigars smoked in Andalusia.

I pa.s.sed through the outer offices and crossed the vast patio without interference. When I attempted to enter the factory itself, however, an official barred the way. I asked why permission was denied and with a wink he answered:

"s.h.!.+ Hace calor. It is hot, and las cigarreras are not dressed to receive visitors. Come in the autumn and I shall make it a pleasure to show you through the fabrica."

"But surely," I protested, "there are men among the employees who have admittance to the workrooms even in summer?"

"Claro, hombre!" he replied, with another wink. "But that is one of the privileges of our trade."

I strolled out around the building. Back of it, sure enough, was a cavalry barracks, and any one of a score of young troopers sitting astride chairs in the shade of the building might have pa.s.sed for Don Jose. Some of them were singing, too, in good clear voices; though rather a sort of dreamy _malagueno_ than the vivacious music of Bizet.

But, alas! With Don Joses and to spare, when the factory gates opened and the thousands of _cigarreras_ so famed in song and impropriety poured forth, not one was there who could by any stretch of the imagination be cast for Carmencita. Sevillanas there were of every age, from three-foot childhood upward; disheveled gypsy girls from Triana across the river; fat, dumpy majas; hobbling old witches; slatterns with an infant tucked under one arm; crippled martyrs of modern invention; hollow-chested victims of tobacco fumes; painted _sinverguenzas_; above all, hundreds of hale, honest women who looked as if they worked to help support their families and lived life seriously and not wantonly. But not a face or even a form that could have seduced any young recruit to betray his trust and ruin his career. Fiction, frequently, is more picturesque than fact--and far less pleasing in its morality.

CHAPTER VI

TRAMPING NORTHWARD

To the man who will travel cheaply, interlarding his walking trips with such journeys by train as may be necessary to cover the peninsula in one summer, Spain offers the advantages of the "billete kilometrico." The kilometer ticket is sold in all cla.s.ses and for almost any distance, and is valid on all but a few branch lines. One applies at a ticket agency, leaves a small photograph of one's self, and comes back a couple of days later to receive a sort of 16mo mileage-book containing legal information sufficient to furnish reading matter for spare moments for a week to come and adorned with the interesting likeness already noted.

I made such application during my second week in Seville, and received for my pains a book good for two thousand kilometers (1280 miles) of third-cla.s.s travel during the ensuing three months. The cost thereof--besides the infelicity of sitting to a photographer in a sadly mosquito-bitten condition--covering transportation, government tax on the same, printing and the tax therefor, the photograph and the tax for that privilege, and the government stamp attesting that the government was satisfied it could tax no more, footed up to seventy-five pesetas, or concisely, thirteen dollars and thirty cents.

But--if there is anything in official Spain that has not a "but"

attached it should be preserved in a museum--but, I say, the kilometer-coupons are printed in fives rather than in ones, and however small the fraction of distance overlapping, it costs five kilometers of ticket. Moreover--there is usually also a "moreover" following the "but" clause in Spanish ordinances--moreover, there are hardly two cities in Spain the railway distance between which does not terminate in the figures one or six. It does not seem reasonable to believe that the railroads were surveyed round-about to accomplish this result; it must be, therefore, that in the hands of Spanish railway measurers the kilometer is susceptible to such shrinkage as may be needful. At any rate--and this is the thought I had hoped to lead up to--at any rate it was very often possible, by walking six or eleven or sixteen kilometers, to save ten or fifteen or twenty kilometers of ticket; and the game of thus outwitting the railway strategists was incomparably more diverting than either solitaire or one-hand poker.

Thus it was that, though I planned to reach Cordoba that evening, I left Seville during the morning of July 8 on foot. In my knapsack was a day's supply of both food and drink, in the form of three-cent's worth of those fresh figs that abound in Spain--the one fruit that is certainly descended directly from the Garden of Eden. For miles the route led across a desert-dry land as flat as a western prairie, grilling in the blazing suns.h.i.+ne. At rare intervals an olive-tree cast a dense black shadow. There was no gra.s.s to be seen, but only an occasional tuft of bright red flowers smiling bravely above the moistureless soil.

Long hours the retrospect of the city of toreros remained, the overgrown cathedral bulking gigantic above all else. All the day through cream-white Carmona on her hilltop--a lofty island in a sea turned sand--gleamed off to the southward, visible almost in detail through the truly transparent air of Andalusia. I did not go to Carmona, near as she is to Seville; I never care to, for certainly she cannot be half so bewitching in reality as she looks on her sheer-faced rock across these burning plains of sand. To the north, beyond the brown Guadalquivir, lay the distance-blue foothills of the Sierra Morena, dying away in the northern horizon.

It was twenty-one o'clock by her station timepiece when I descended at Cordoba from the train I had boarded in the dusk at Tocina. A mile's stroll brought me to the city itself, and a lodging. Poor old Cordoba has fallen on parlous times. Like those scions of n.o.bility one runs across now and then "on the road," it is well that she has her papers to prove she was once what she claims to have been. Surely none would guess her to-day a former imperial city of the Caliphs, the Bagdad and Mecca of the West. Her streets, or rather her alleys, for she has no streets, are bordered for the most part by veritable village hovels.

Most African in aspect of all the cities of Spain, this once center of Arabic civilization looks as if she had been overwhelmed so often that she has utterly lost heart and given up, expending what little sporadic energy she has left in constructing a tolerable Alameda to the station, either that she may have always open an avenue of escape, or to entice the unsuspecting traveler into her misery.

To the imagination the Cordoba of to-day is wholly a deception. Yet she may rest a.s.sured that she will not be entirely forgotten so long as her one lion, the cathedral, or more properly her chief mosque, remains.

For in spite of Christian desecration, in spite of the crippled old women who are incessantly drawing water in its Patio of the Orange-trees, despite even the flabby, cynical priests that loaf in the shade of the same, smoking their cigarettes, and the beggars at its doors like running sores on the landscape, the Mesdjid al-Dijami of Cordoba does not, like many a far-heralded "sight," bring disappointment. Once in the cool stillness of its forest of pillars one may still drift back into the gone centuries and rebuild and repeople in fancy the sumptuous days of the Moor.

This reconstruction of the past was not uninterrupted, however, on the morning of my visit. For in the church, that heavy-featured intruder within the mosque like a toadstool that has sprung up through some broken old Etruscan vase, ma.s.s was celebrating. I crossed before the open door and glanced in. Some thirty strapping, well-fed priests were lounging in the richly-carved choir stalls, chanting a resonant wail that was of vast solace, no doubt, to some unhappy soul writhing in purgatory. There was not the shadow of a wors.h.i.+per in the building. Yet these able-bodied and ostensibly sane men croaked on through their chants as serious-featured as if all the congregation of Cordoba were following their every syllable with reverent awe.

They interfered not in the least with sight-seeing, however, being, as I have said, in the church proper, an edifice wholly distinct from the mosque and one which none but a conscientious tourist or a fervent Catholic would care to enter. There were, nevertheless, certain annoyances, in the persons of a half-dozen blearing crones and as many ragged and officious urchins, who crowded about offering, nay, thrusting upon me their services as guides.

In time I shook off all but one ugly fellow of about fifteen, who hung irrepressibly on my heels. Ma.s.s ended soon after, and the priests filed out into the mosque chatting and rolling cigarettes, and wandered gradually away. One of them, however, catching sight of me, advanced and clutching my would-be guide by the slacker portions of his raiment, sent him spinning toward the door.