  THERE were “Bulls at Salamanca” (so ran the placards) on the day when we were to resume our journey towards the south; and the SeÑor Patron seemed quite crestfallen at realising that we had no intention of deferring our departure in order to witness the fun. Bull-fighting was not cruel, he protested. That was all our inexplicable British prejudice. And as patrons of prize-fights and football we ought to be the last to throw stones. We were rather expected to sympathise with the national sport of Spain. His conclusion was truer than his reasoning. There are certain thrilling forms of playing with death amiably tolerated by the British public which are logically no whit better than bull-fighting: and it is not humanity but fashion that dictates to us which to condemn. Only a few days earlier an unfortunate woman had been killed at Madrid Bull-fighting is one of the many sports that have been ruined by professionalism. In the days when the young gallants of the court encountered the bull themselves, on their own horses, before the eyes of their lady-loves in the Plaza Mayor, there was a spice of chivalry about the proceeding that half redeemed its brutality. It was truly a sport then, albeit a savage one; but now it is merely a show. Moreover, even our host admitted that this time the Corrida would be shorn of its foremost attraction. It was to have been inaugurated by a bull-fighting Pierrot who was wont to await the first rush of the monster motionless upon a tub in the centre of the arena. The bull would charge headlong upon him,—check, sniff, and turn away. No doubt he owed his immunity to his apparent lifelessness; but it was billed as the “power of the The two English visitors to Salamanca also failed to figure at the function. They had crossed the bridge very early in the morning, and were heading for the mountains of GrÉdos by the highway leading to BÉjar. The actual battlefield was passed upon the left, about four miles distant from Salamanca, subtending the angle formed by the roads to Alba and BÉjar; and the olive woods which so hampered Clausel spread wide around us over the hills behind. It was a just Nemesis which overtook the invaders on this occasion, for the destruction of olive trees for fuel had been one of their most gratuitous outrages during the war. The olive is a slow grower, and a few hours’ reckless cutting might take half a century to repair. At first the road rises gradually and the country
Hope had told us a flattering tale concerning the attractions of BÉjar. A Salamanca gentleman to whom we confided our intention of visiting it had kissed his finger-tips ecstatically at the mere mention of its name. “Muy bonita!” The town was holding a little Fiesta of its own upon the day of our visit, and the advent of two pedlars with knapsacks was naturally accepted as a part of the show. Several anxious enquirers stopped us in the street to ascertain “what our honours were selling”; and the prevalent notion appeared to be that we were vendors of edible snails! Many of the country-folk had come in from the remoter villages and were attired in the quaintest of costumes. The women wore very brief skirts, which gave an exceedingly squat appearance to their sturdy thick-set figures. The men had tight black breeches and jerkins adorned with polished metal buttons; enormously broad leather belts something like the cuirasses of the The journey from Salamanca to Ávila entails a longer spell of Duero valley scenery than that from Salamanca to BÉjar; and for the best part of a day we were perseveringly reeling off league after league of the same dry red plough lands which had already wearied us in the North. It was not till towards evening that the road at last began swerving and plunging upon the great ground-swell which ripples out into the plain from the feet of the Sierra de Guadarrama; and the huge granite boulders littered about among the stunted ilex and gorse which clothed the shaggy ridges apprised us that we had drawn within reach of the derelict moraines. Still as we held our course each successive wave bore us higher than its predecessor, till at last we looked down into a wide upland basin, and beheld the towers of Ávila rising proudly upon their daÏs in the midst.
There is no other walled town of my acquaintance that flaunts its defences quite so defiantly as Ávila. Its circlet of tower and curtain crests its great But the chief pride and glory of Ávila is the boast that it was the birthplace of Sta Theresa, the “seraphic” lady whom a more emotional epoch has preferred to the martial Santiago, and almost matched with the Virgin herself as the modern patroness of Spain. Sta Theresa was quite a modern saint; and, like her contemporary Ignatius Loyola, much more truly saintly than hagiologists would have us infer. They would rather persist in belauding her visionary ecstasies and ascetic self-mortification. Her practical common-sense and her gentle resolution are dismissed as earthlier virtues: yet it was these that made her a power. She certainly lost no time in beginning the practice of her profession, for at the age of seven she persuaded her baby brother to run away with her to Barbary to get martyred by the Moors. Being captured and brought home by their distracted parents, they next decided upon becoming hermits. But this notable scheme was also vetoed;—poor little mites! Maybe we know other small children who have started somewhat similarly on the road to canonization; but Theresa’s romantic devotion outlasted this fanciful stage. At the age of sixteen she assumed the veil—a step which in wiser years she was not so eager to advocate, but in which she found ample opportunity for the exercise of her piety and her zeal. Her reform of the Carmelite nunneries was achieved in the teeth of great opposition from the hierarchy of the day; and her literary work is of an excellence But perhaps the most remarkable honour ever accorded to her is the fact that two hundred years after her death she was actually gazetted commander-in-chief of the Spanish armies in the Peninsula war! Certainly Louis XI. had previously honoured Our Lady of Embrun with the colonelcy of his Scottish Guards. But here was a popular assembly, in the nineteenth century, which could “see him and go one better”; a far more deliberate extravagance than the whim of a fetish-cowed king. Of course there was more method in their madness than appears on the surface. They did not really want a commander-in-chief at all. What they did want was a Name which should fire the enthusiasm of the peasantry, as the citizens of Zaragoza had been fired by the name of Our Lady of the Pillar. At the same time it must be admitted that matters seemed to move more smoothly when she was superseded by the Duke of Wellington. The cathedral is a most massive structure of stern grey granite, with its apse bulging out beyond the city walls—battlemented, loop-holed, and machicolated like the profanest bastion of them all. It looks every inch a castle, and has not served amiss when so utilised; for in the great western tower the infant King Alfonso XI. (Father of Pedro the Cruel) was kept safe from his would-be guardians during his long minority, by the Bishop and people of Ávila. The interior of the building is one of the noblest in Spain—severe, gloomy and solemn; but furnished with that surpassing magnificence which only Spanish cathedrals can boast. The old town itself is full of quaint nooks and corners, and most of its streets and houses are as unalterably medieval as the walls. A county council inspector would probably play sad havoc with them, for even if they are sanitary they are terribly out of repair. There is a smell which lingers distinctive in these old Spanish townships. Not indeed altogether unpleasant, but rather grateful from association, like the smell of the stone walls of the West country after a summer shower. It is compounded of many simples, and its leading ingredient is garlic. But it would be
A Spaniard, however, takes his risks more lightly than an Englishman. Like Sancho Panza, he argues that the physician is worse than the disease. Life is a shockingly hazardous business even on wafers and membrillo, and perhaps, after all, roast partridge is not quite so deadly as Hippocrates supposed. Perhaps the most notable of the many monasteries and churches of Ávila is the Convent of San Tomas at the foot of the hill to the south. As in many important Spanish churches, the choir is placed in a great stone gallery at the west end, and in this instance the arrangement is balanced by a similar gallery for the High Altar at the east. The floor is occupied by the beautiful marble monument of Prince Juan, the only son of Ferdinand and Isabella. The Catholic kings, fortunate in all else, desired in vain that greatest blessing of all, the happiness of their children. Juan, the hope of their kingdom, died a few months after his marriage, and his posthumous child was still-born. Isabella, their eldest daughter, torn from the cloister to give an heir to the crown, was married to the Crown Prince of Portugal. Her Ávila lies at an extremely lofty elevation, three thousand feet above sea level; and both here and at SegÓvia snow frequently falls as late as the middle of May. The mountains immediately behind it, however, are but the connecting link between the Sierras of GrÉdos and Guadarrama, and all the loftier peaks lie at some distance east and west. A road leads through the gap to Talavera de la Reyna (a circumstance, it may be remembered, which was extremely fortunate for Sir John Moore). Our course lay over a brown and undulating moorland, with the Duero plains to the left of us and the broken ridges of the Sierra rising up At Villacastin we struck the great royal road for which we had been making, and the mountains stretched out their arms to receive us as we turned our faces towards the south. The day had been well advanced when we quitted Ávila, and now it was nearly dusk. The mountains were of indigo darkness, and the deep, closed valley into which we were plunging was as black as the throat of a wolf. But the white road led us on surely and The Fonda San Rafael is a long, low, straggling building, very similar to our own old coaching inns, but much more primitive in style. The village aristocracy were engaged at dominoes in the kitchen; and the time which we wasted in dining they attempted to utilise more profitably by mastering the English tongue. They borrowed our pocket dictionary and started their task with enthusiasm. But this laudable access of energy did not win the success it deserved. Unluckily they commenced operations among the sn’s—a combination which no Spaniard can ever pronounce without an antecedent e. And they came such amazing croppers over “es-na-Îl,” “es-nÂ-kÉ” and “es-ne-ÊzÉ,” that their bewildered interpreters got as much at sea as themselves.
The ascent of the Puerto de Guadarrama begins immediately beyond the village; a series of long steep zigzags well shaded by slender pine trees—the “spindles of Guadarrama,” to which Don Quixote likened Dulcinea. The climb in itself is not particularly arduous, but no doubt it is an ugly place in a December snowstorm; and so Napoleon Viewed from the north, the pass is a saddle at the end of a long deep valley; but its southern face forms an embrasure in a great mountain wall. The whole valley of the Tagus seemed spread beneath us as we gazed down from the summit; the plains all shimmering in a sea of purple heat haze, and the blue Toledan mountains rising faint and ethereal upon the further shore. So “Lot lifted up his eyes and looked and beheld all the Vale of Jordan.” The text seems singularly appropriate to many of these vistas of Spain. A little later in the day, when the haze had been lifted by the sunshine, every detail of the country would have shown up as clearly as on a map. At the foot of the descent we swung to the right Don Fernando (requiescat in pace) is by no means the only benefactor who has conferred such a boon on his countrymen. Almost every village near the mountains is dowered with a tank in the plaza, and a generous jet of water beneath which you may seethe your hissing head. Would that we were as well off in England! For our fountains can furnish no more than a miserable trickle, and even that is frequently dry. How often have we raged unsatisfied from one faithless nozzle to another, while the yokels mocked our agonies with commendations of the beer! Beer is excellent in its way—but not when one is thirsty. Then on revient toujours À ses premiers amours. ???S??? ??? ??O?. The famous palace of Escorial opened suddenly “First a tomb, next a convent, last a palace,” was the ideal at which the founder was aiming; and the massive asceticism of the building is an apt reflection of his mood. It boasts itself the finest of all the great monasteries: and if tested by weight or by measure, the claim could hardly be denied. But this vast gloomy prison is a thing which has nothing in common with the staid beauty of Poblet, The memory of Philip the Prudent is still held in honour by Spaniards, for he reigned in the days of their glory, and was probably the most powerful autocrat who ever occupied the throne. But history’s more equable judgment has condemned the reign as a failure, and the monarch as one of the scourges of mankind. True, he has not lacked apologists; for there is an uncanny fascination about his grim personality; and it is not difficult to show some redeeming quality even in a Louis XI. or a Richard III. But most of us prefer our history broadly coloured, with good strong lights and shadows. We must be allowed a real villain occasionally; and, till such time as we get Iago incarnate, Philip II. will do very sufficiently well. “A rake in his youth, a monster in his manhood, a miser in his old age;”—the bitter epitaph scribbled up over his deathbed paints his character in three lines.
And yet none who has once visited the Escorial will thereafter think of Philip without some glimmerings of respect. Our loathing for his The Escorial was Philip’s most cherished creation. Probably he had a large share in designing it; certainly he watched it stone by stone as it grew. Here he dwelt as “Brother Philip,” a monk in his own monastery, “ruling two worlds with a scrap of paper, from a cell on a mountain side.” Here he was worshipping when he received the news of Lepanto, and of the destruction of the Armada. And it was with the same resolute stoicism that he learned of the victory and of the defeat. Here he died—the death of Herod Agrippa; sustaining his two months’ agony with a constancy worthy of de Seso himself. Yet on one point the tyrant-hermit claims our unreserved approbation. He displayed a most excellent taste in the matter of selecting a site. Here we can feel no shadow of sympathy for his critics. His choice was unexceptionable: and those who impugn it are blind. Indeed, this whole range of Sierras is a region of singular beauty, and the charming old towns which lie on the foot hills beneath it,—BÉjar and PlasÉncia, Ávila and SegÓvia,—give it an added interest which mountain districts do not often possess. Charles V. was drawn hither to Yuste, as Philip to Escorial: yet each held an ample dominion and neither was an incapable connoisseur. The jaded soldier and statesman could wish for no pleasanter resting-place than these grave highland solitudes which form the backbone of Spain. The road which leads plainwards from Escorial to Madrid—“that splendid road constructed regardless of cost for the gratification of a royal caprice”—seems now scarce worthy of Macaula The capital itself, however, does not show up badly when approached from the northward; and the Royal Palace which dominates it, on the hill above the Manzanares, is an exceedingly imposing pile. ArÁnjuez (we were given to understand) considers itself equal to Windsor; but no one of our acquaintance would dare mention Buckingham Palace in competition with the Palacio Real at Madrid. |
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