The Mediterranean.
by T. G. (Thomas Gray) Bonney, E. A. R. Ball, H. D. Traill, Grant Allen, and Arthur Griffiths.
I
THE PILLARS OF HERCULES
Portals of the ancient world--Bay of Tangier at sunrise--Tarifa--The Rock of Gibraltar--Wonders of its fortifications--Afternoon promenade in the Alameda Gardens--Ascending the Rock--View from the highest point--The Great Siege--Ceuta, the princ.i.p.al Spanish stronghold on the Moorish coast--The rock of many names.
The "Pillars of Hercules!" The portals of the Ancient World! To how many a traveller just beginning to tire of his week on the Atlantic, or but slowly recovering, it may be, in his tranquil voyage along the coasts of Portugal and Southern Spain, from the effects of thirty unquiet hours in the Bay of Biscay, has the nearing view of this mighty landmark of history brought a message of new life! That distant point ahead, at which the narrowing waters of the Strait that bears him disappear entirely within the clasp of the embracing sh.o.r.es, is for many such a traveller the beginning of romance. He gazes upon it from the westward with some dim reflection of that mysterious awe with which antiquity looked upon it from the East. The progress of the ages has, in fact, transposed the center of human interest and the human point of view. Now, as in the Homeric era, the Pillars of Hercules form the gateway of a world of wonder; but for us of to-day it is within and not without those portals that that world of wonder lies. To the eye of modern poetry the Atlantic and Mediterranean have changed places. In the waste of waters stretching westward from the rock of Calpe and its sister headland, the Greek of the age of Homer found his region of immemorial poetic legend and venerable religious myth, and peopled it with the G.o.ds and heroes of his traditional creed. Here, on the bosom of the wide-winding river Ocea.n.u.s, lay the Islands of the Blest--that abode of eternal beauty and calm, where "the life of mortals is most easy," where "there is neither snow nor winter nor much rain, but ocean is ever sending up the shrilly breezes of Zephyrus to refresh man."
But for us moderns who have explored this mighty "river Ocea.n.u.s," this unknown and mysterious Atlantic to its farthest recesses, the glamor of its mystery has pa.s.sed away for ever; and it is eastward and not westward, through the "Pillars of Hercules," that we now set our sails in search of the region of romance. It is to the basin of the Mediterranean--fringed with storied cities and venerable ruins, with the crumbling sanctuaries of a creed which has pa.s.sed away, and the monuments of an art which is imperishable--that man turns to-day. The genius of civilization has journeyed far to the westward, and has pa.s.sed through strange experiences; it returns with new reverence and a deeper awe to that _enclave_ of mid-Europe which contains its birthplace, and which is hallowed with the memories of its glorious youth. The grand cliff-portal which we are approaching is the entrance, the thoughtful traveller will always feel, to a region eternally sacred in the history of man; to lands which gave birth to immortal models of literature and unerring canons of philosophic truth; to shrines and temples which guard the ashes of those "dead but sceptered sovereigns" who "rule our spirits from their urns."
As our vessel steams onward through the rapidly narrowing Straits, the eye falls upon a picturesque irregular cl.u.s.ter of buildings on the Spanish sh.o.r.e, wherefrom juts forth a rocky tongue of land surmounted by a tower.
It is the Pharos of Tarifa, and in another half hour we are close enough to distinguish the exact outlines of the ancient and famous city named of Tarif Ibn Malek, the first Berber sheikh who landed in Spain, and itself, it is said--though some etymologists look askance at the derivation--the name-mother of a word which is little less terrible to the modern trader than was this pirate"s nest itself to his predecessor of old times. The arms of Tarifa are a castle on waves, with a key at the window, and the device is not unaptly symbolical of her mediaeval history, when her possessors played janitors of the Strait, and merrily levied blackmail--the irregular _tariff_ of those days--upon any vessel which desired to pa.s.s. The little town itself is picturesquely situated in the deepest embrace of the curving Strait, and the view looking westward--with the lighthouse rising sharp and sheer against the sky, from the jutting cl.u.s.ter of rock and building about its base, while dimly to the left in the farther distance lie the mountains of the African coast, descending there so cunningly behind the curve that the two continents seem to touch and connect the channel into a lake--is well worth attentive study. An interesting spot, too, is Tarifa, as well as a picturesque--interesting at least to all who are interested either in the earlier or the later fortunes of post-Roman Europe. It played its part, as did most other places, on this common battle-ground of Aryan and Semite, in the secular struggle between European Christendom and the Mohammedan East. And again, centuries later, it was heard of in the briefer but more catastrophic struggle of the Napoleonic wars. From the day when Alonzo Perez de Guzman threw his dagger down from its battlements in disdainful defiance of the threat to murder his son, dragged bound before him beneath its walls by traitors, it is a "far cry" to the day when Colonel Gough of the 87th (the "Eagle-Catchers") beat off Marshal Victor"s besieging army of 1,800 strong, and relieved General Campbell and his gallant little garrison; but Tarifa has seen them both, and it is worth a visit not only for the sake of the ride from it over the mountains to Algeciras and Gibraltar, but for its historical a.s.sociations also, and for its old-world charm.
We have taken it, as we propose also to take Tangier, a little out of its turn; for the voyaging visitor to Gibraltar is not very likely to take either of these two places on his way. It is more probable that he will visit them, the one by land and the other by sea, from the Rock itself.
But Tangier in particular it is impossible to pa.s.s without a strong desire to make its acquaintance straightway; so many are the attractions which draw the traveller to this some-time appanage of the British Crown, this African _pied a terre_, which but for the insensate feuds and factions of the Restoration period might be England"s to-day. There are few more enchanting sights than that of the Bay of Tangier as it appears at sunrise to the traveller whose steamer has dropped down the Straits in the afternoon and evening hours of the previous day and cast anchor after nightfall at the nearest point off sh.o.r.e to which a vessel of any draught can approach. Nowhere in the world does a nook of such sweet tranquillity receive, and for a season, quiet, the hurrying waters of so restless a sea. Half a mile or so out towards the center of the Strait, a steamer from Gibraltar has to plough its way through the surface currents which speed continually from the Atlantic towards the Pillars of Hercules and the Mediterranean beyond. Here, under the reddening daybreak, all is calm.
The blue waters of the bay, now softly flushing at the approach of sunrise, break lazily in mimic waves and "tender curving lines of creamy spray" upon the shining beach. To the right lies the city, spectral in the dawn, save where the delicate pale ivory of some of its higher houses is warming into faintest rose; while over all, over sea and sh.o.r.e and city, is the immersing crystal atmosphere of Africa, in which every rock, every ripple, every housetop, stands out as sharp and clear as the filigree work of winter on a frosted pane.
Nothing in Tangier, it must be honestly admitted, will compare with the approach to it by its incomparable bay. In another sense, too, there is nothing here or elsewhere which exactly resembles this "approach," since its last stage of all has to be performed alike for man and woman--unless man is prepared to wade knee-deep in the clear blue water--on the back of a st.u.r.dy Moor. Once landed, he will find that the picturesqueness of Tangier, like that of most Eastern cities, diminishes rather than increases on a nearer view. A walk through its main street yields nothing particularly worthy of note, unless it be the minaret of the Djama-el-Kebir, the princ.i.p.al mosque of the city. The point to which every visitor to Tangier directs his steps, or has them directed for him, is the Bab-el-Sok, the gate of the market place, where the scene to be witnessed at early morning presents an unequaled picture of Oriental life. Crouching camels with their loads of dates, chaffering traders, chattering women, sly and servile looking Jews from the city, fierce-eyed, heavily armed children of the desert, rough-coated horses, and the lank-sided mules, withered crones squatting in groups by the wayside, tripping damsels ogling over the _yashmak_ as they pa.s.s, and the whole enveloped in a blinding, bewildering, choking cloud of such dust as only Africa, "_arida nutrix_," can produce--such dust as would make the pulverulent particles of the dryest of turnpikes in the hottest of summers, and under the most parching of east winds, appear by comparison moist and cool, and no more than pleasingly t.i.tillatory of the mouth and nostrils--let the reader picture to himself such a scene with such accessories, and he will know what spectacle awaits him at early morning at the Bab-el-Sok of Tangier.
But we must resume our journey eastward towards the famous "Rock." There at last it is! There "dawns Gibraltar grand and gray," though Mr. Browning strains poetic license very hard in making it visible even "in the dimmest north-east distance," to a poet who was at that moment observing how "sunset ran one glorious blood-red recking into Cadiz Bay." We, at any rate, are far enough away from Cadiz before it dawns upon us in all its t.i.tanic majesty of outline; grand, of course, with the grandeur of Nature, and yet with a certain strange air of human menace as of some piece of Atlantean ordnance planted and pointed by the hand of man. This "armamental" appearance of the Rock--a look visible, or at any rate imaginable in it, long before we have approached it closely enough to discern its actual fortifications, still less its artillery--is much enhanced by the dead flatness of the land from which its western wall arises sheer, and with which by consequence it seems to have no closer physical connection than has a gun-carriage with the parade ground on which it stands. As we draw nearer this effect increases in intensity. The surrounding country seems to sink and recede around it, and the Rock appears to tower ever higher and higher, and to survey the Strait and the two continents, divided by it with a more and more formidable frown. As we approach the port, however, this impression gives place to another, and the Rock, losing somewhat of its "natural-fortress" air, begins to a.s.sume that resemblance to a couchant lion which has been so often noticed in it.
Yet alas! for the so-called famous "leonine aspect" of the famous height, or alas! at least for the capricious workings of the human imagination!
For while to the compiler of one well-reputed guidebook, the outlines of Gibraltar seem "like those of a lion asleep, and whose head, somewhat truncated, is turned towards Africa as if with a dreamy and steadfast deep attention;" to another and later observer the lion appears to have "his kingly head turned towards Spain, as if in defiance of his former master, every feature having the character of leonine majesty and power!" The truth is, of course, that the Rock a.s.sumes entirely different aspects, according as it is looked at from different points of view. There is certainly a point from which Gibraltar may be made, by the exercise of a little of Polonius"s imagination, to resemble some couchant animal with its head turned towards Africa--though "a head somewhat truncated," is as odd a phrase as a "body somewhat decapitated"--and contemplating that continent with what we may fancy, if we choose, to be "dreamy and steadfast attention." But the resemblance is, at best, but a slender one, and a far-fetched. The really and strikingly leonine aspect of Gibraltar is undoubtedly that which it presents to the observer as he is steaming towards the Rock from the west, but has not yet come into full view of the slope on which the town is situated. No one can possibly mistake the lion then. His head is distinctly turned towards Spain, and what is more, he has a foot stretched out towards the mainland, as though in token of his mighty grasp upon the soil. Viewed, however, from the neutral ground, this Protean cliff takes on a new shape altogether, and no one would suppose that the lines of that sheer precipice, towering up into a jagged pinnacle, could appear from any quarter to melt into the blunt and ma.s.sive curves which mark the head and shoulders of the King of Beasts.
At last, however, we are in the harbor, and are about to land. To land!
How little does that phrase convey to the inexperienced in sea travel, or to those whose voyages have begun and ended in stepping from a landing-stage on to a gangway, and from a gangway on to a deck, and _vice-versa_! And how much does it mean for him to whom it comes fraught with recollections of steep descents, of heaving seas, of tossing c.o.c.k-boats, perhaps of dripping garments, certainly of swindling boatmen!
There are disembarkations in which you come in for them all; but not at Gibraltar, at least under normal circ.u.mstances. The waters of the port are placid, and from most of the many fine vessels that touch there you descend by a ladder, of as agreeable an inclination as an ordinary flight of stairs. All you have to fear is the insidious bilingual boatman, who, unless you strictly covenant with him before entering his boat, will have you at his mercy. It is true that he has a tariff, and that you might imagine that the offense of exceeding it would be punished in a place like Gibraltar by immediate court-martial and execution; but the traveller should not rely upon this. There is a deplorable relaxation of the bonds of discipline all over the world. Moreover, it is wise to agree with the boatmen for a certain fixed sum, as a salutary check upon undue liberality. Most steamers anchor at a considerable distance from the sh.o.r.e, and on a hot day one might be tempted by false sentiment to give the boatman an excessive fee.
Your hosts at Gibraltar--"spoiling" as they always are for the sight of new civilian faces--show themselves determined from the first to make you at home. Private Thomas Atkins on sentry duty grins broad welcome to you from the Mole. The official to whom you have to give account of yourself and your belongings greets you with a pleasant smile, and, while your French or Spanish fellow-traveller is strictly interrogated as to his ident.i.ty, profession, purpose of visit, &c., your English party is pa.s.sed easily and promptly in, as men "at home" upon the soil which they are treading. Fortunate is it, if a little bewildering, for the visitor to arrive at midday, for before he has made his way from the landing-place to his hotel he will have seen a sight which has few if any parallels in the world. Gibraltar has its narrow, quiet, sleepy alleys as have all Southern towns; and any one who confined himself to strolling through and along these, and avoiding the main thoroughfare, might never discover the strangely cosmopolitan character of the place. He must walk up Waterport Street at midday in order to see what Gibraltar really is--a conflux of nations, a mart of races, an Exchange for all the mult.i.tudinous varieties of the human product. Europe, Asia, and Africa meet and jostle in this singular highway. Tall, stately, slow-pacing Moors from the north-west coast; white-turbaned Turks from the eastern gate of the Mediterranean; thick-lipped, and woolly-headed negroids from the African interior; quick-eyed, gesticulating Levantine Greeks; gabardined Jews, and black-wimpled Jewesses; Spanish smugglers, and Spanish sailors; "rock-scorpions," and red-coated English soldiers--all these compose, without completing, the motley moving crowd that throngs the main street of Gibraltar in the forenoon, and gathers densest of all in the market near Commercial Square.
It is hardly then as a fortress, but rather as a great entrepot of traffic, that Gibraltar first presents itself to the newly-landed visitor.
He is now too close beneath its frowning batteries and dominating walls of rock to feel their strength and menace so impressive as at a distance; and the flowing tide of many-colored life around him overpowers the senses and the imagination alike. He has to seek the outskirts of the town on either side in order to get the great Rock again, either physically or morally, into proper focus. And even before he sets out to try its height and steepness by the ancient, if unscientific, process of climbing it--nay, before he even proceeds to explore under proper guidance its mighty elements of military strength--he will discover perhaps that sternness is not its only feature. Let him stroll round in the direction of the race-course to the north of the Rock, and across the parade-ground, which lies between the town and the larger area on which the reviews and field-day evolutions take place, and he will not complain of Gibraltar as wanting in the picturesque. The bold cliff, beneath which stands a Spanish cafe, descends in broken and irregular, but striking, lines to the plain, and it is fringed luxuriantly from stair to stair with the vegetation of the South. Marching and counter-marching under the shadow of this lofty wall, the soldiers show from a little distance like the tin toys of the nursery, and one knows not whether to think most of the physical insignificance of man beside the brute bulk of Nature, or of the moral--or immoral--power which has enabled him to press into his service even the vast Rock which stands there beetling and lowering over him, and to turn the blind giant into a sort of t.i.tanic man-at-arms.
Such reflections as these, however, would probably whet a visitor"s desire to explore the fortifications without delay; and the time for that is not yet. The town and its buildings have first to be inspected; the life of the place, both in its military and--such as there is of it--its civil aspect, must be studied; though this, truth to tell, will not engage even the minutest observer very long. Gibraltar is not famous for its shops, or remarkable, indeed, as a place to buy anything, except tobacco, which, as the Spanish Exchequer knows to its cost (and the Spanish Customs"
officials on the frontier too, it is to be feared, their advantage), is both cheap and good. Business, however, of all descriptions is fairly active, as might be expected, when we recollect that the town is pretty populous for its size, and numbers some 20,000 inhabitants, in addition to its garrison of from 5,000 to 6,000 men. With all its civil activity, however, the visitor is scarcely likely to forget--for any length of time--that he is in a "place of arms." Not to speak of the shocks communicated to his unaccustomed nerves by morning and evening gun-fire; not to speak of the thrilling fanfare of the bugles, executed as only the bugler of a crack English regiment can execute it, and echoed and re-echoed to and fro, from face to face of the Rock, there is an indefinable air of stern order, of rigid discipline, of authority whose word is law, pervading everything. As the day wears on toward the evening this aspect of things becomes more and more unmistakable; and in the neighborhood of the gates, towards the hour of gun-fire, you may see residents hastening in, and non-residents quickening the steps of their departure, lest the boom of the fatal cannon-clock should confine or exclude them for the night. After the closing of the gates it is still permitted for a few hours to perambulate the streets; but at midnight this privilege also ceases, and no one is allowed out of doors without a night-pa.s.s. On the 31st of December a little extra indulgence is allowed.
One of the military bands will perhaps parade the main thoroughfare discoursing the sweet strains of "Auld Lang Syne," and the civil population are allowed to "see the old year out and the new year in." But a timid and respectful cheer is their sole contribution to the ceremony, and at about 12.15 they are marched off again to bed: such and so vigilant are the precautions against treachery within the walls, or surprise from without. In Gibraltar, undoubtedly, you experience something of the sensations of men who are living in a state of siege, or of those Knights of Branksome who ate and drank in armor, and lay down to rest with corslet laced, and with the buckler for a pillow.
The lions of the town itself, as distinguished from the wonders of its fortifications, are few in number. The Cathedral, the Garrison Library, Government House, the Alameda Gardens, the drive to Europa Point exhaust the list; and there is but one of these which is likely to invite--unless for some special purpose or other--a repet.i.tion of the visit. In the Alameda, however, a visitor may spend many a pleasant hour, and--if the peace and beauty of a hillside garden, with the charms of subtropical vegetation in abundance near at hand, and n.o.ble views of coast and sea in the distance allure him--he a.s.suredly will. Gibraltar is immensely proud of its promenade, and it has good reason to be so. From the point of view of Nature and of Art the Alameda is an equal success. General Don, who planned and laid it out some three-quarters of a century ago, unquestionably earned a t.i.tle to the same sort of tribute as was bestowed upon a famous military predecessor, Marshal Wade. Anyone who had "seen"
the Alameda "before it was made," might well have "lifted up his hands and blessed" the gallant officer who had converted "the Red Sands," as the arid desert once occupying this spot was called, into the paradise of geranium-trees which has taken its place. Its monuments to Elliot and Wellington are not ideal: the mysterious curse p.r.o.nounced upon English statuary appears to follow it even beyond seas; but the execution of the effigies of these national heroes may, perhaps, be forgotten in the interest attaching to their subjects. The residents at any rate, whether civil or military, are inured to these efforts of the sculptor"s art, and have long since ceased to repine. And the afternoon promenade in these gardens--with the English officers and their wives and daughters, English nursemaids and their charges, tourists of both s.e.xes and all ages, and the whole surrounded by a polyglot and polychromatic crowd of Oriental listeners to the military band--is a sight well worth seeing and not readily to be forgotten.
But we must pursue our tour round the peninsula of the Rock; and leaving the new Mole on our right, and farther on the little land-locked basin of Rosia Bay, we pa.s.s the height of Buena Vista, crowned with its barracks, and so on to the apex of the promontory, Europa Point. Here are more barracks and, here on Europa Flats, another open and level s.p.a.ce for recreation and military exercises beneath the cliff wall. Doubling the point, and returning for a short distance along the eastern side of the promontory, we come to the Governor"s Cottage, a cool summer retreat nestling close to the Rock, and virtually marking the limits of our exploration. For a little way beyond this the cliff rises inaccessible, the road ends, and we must retrace our steps. So far as walking or driving along the flat is concerned, the visitor who has reached the point may allege, with a certain kind of superficial accuracy, that he has "done Gibraltar." No wonder that the seasoned globe-trotter from across the Atlantic thinks nothing of taking Calpe in his stride.
To those, however, who visit Gibraltar in a historic spirit, it is not to be "done" by any means so speedily as this. Indeed, it would be more correct to say that the work of a visitor of this order is hardly yet begun. For he will have come to Gibraltar not mainly to stroll on a sunny promenade, or to enjoy a shady drive round the seaward slopes of a Spanish headland, or even to feast his eyes on the glow of Southern color and the picturesque varieties of Southern life; but to inspect a great world-fortress, reared almost impregnable by the hand of Nature, and raised into absolute impregnability by the art of man; a spot made memorable from the very dawn of the modern period by the rivalries of nations, and famous for all time by one of the most heroic exploits recorded in the annals of the human race. To such an one, we say, the name of Gibraltar stands before and beyond everything for the Rock of the Great Siege; and he can no more think of it in the light of a Mediterranean watering-place, with, a romantic, if somewhat limited, sea-front, than he can think of the farmhouse of La Haye as an "interesting Flemish homestead," or the Chateau of Hougoumont as a Belgian gentleman"s "eligible country house."
[Ill.u.s.tration]
For him the tour of the renowned fortifications will be the great event of his visit. Having furnished himself with the necessary authorization from the proper military authorities (for he will be reminded at every turn of the strict martial discipline under which he lives), he will proceed to ascend the Rock, making his first halt at a building which in all probability he will often before this have gazed upon and wondered at from below. This is the Moorish Castle, the first object to catch the eye of the newcomer as he steps ash.o.r.e at the Mole, and looks up at the houses that clamber up the western slope of the Rock. Their ascending tiers are dominated by this battlemented pile, and it is from the level on which it stands that one enters the famous galleries of Gibraltar. The castle is one of the oldest Moorish buildings in Spain, the Arabic legend over the south gate recording it to have been built in 725 by Abu-Abul-Hajez. Its princ.i.p.al tower, the Torre del Homenaje, is riddled with shot marks, the scars left behind it by the ever-memorable siege. The galleries, which are tunneled in tiers along the north front of the Rock, are from two to three miles in extent. At one extremity they widen out into the s.p.a.cious crypt known as the Hall of St. George, in which Nelson was feasted. No arches support these galleries; they are simply hewn from the solid rock, and pierced every dozen yards or so by port-holes, through each of which the black muzzle of a gun looks forth upon the Spanish mainland. They front the north, these grim watchdogs, and seeing that the plain lies hundreds of feet beneath them, and with that alt.i.tude of sheer rock face between them and it, they may perhaps be admitted to represent what a witty Frenchman has called _le luxe et la coquetterie d" imprenable_, or as we might put it, a "refinement on the impregnable." Artillery in position implies the possibility of regular siege operations, followed perhaps by an a.s.sault from the quarter which the guns command; but though the Spanish threw up elaborate works on the neutral ground in the second year of the great siege, neither then nor at any other time has an a.s.sault on the Rock from its northern side been contemplated. Yet it has once been "surprised"
from its eastern side, which looks almost equally inaccessible; and farther on in his tour of exploration, the visitor will come upon traces of that unprecedented and unimitated exploit. After having duly inspected the galleries, he will ascend to the Signal Tower, known in Spanish days as El Hacho, or the Torch, the spot at which beacon fires were wont on occasion to be kindled. It is not quite the highest point of the Rock, but the view from it is one of the most imposing in the world. To the north lie the mountains of Ronda, and to the far east the Sierra of the Snows that looks down on Granada, gleams pale and spectral on the horizon. Far beneath you lie town and bay, the batteries with their tiny ordnance, and the harbor with its plaything ships; while farther onward, in the same line of vision, the African "Pillar of Hercules," Ceuta, looks down upon the sunlit waters of the Strait.
A little farther on is the true highest point of the Rock, 1,430 feet; and yet a little farther, after a descent of a few feet, we come upon the tower known as O"Hara"s Folly, from which also the view is magnificent, and which marks the southernmost point of the ridge. It was built by an officer of that name as a watch tower, from which to observe the movements of the Spanish fleet at Cadiz, which, even across the cape as the crow flies, is distant some fifty or sixty miles. The extent, however, of the outlook which it actually commanded has probably never been tested, certainly not with modern optical appliances, as it was struck by lightning soon after its completion. Retracing his steps to the northern end of the height, the visitor historically interested in Gibraltar will do well to survey the scene from here once more before descending to inspect the fortifications of the coast line. Far beneath him, looking landward, lies the flat sandy part of the isthmus, cut just where its neck begins to widen by the British lines. Beyond these, again, extends the zone some half mile in breadth of the neutral ground; while yet farther inland, the eye lights upon a broken and irregular line of earthworks, marking the limit, politically speaking, of Spanish soil. These are the most notable, perhaps the only surviving, relic of the great siege. In the third year of that desperate leaguer--it was in 1781--the Spaniards having tried in vain, since June, 1779, to starve out the garrison, resorted to the idea of bombarding the town into surrender, and threw up across the neutral ground the great earthworks, of which only these ruins remain. They had reason, indeed, to resort to extraordinary efforts. Twice within these twenty-four months had they reduced the town to the most dreadful straits of hunger, and twice had it been relieved by English fleets. In January, 1780, when Rodney appeared in the Straits with his priceless freight of food, the inhabitants were feeding on thistles and wild onions; the hind quarter of an Algerian sheep was selling for seven pounds ten, and an English milch cow for fifty guineas. In the spring of 1781, when Admiral Darby relieved them for the second time, the price of "bad ship"s biscuits full of vermin"--says Captain John Drinkwater of the 72nd, an actor in the scenes which he has recorded--was a shilling a pound; "old dried peas, a shilling and fourpence; salt, half dirt, the sweepings of ships" bottoms, and storehouses, eightpence; and English farthing candles, sixpence apiece." These terrible privations having failed to break the indomitable spirit of the besieged, bombardment had, before the construction of these lines, been resorted to. Enormous batteries, mounting 170 guns and 80 mortars, had been planted along the sh.o.r.e, and had played upon the town, without interruption, for six weeks.
Houses were shattered and set on fire, homeless and half-starved families were driven for shelter to the southern end of the promontory, where again they were harried by Spanish ships sailing round Europa Point and firing indiscriminately on sh.o.r.e. The troops, sh.e.l.led out of their quarters, were living in tents on the hillside, save when these also were swept away by the furious rainstorms of that region. And it was to put, as was hoped, the finishing stroke to this process of torture, that the great fortifications which have been spoken of were in course of construction all through the spring and summer of 1781 on the neutral ground. General Elliot--that tough old Spartan warrior, whose food was vegetables and water, and four hours his maximum of continuous sleep, and the contagion of whose n.o.ble example could alone perhaps have given heart enough even to this st.u.r.dy garrison--watched the progress of the works with anxiety, and had made up his mind before the winter came that they must be a.s.saulted.
Accordingly, at three A. M. on the morning of November 27, 1781, he sallied forth with a picked band of two thousand men--a pair of regiments who had fought by his side at Minden two-and-twenty years before--and having traversed the three-quarters of a mile of intervening country in swift silence, fell upon the Spanish works. The alarm had been given, but only just before the a.s.sailants reached the object of their attack; and the affair was practically a surprise. The gunners, demoralized and panic-stricken, were bayoneted at their posts, the guns were spiked, and the batteries themselves set on fire with blazing f.a.ggots prepared for the purpose. In an hour the flames had gained such strength as to be inextinguishable, and General Elliot drew off his forces and retreated to the town, the last sound to greet their ears as they re-entered the gates being the roar of the explosion of the enemy"s magazines. For four days the camp continued to burn, and when the fire had exhausted itself for want of materials, the work of laborious months lay in ruins, and the results of a vast military outlay were scattered to the winds. It was the last serious attempt made against the garrison by the Spaniards from the landward side. The fiercest and most furious struggle of the long siege was to take place on the sh.o.r.e and waters to the west.
And so after all it is to the "line-wall"--to that formidable bulwark of masonry and gun-metal which fringes the town of Gibraltar from the Old Mole to Rosia Bay--that one returns as to the chief attraction from the historical point of view, of the mighty fortress. For two full miles it runs, zigzagging along the indented coast, and broken here and there by water-gate or bastion, famous in military story. Here, as we move southward from the Old Mole, is the King"s Bastion, the most renowned of all. Next comes Ragged Staff Stairs, so named from the heraldic insignia of Charles V.; and farther on is Jumper"s Battery, situated at what is held to be the weakest part of the Rock, and which has certainly proved itself to be so on one ever memorable occasion. For it was at the point where Jumper"s Battery now stands that the first English landing-party set foot on sh.o.r.e; it was at this point, it may be said, that Gibraltar was carried. The fortunes of nomenclature are very capricious, and the name of Jumper--unless, indeed, it were specially selected for its appropriateness--has hardly a better right to perpetuation in this fashion than the name of Hicks. For these were the names of the two gallant officers who were foremost in their pinnaces in the race for the South Mole, which at that time occupied the spot where the landing was effected; and we are not aware that history records which was the actual winner. It was on the 23rd of July, 1704, as all the world knows, that these two gallant seamen and their boats" crews made their historic leap on sh.o.r.e; and after all, the accident which had preserved the name of one of them is not more of what is familiarly called a "fluke" than the project of the capture itself, and the retention of the great fortress when captured. It is almost comic to think that when Sir George Rooke sailed from England, on the voyage from which he returned, figuratively speaking, with the key of the Mediterranean in his pocket, he had no more notion of attacking Gibraltar than of discovering the North-West Pa.s.sage. He simply went to land England"s candidate for the Spanish throne, "King Charles III.," at Lisbon; which service performed, he received orders from the English Government to sail to the relief of Nice and Villa Franca, which were supposed to be in danger from the French, while at the same time he was pressed by Charles to "look round" at Barcelona, where the people, their aspirant-sovereign thought, were ready to rise in his favor. Rooke executed both commissions. That is to say, he ascertained that there was nothing for him to do in either place--that Barcelona would not rise, and that Nice was in no danger of falling; and the admiral accordingly dropped down the Mediterranean towards the Straits--where he was joined by Sir Cloudesley Shovel with another squadron--with the view of intercepting the Brest Fleet of France, which he had heard was about to attempt a junction with that of Toulon. The Brest Fleet, however, he found had already given him the slip, and thus it came about that on the 17th of July these two energetic naval officers found themselves about seven leagues to the east of Tetuan with nothing to do. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the attack on Gibraltar was decreed as the distraction of an intolerable ennui. The stronghold was known to be weakly garrisoned, though, for that time, strongly armed; it turned out afterwards that it had only a hundred and fifty gunners to a hundred guns, and it was thought possible to carry the place by a _coup-de-main_. On the 21st the whole fleet came to anchor in Gibraltar Bay. Two thousand men under the Prince of Hesse were landed on what is now the neutral ground, and cut off all communication with the mainland of Spain. On the 23rd Rear-Admirals Vanderdussen and Byng (the father of a less fortunate seaman) opened fire upon the batteries, and after five or six hours" bombardment silenced them, and Captain Whittaker was thereupon ordered to take all the boats, filled with seamen and marines, and possess himself of the South Mole Head. Captains Jumper and Hicks were, as has been said, in the foremost pinnaces, and were the first to land. A mine exploded under their feet, killing two officers and a hundred men, but Jumper and Hicks pressed on with their stout followers, and a.s.saulted and carried a redoubt which lay between the Mole and the town. Whereupon the Spanish Governor capitulated, the gates on the side of the isthmus were thrown open to the Prince of Hesse and his troops, and Gibraltar was theirs. Or rather it was not theirs, except by the t.i.tle of the "man in possession." It was the property of his Highness the Archduke Charles, styled his Majesty King Charles III. of Spain, and had he succeeded in making good that t.i.tle in arms, England should, of course, have had to hand over to him the strongest place in his dominions, at the end of the war. But she profited by the failure of her protege. The war of the Spanish Succession ended in the recognition of Philip V.; and almost against the will of the nation--for George I. was ready enough to give it up, and the popular English view of the matter was that it was "a barren rock, an insignificant fort, and a useless charge"--Gibraltar remained on her hands.
Undoubtedly, the King"s Bastion is the center of historic military interest in Gibraltar, but the line-wall should be followed along its impregnable front to complete one"s conception of the sea defenses of the great fortress. A little farther on is Government House, the quondam convent, which now forms the official residence of the Governor; and farther still the landing-place, known as Ragged Staff Stairs. Then Jumper"s Bastion, already mentioned; and then the line of fortification, running outwards with the coast line towards the New Mole and landing-place, returns upon itself, and rounding Rosia Bay trends again southward towards Buena Vista Point. A ring of steel indeed--a coat of mail on the giant"s frame, impenetrable to the projectiles of the most terrible of the modern t.i.tans of the seas. The casemates for the artillery are absolutely bomb-proof, the walls of such thickness as to resist the impact of shots weighing hundreds of pounds, while the mighty arches overhead are constructed to defy the explosion of the heaviest sh.e.l.ls. As to its offensive armament, the line-wall bristles with guns of the largest caliber, some mounted on the parapet above, others on the casemates nearer the sea-level, whence their shot could be discharged with the deadliest effect at an attacking ship.
He who visits Gibraltar is pretty sure, at least if time permits, to visit Algeciras and San Roque, while from farther afield still he will be tempted by Estepona. The first of these places he will be in a hurry, indeed, if he misses; not that the place itself is very remarkable, as that it stands so prominently in evidence on the other side of the bay as almost to challenge a visit. Add to this the natural curiosity of a visitor to pa.s.s over into Spanish territory and to survey Gibraltar from the landward side, and it will not be surprising that the four-mile trip across the bay is pretty generally made. On the whole it repays; for though Algeciras is modern and uninteresting enough, its environs are picturesque, and the artist will be able to sketch the great rock-fortress from an entirely new point, and in not the least striking of its aspects.
And now, before pa.s.sing once for all through the storied portal of the Mediterranean, it remains to bestow at least a pa.s.sing glance upon the other column which guards the entrance. Over against us, as we stand on Europa Point and look seaward, looms, some ten or a dozen miles away, the Punta de Africa, the African Pillar of Hercules, the headland behind which lies Ceuta, the princ.i.p.al Spanish stronghold on the Moorish coast. Of a truth, one"s first thought is that the great doorway of the inland sea has monstrously unequal jambs. Except that the Punta de Africa is exactly opposite the Rock of Gibraltar, and that it is the last eminence on the southern side of the Straits--the point at which the African coast turns suddenly due southward, and all is open sea--it would have been little likely to have caught the eye of an explorer, or to have forced itself upon the notice of the geographer. Such as it is, however, it must stand for the African Pillar of Hercules, unless that demi-G.o.d is to content himself with only one. It is not imposing to approach as we make our way directly across the Straits from Gibraltar, or down and along them from Algeciras towards it: a smooth, rounded hill, surmounted by a fort with the Spanish flag floating above it, and walled on the sea side, so little can its defenders trust to the very slight natural difficulties offered even by its most difficult approach. Such is Ceuta in the distance, and it is little, if at all, more impressive on a closer inspection. Its name is said to come from Sebta, a corruption of Septem, and to have been given it because of the seven hills on which it is built. Probably the seven hills would be difficult to find and count, or with a more liberal interpretation of the word, it might very likely be as easy to find fourteen.
Ceuta, like almost every other town or citadel on this battle-ground of Europe and Africa, has played its part in the secular struggle between Christendom and Islam. It is more than four centuries and a half since it was first wrested from the Moors by King John of Portugal, and in the hands of that State it remained for another two hundred years, when in 1640, it was annexed to the Crown of Castille. King John"s acquisition of the place, however, was unfortunate for his family. He returned home, leaving the princes of Portugal in command of his new possession; which, after the repulse of an attempt on the part of the Moors to recapture it, he proceeded to strengthen with new fortifications and an increased garrison. Dying in 1428, he was succeeded by his eldest son, Edward, who undertook an expedition against Tangier, which turned out so unluckily that the Portuguese had to buy their retreat from Africa by a promise to restore Ceuta, the king"s son, Don Ferdinand, being left in the hands of the Moors as a hostage for its delivery. In spite of this, however, the King and Council refused on their return home to carry out their undertaking; and though preparations were made for recovering the unfortunate hostage, the death of Edward prevented the project from being carried out, and Prince Ferdinand remained a prisoner for several years.
Ceuta was never surrendered, and pa.s.sing, as has been said, in the seventeenth century from the possession of Portugal into that of Spain, it now forms one of the four or five vantage-points held by Spain on the coast of Africa and in its vicinity. Surveyed from the neighboring heights, the citadel, with the town stretching away along the neck of land at its foot, looks like anything but a powerful stronghold, and against any less effete and decaying race than the Moors who surround it, it might not possibly prove very easy to defend. Its garrison, however, is strong, whatever its forts may be, and as a basis of military operations, it proved to be of some value to Spain in her expedition against Morocco thirty years ago. In times of peace it is used by the Spaniards as a convict station.
The internal attractions of Ceuta to a visitor are not considerable. There are Roman remains in the neighborhood of the citadel, and the walls of the town, with the ma.s.sive archways of its gates, are well worthy of remark.
Its main feature of interest, however, is, and always will be, that rock of many names which it thrusts forth into the Straits, to form, with its brother column across the water, the gateway between the Eastern and the Western World. We have already looked upon it in the distance from El Hacho, the signal tower on the summit of the Rock of Gibraltar. Abyla, "the mountain of G.o.d," it was styled by the Phoenicians; Gibel Mo-osa, the hill of Musa, was its name among the Moors; it is the Cabo de Bullones of the Spaniard, and the Apes" Hill of the Englishman. It may be well seen, though dwarfed a little by proximity, from its neighboring waters; a curious sight, if only for its strange contrast with the European Pillar that we have left behind. It is shaped like a miniature Peak of Teneriffe, with a pointed apex sloping away on either side down high-shouldered ridges towards its companion hills, and presenting a lined and furrowed face to the sea. It is its situation, as has been noted already, and not its conformation, which procured it its ancient name. But however earned, its mythical t.i.tle, with all the halo of poetry and romance that the immortal myths of h.e.l.las have shed around every spot which they have reached, remains to it for ever. And here we take our farewell look of the Pillars of Hercules to right and left, and borne onwards amidstream by the rushing current of the Straits, we pa.s.s from the modern into the ancient world.
II
ALGIERS
"A Pearl set in Emeralds"--Two distinct towns, one ancient, one modern--The Great Mosque--A Mohammedan religious festival--Oriental life in perfection--The road to Mustapha Superieur--A true Moorish villa described--Women praying to a sacred tree--Excessive rainfall.
"Algiers," says the Arab poet, with genuine Oriental love of precious stones in literature, "is a pearl set in emeralds." And even in these degenerate days of Frank supremacy in Islam, the old Moorish town still gleams white in the sun against a deep background of green hillside, a true pearl among emeralds. For it is a great mistake to imagine North Africa, as untravelled folk suppose, a dry and desert country of arid rocky mountains. The whole strip of laughing coast which has the Atlas for its backbone may rank, on the contrary, as about the dampest, greenest, and most luxuriant region of the Mediterranean system. The home of the Barbary corsairs is a land of high mountains, deep glens, great gorges; a land of vast pine forests and thick, verdant undergrowth. A thousand rills tumble headlong down its rich ravines; a thousand rivers flow fast through its fertile valleys. For wild flowers Algeria is probably unequaled in the whole world; its general aspect in many ways recalls on a smaller scale the less snow-clad parts of eastern Switzerland.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
When you approach the old pirate-nest from the sea, the first glimpse of the African coast that greets your expectant eye is a long, serrated chain of great sun-smitten mountains away inland and southward. As the steamer nears the land, you begin, after a while, to distinguish the snowy ridge of the glorious Djurjura, which is the Bernese Oberland of Algeria, a huge block of rearing peaks, their summits thick-covered by the virgin snow that feeds in spring a score of leaping torrents. By-and-by, with still nearer approach, a wide bay discloses itself, and a little range of green hills in the foreground detaches itself by degrees from the darker ma.s.s of the Atlas looming large in the distance behind. This little range is the Sahel, an outlier just separated from the main chain in the rear by the once marshy plain of the Metidja, now converted by drainage and scientific agriculture into the most fertile lowland region of all North Africa.
Presently, on the seaward slopes of the Sahel, a white town bursts upon the eye, a white town so very white, so close, so thick-set, that at first sight you would think it carved entire, in tier after tier, from a solid block of marble. No street or lane or house or public building of any sort stands visible from the rest at a little distance; just a group of white steps, you would say, cut out by giant hands from the solid hillside. The city of the Deys looks almost like a chalk-pit on the slope of an English down; only a chalk-pit in relief, built out, not hewn inwards.
As you enter the harbor the strange picture resolves itself bit by bit with charming effect into its component elements. White houses rise up steep, one above the other, in endless tiers and rows, upon a very abrupt acclivity. Most of them are Moorish in style, square, flat-roofed boxes; all are whitewashed without, and smiling like pretty girls that show their pearly teeth in the full southern sunshine. From without they have the aspect of a single solid block of stone; you would fancy it was impossible to insert a pin"s head between them. From within, to him that enters, sundry narrow and tortuous alleys discover themselves here and there on close inspection; but they are too involved to produce much effect as of streets or rows on the general _coup d"oeil_ from the water.
Land at the quay, and you find at once Algiers consists of two distinct towns: one ancient, one modern; one Oriental, one Western. Now and again these intersect, but for the most part they keep themselves severely separate.
The lower town has been completely transformed within half a century by its French masters. What it has gained in civilization it has lost in picturesqueness. A s.p.a.cious port has been constructed, with ma.s.sive mole and huge arcaded breakwater. Inside, vast archways support a magnificent line of very modern quays, bordered by warehouses on a scale that would do honor to Ma.r.s.eilles or to Liverpool. Broad streets run through the length and breadth of this transformed Algiers, streets of stately shops where ladies can buy all the fripperies and fineries of Parisian dressmakers.
Yet even here the traveller finds himself already in many ways _en plein Orient_. The general look of the new town itself is far more Eastern than that of modernized Alexandria since the days of the bombardment. Arabs, Moors and Kabyles crowd the streets and market-places; m.u.f.fled women in loose white robes, covered up to the eyes, flit noiselessly with slippered feet over the new-flagged pavement; turbaned Jews, who might have stepped straight out of the "Arabian Nights," chaffer for centimes at the shop-doors with hooded mountain Berbers. All is strange and incongruous; all is Paris and Bagdad shaking hands as if on the Devonshire hillsides.
Nor are even Oriental buildings of great architectural pretensions wanting to this newer French city. The conquerors, in reconstructing Algiers on the Parisian model, have at least forborne to Haussmannise in every instance the old mosques and palaces. The princ.i.p.al square, a broad place lined with palm-trees, is enlivened and made picturesque by the white round dome and striking minarets of the Mosquee de la Pecherie. Hard by stands the Cathedral, a religious building of Mussulman origin, half Christianized externally by a tower at each end, but enclosing within doors its old Mohammedan _mimbar_ and many curious remains of quaint Moorish decoration. The Archbishopric at its side is a Moorish palace of severe beauty and grandeur; the museum of Graeco-Roman antiques is oddly installed in the exquisite home raised for himself by Mustapha Pasha. The Great Mosque, in the Rue Bab-el-Oued, remains to us unspoiled as the finest architectural monument of the early Mohammedan world. That glorious pile was built by the very first Arab conquerors of North Africa, the companions of the Prophet, and its exquisite horse-shoe arches of pure white marble are unsurpa.s.sed in the Moslem world for their quaintness, their oddity, and their originality.
The interior of this mosque is, to my mind, far more impressive than anything to be seen even in Cairo itself, so vast it is, so imposing, so grand, so gloomy. The entire body of the building is occupied throughout by successive arcades, supported in long rows by plain, square pillars.