IN winter Seville’s sky is sometimes for weeks entirely cloudless. Day after day opens and dies peacefully away like a perfect flower; or, if a strong cold wind drives across the day, it still blows in a heaven of limitless clear blue. But in early spring the sky is often veiled in a floating canopy of grey, or one may watch the white masses of clouds thin and melt on the blue. And the blue is no longer fixed, distant, and serene; even when apparently clear it has a vague movement of dissolving mists, an intangible white softness interlacing it. It is this quality of the sky, harmonizing so well with the soft lines and delicate colours of the city, that gives to Seville in spring its unfailing charm. Especially is that charm felt in the hour when men’s cigarettes begin to glow and dot the streets with tiny fire-flies, distinct as the white flowers worn by the women in their hair. The deep-red carnations and dark violets of the open flower-stalls fade into shadow; the light greens, lilacs, yellows, browns, and blues of the houses take a greyer tinge. The last sunshine throws its thinner radiance along the white lines of flat roofs that stand out in many levels and angles on the blue or blue-and-white sky, and the effect is of pearls and opals, not the flash of polished opals, but, as it were, blue veins of opal in white chalk. The west is filled with a level radiance of pure gold, and presently the eastern sky also changes from blue to a faint golden grey. One by one the hanging street lamps begin to shed their soft glow of white light, and overhead the first stars shine faintly and vanish and reappear. The bells of goats and the mellower note of cowbells are heard as they go their evening round to be milked, driven by a boy astride his donkey, or by an old man with faded-pink umbrella; or a donkey passes laden with oranges, the fruit’s gold gleaming through the twilight afterglow from between the netting of the panniers. A breath of country air invades the city; the day’s work is ended, and perhaps from some church or convent you may hear “a distant bell that seems to mourn the dying of the day”:

The swift Southern twilight soon dies, but this short hour more than any other embodies the magic of a Seville spring. For Seville at other times is “a city full of stirs, a tumultuous city, a joyous city.” It wakes to a discordant music of many street cries. All kinds of wares are hawked shrilly, with loud shouts, or slow, dirge-like chants. Later in the day come the more melodious cries of “Oranges! Water! Violets! Carnations!—QuÉ buenas naranjas! Agua, quien quiere agua! Violetas! Claveles!” But to the flat brick-paved housetops, surrounded with walls of different height, from three to twenty feet, all whitewashed to their level tops, these sounds of the street come faintly. The rattle of wheels over the cobbles is deadened, the bells of slowly driven cows and goats chime distantly; sometimes one hears the intricate whistle of the knife-grinder, or a barrel-organ plays an interminable dance to the clacking of castaÑets, that fascinates by its ceaseless repetition. But the sounds are vague and muffled, without harshness or stridency, and here reigns more uninterrupted quiet than in the cool marble patios below, with the frequent goings out and in through the door’s iron reja. On the walls or in the line of shade beneath them stand rows of plants—roses, geraniums, heliotrope, and especially carnations. From here the street sellers fill their open stalls and baskets with the huge carnations of spring, the smaller early carnations coming chiefly from MÁlaga. And the carnations never look more beautiful than seen, dark red or pink or yellow, against these walls of glistening white; one is fain to call them by their German or “soft Spanish name”—Nelken, claveles. The sun rising lights up the housetops so that they gleam like snow between the dark spaces of bronze or green or blue glazed tiles, slender-springing towers, and infrequent roofs, covered thickly in spring with grass, like small fields. Or on a night of moon the city has a phantom look of whited sepulchres, and if no moon looks round her with delight when the heavens are bare, there is an uninterrupted view of stars in the whole sky, as from a ship’s deck. At midday, when the sun is all fire and narrows the lines of shadow to mere rims of black, one may not look for more than an instant across the glaring radiance of white. In the morning there is an exquisite freshness. Little smoke rises from the houses—only an occasional tiny wraith of grey—but, beyond, a dense line goes up from the Cartuja factory of azulejos, and hangs black-purple on the blue sky—the morning sky streaked with waving outdrawn wisps of white mist-like cloud. There is a flapping of pigeons’ wings as they flutter from wall to wall, and the twittering of innumerable sparrows. The hours are marked by the crystal striking of many clocks that are heard only dim and intermittently from below in the street traffic. But it is at evening that the housetop has an almost magical charm, when the sun has set in a sky of delicate gold, and in the east long thin lines of white and faint purple cloud lie across a sky of lightest blue. Then the flowers along the wall give out all their scent. Swallows whirl and swerve far overhead or lightly skim the hundred levels of whitewashed turret and wall. The claveles fade slowly in the growing dusk; the wide, uneven plain of glowing walls gradually becomes indistinct and blurred; finally the sky, too, is moulded to a perfect symmetry of grey, and perhaps an immense orange-coloured moon climbs slowly above the city. Seville is lovely in winter, when the sky is a cold, serene blue, and night by night the stars glint and glitter; lovely in spring, when everywhere, in roof and patio and garden, is a triumph of green, when the oranges still hang on the orange-trees in flower—like yellow crocuses peering from the snow—and the corn is already high in the olives beyond the river; lovely in summer, when the greens are parched and shrivelled, and a hot wind blows heavily across the fainting housetops, or in nights of sultry stillness the intense glow from many a lighted patio falls across the velvet darkness of the narrow streets. Lovely at all times, but never more lovely than in the temperate days of spring, when a hundred bells are ringing for the Feast of Resurrection, and the flowers from countless roofs are gathered for the fÊte; when, in scenes of fairy magic, the slow pasos move with their myriad candles burning through the twilight, along the crowded streets and plazas to the Cathedral, while still peacefully above its Court of Oranges the tall Giralda looks across the city that hems it in, to the wide dehesas of AndalucÍa, to the green fields and olive-covered hills beyond the gently flowing Guadalquivir, and to the distant line of the Sierra Morena.