MEDITERRANEAN 
 I MOODS 
 
Olornell Iniw^rHttg Htbrarg 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 fi:3.hUM. flW-'Z.. 
 
 9306 
 
Cornell University Library 
 D 974.F62 
 
 Mediterranean moods, footnotes of travel 
 
 3 1924 027 903 032 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027903032 
 
MEDITERRANEAN MOODS 
 
PEASANT GIRLS 
 OF BONO, SARDINIA 
 
 FROM A WATER-COLOUR DRAWING BY 
 G. BIASI 
 
MEDITERRANEAN 
 MOODS 
 
 FOOTNOTES OF TRAVEL IN THE ISLANDS OF 
 MALLORCA, MENORCA, IBIZA AND SARDINIA 
 
 BY 
 
 J. E. CRAWFORD FLITCH, M.A. 
 
 WITH A FRONTISPIECE IN COLOUR REPRODUCED FROM 
 
 A DRAWING BY G. BIASI, THIRTY-TWO ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 IN BLACK AND WHITE, AND MAPS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 E. P. BUTTON & CO. 
 
 1911 
 

 WM. BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH 
 ENGLAND 
 
TO 
 MY MOTHER AND FATHER 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Introductoet 
 
 11 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. 
 
 MAT. T, ORG A 
 
 Palma dk Malloeca 
 
 19 
 
 II. 
 
 The Coast .... 
 
 44 
 
 III. 
 
 The Mountains .... 
 
 68 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Poet .... 
 
 87 
 
 V. 
 
 The Plain .... 
 MENORCA 
 
 108 
 
 VI. 
 
 The Lost Jewel 
 
 139 
 
 VII. 
 
 Sepulchres and Whitewash 
 IBIZA 
 
 151 
 
 VIII. 
 
 The Amoues of Santa Eulalia 
 
 167 
 
 IX. 
 
 The Improvisers 
 
 SARDINIA 
 
 182 
 
 X. 
 
 Cagliaei .... 
 
 . 205 
 
 XI, 
 
 The Gate of Silvee 
 
 225 
 
 XII. 
 
 The Festa of San Costantino 
 
 249 
 
 XIII. 
 
 The Bueied City 
 
 272 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 The Teavellee in the Islands of the 
 Western Mediterranean . . . 291 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Feasant Girls of BonOj Sardinia 
 
 
 Frmtispiece 
 
 
 FACING PAGE 
 
 San Nicoksj Palma .... 
 
 . 20 
 
 The Lonja, Palma .... 
 
 
 
 22 
 
 The Cathedral, Palma 
 
 
 
 28 
 
 The Cloisters of San Francisco, Palma 
 
 
 
 36 
 
 A Corner of the Market, Palma 
 
 
 
 40 
 
 Estallenchs ..... 
 
 
 
 64 
 
 Las Valentas Donas de Can Tamany 
 
 
 
 68 
 
 The Torrente, Seller 
 
 
 
 62 
 
 Seller and Puig Mayor 
 
 
 
 66 
 
 Pepe and Conchita at Lluch 
 
 
 
 76 
 
 Puerto-Pollensa .... 
 
 
 
 88 
 
 The Primera Comunidn 
 
 
 
 124 
 
 Puerto Mahon .... 
 
 
 
 140 
 
 The Talayot of Binicodrell . 
 
 
 
 164 
 
 Ciudadela ..... 
 
 
 
 168 
 
 Returning from Mass, Santa Eulalia 
 
 
 
 170 
 
 The Procession of Corpus Christi, San Antonio 
 
 
 
 188 
 
 The City of Ihiza . . . 
 
 
 
 192 
 
 The Saints' Holiday .... 
 
 
 
 194 
 
 Viale Regina, Cagliari 
 
 
 
 212 
 
 Barhagian Horsemen 
 
 
 
 226 
 
 Feasant Girls of Aritzo 
 
 
 
 228 
 
 The Boundary of the Forest, Gennargentu 
 
 
 
 232 
 
 The Confraternity of the Rosario 
 
 
 
 236 
 
 Children of Desulo .... 
 
 
 
 240 
 
 Going to Mass, Desulo 
 
 
 
 244 
 
 Hearing Mass outside the Church of San Fietro 
 
 
 
 246 
 
 On the way to the Festa 
 
 
 
 250 
 
 Peasants of Barbagia 
 
 
 
 268 
 
 Entrance to the Festa, Sedilo 
 
 
 
 270 
 
 A Wedding Group, Aritzo 
 
 
 
 302 
 
 A Spinster of Fonni 
 
 
 
 304 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 Every traveller, consciously or unconsciously, 
 is in search of certain exalted moments. 
 
 By the traveller I understand one who is half 
 an exile, kinsman to the Wandering Jew. Not 
 the mere holiday maker. His mood is too un- 
 discriminating. The bare fact of his idleness and 
 the dislocation of his customary habits are a per- 
 petual and delightful miracle. He is the skilful 
 alchemist who can transmute gold into pleasure 
 at will. He carries with him an exhaustless fund 
 of spirits, but no standard of criticism. Every 
 town is a sort of exhibition provided with at- 
 tractive side-shows. He finds friends stationed 
 everywhere to receive him. He recognises them 
 by the legends on their caps. They come to meet 
 him at the train ; they await him at the show- 
 place ; if he but glance at them they smile, bend 
 their backs, smooth their hands. Every country 
 is a museum which painstaking people have cata- 
 logued for him, recording the result of their re- 
 search in red-bound volumes suited to his pocket. 
 Providence plays the r61e of a kind of impresario, 
 achieving telling effects in Alpine or African 
 scenery, filling the stage with picturesque choruses. 
 
 II 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 Pangloss was right — it is the best of all possible 
 worlds. 
 
 But when he has sat long at the feast of foreign 
 life ; when he has dulled the edge of novelty, 
 admired all that is to be admired, worn out his 
 guide-books ; when, in a word, he feels the pre- 
 monitions of ennui ; then, if he is honest with 
 himself, the traveller will confess that travel is a 
 wilderness punctuated by oases. These oases are 
 the precious moments which he seeks. Unluckily 
 there is no certain route which conducts to them. 
 There is no map on which they are charted. They 
 are not starred in Baedeker. The tourist agencies 
 know nothing of them. The directions of friends 
 are invariably misleading. Their oasis will be 
 your mirage. No personal intuition will ever 
 guide you to them. If you succeed in finding your 
 way back to one which has once refreshed you, 
 you will only experience the disillusion and bitter 
 amazement with which you renew the acquaint- 
 ance of a first love. 
 
 Yet the pursuit of these moments of exaltation 
 and contentment is the supreme object of travel, 
 and their discovery its reward. If you look back 
 upon a tour you have made, you will find that 
 your recollection of notable sights and historic 
 places is indistinct, and that you have quite for- 
 gotten all the fateful statistics which guides and 
 guide-books thrust upon you. But certain mo- 
 ments have made themselves immortal — a halt at 
 
 12 
 
THE FOOLISH TRAVELLER 
 
 midday by the waters of a lake, a dinner beneath 
 the trees within earshot of music, the greeting of 
 a peasant girl among the hills. The frequency 
 of these red-letter moments is the index of the 
 success of the journey. And happily they are un- 
 failing. No diary is without the record of them. 
 But their times are as unforeseen as the arrival 
 of the thief in the night. They surprise you in the 
 last places in the world where you would have 
 expected them. One thing, however, you must 
 avoid if you would not prevent their recurrence 
 — ^never attempt to control or pre-arrange them. 
 The foolish traveller plans his travel as if it 
 were a campaign. He arms himself prudently 
 against its discomforts. He maps out the enemy's 
 country beforehand, marking the points upon it 
 which are to be his various objectives. From one 
 to another of these he travels in a bee-line, firmly 
 resisting temptations to loiter or digress. He 
 compiles a time-table of his arrivals and depar- 
 tures. He knows the names of the hotels which 
 will receive him. Nothing is left to hazard. It is 
 difficult even for a piece of his luggage to detach 
 itself from the rest and follow up an itinerary of 
 its own. Him the capricious arbiter and disposer 
 of these incalculable moments passes over. He 
 has been at too great pains to safeguard his plans 
 against derangement. Besides, he is surrounded 
 by an atmosphere that is proof against penetra- 
 tion by alien moods. His attitude towards the 
 
 13 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 country he travels in is that of an army in tempo- 
 rary occupation of hostile territory. The arid 
 entrance hall of his hotel is the citadel from 
 which he makes incursions into the surrounding 
 country. All natives are belligerents, astute and 
 conscienceless. If possible, he treats with them 
 indirectly. His ambassadors are the myrmidons 
 of the hotel, who serve his wants with the mixture 
 of obsequiousness and apathy proper to their 
 kind. His bearing towards strangers is dignified, 
 but guarded. His one confidential associate is the 
 camera to which he has entrusted the responsi- 
 bilities of memory. His one emotion is the proud 
 consciousness of his nationality. 
 
 The wise traveller comes not to conquer a 
 country, but to be conquered by it. His only 
 tactic should be that of masterly inactivity. He 
 arranges nothing. He takes no thought for the 
 train he shall catch on the morrow. If he misses 
 it he is not disconcerted, for he never knows 
 whether, if he had caught it, he might not have 
 missed one of those rare moments of which he is 
 always expectant. It is just as likely to visit him 
 if he stays as if he goes. He is not at the mercy 
 of any contretemps, or rather in every contretemps 
 he has learned to discern the prefigurement of a 
 mercy. If the engine had not run off the rails on 
 the branch line to Lanusei in Sardinia, I should 
 never have seen the skin-clad shepherd fold his 
 sheep by lantern-light in a lap of the solemn hills. 
 
 14 
 
THE QUEST OF ECSTASY 
 
 If the falucha had not left Formentera before I got 
 down to the harbour, should I ever have heard 
 Juanito sing his gentle love-songs beneath the 
 stars ? Indeed, when I come to think of it, it was 
 only when my plans were frustrated that my de- 
 sires were fulfilled. It is chiefly when some mis- 
 chance upsets the routine of travel that a country 
 becomes most interesting and most intimate. 
 Therefore the wise traveller knows the folly of 
 compiling time-tables and itineraries. He is as 
 unstable as water, changeful as the wind. He has 
 no will of his own. He lets himself be directed by 
 any chance word, by the caprice of a hall-porter 
 or the error of a booking-clerk. For who can tell 
 whether these be not the agents of fate ? 
 
 It is easier to say where the ecstasy you seek 
 will not overtake you than where it will. The 
 presence of crowds of fellow-seekers is assuredly 
 fatal to the search. " Nature is shy," observed 
 the author of the Sentimental Journey, " and hates 
 to act before spectators." So is art, and sc is 
 every other treasonous voice that half divulges 
 the eternal secrets. They speak most confiden- 
 tially to the solitary, sometimes to a company of 
 two, at most of three. But to the trampling army 
 that comes expressly to overhear what they have 
 to say, sternly resolved to be melted with the 
 right emotions, they are dumb. That is the use 
 of the stars in the guide-books — they mark the 
 places to avoid. A .show-place is a deserted 
 
 15 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 shrine from which the crowd has expelled the 
 god. But do not therefore suppose that crowds 
 are less propitious than solitude to these secret 
 visitations. It was one evening when the citizens 
 of Cagliari were thronging the Bastione di San 
 Remy that I felt most nearly the beating of the 
 invisible wings, as you shall hear later. But let it 
 be a natural, spontaneous crowd, rooted in its own 
 soil, not seeking but generating emotions, going 
 about some decent human business, — carrying its 
 saints through the streets, listening to blind 
 beggars singing ballads, throwing roses at carni- 
 val time, or merely taking the sun in the piazza. 
 But the circumstances which determine these 
 perfect moments are themselves indeterminable. 
 All that is certain is that they are wholly fortui- 
 tous. And sometimes they are so minute that 
 many overlook them. The high mood hangs upon 
 a hint, an echo, a nothing. The rhythm of a 
 woman's walk in the midst of a crowd, and it is 
 upon you — a song heard in the night, music 
 coming out of the open window of a lamp-lit 
 room, a light burning over water, a boat running 
 into harbour, the shape of an ancient vase, a 
 glass of wine, a jewel in the ear. . . . 
 
 i6 
 
MALLORCA 
 
PALMA DE MALLORCA 
 
 Every place has its peculiar hour when it is most 
 its proper self. The aspect of a town is as variable 
 as that of a woman. It wears the most perverse 
 disguises. Usually it most belies itself in its hours 
 of parade — its forced gaiety of Carnival or its 
 exaggerated grief of Holy Week. To find out its 
 intimate spirit, it is necessary to surprise it in its 
 unguarded moments, its waking or its sleep. 
 
 Incontestably your first view of Palma should 
 be at dawn. If it were full of vivacity and energy 
 like Barcelona, perhaps noon would be fitter ; if 
 it breathed an air of languor and mystery like 
 Granada, evening ; or if it lived a hectic life like 
 Madrid, then the feverish hours after midnight. 
 But Palma is neither vivacious, nor mysterious, 
 nor feverish ; it is merely serene. And it is most 
 serene when the stars arfe pale at dawn, and when 
 the level morning light streams out upon it from 
 the fretted lattices of the east. The gleaming 
 flat-roofed houses, touching all the shades from 
 white and pink to that warm, sunburnt brown 
 which the Spaniards call tostado, stretch along 
 
 19 
 
PALMA DE MALLORCA 
 
 the sweeping rim of a bay almost as noble as 
 that of Naples. At the western point, on a 
 wooded hill above the gay villas of Porto-Pi, 
 stands the august castle of Bellver, so surprisingly 
 like the ideal medieval castle of romance that it 
 has all the unreality of a piece of stage decor. 
 At the eastern extremity the windmills of the 
 Molinar and the outlying suburb of Las Enra- 
 madas fade away into the plain. In the midst, 
 the bold, square mass of the cathedral rises up 
 almost out of the water's edge like a cliff. In the 
 distance, the misty mountains draw a wide ram- 
 part round the city, far enough away to give it 
 ample space and breath, but lending a comfort- 
 able air of watchfulness and defence. 
 
 In some phenomenal inundation centuries ago 
 a torrent burst down frdm the hills and hollowed 
 out a channel which now forms the pleasant 
 avenue of the Rambla and the Borne. It makes 
 the one touch of modern Europe. Out of it the 
 narrow Moorish streets climb like staircases to 
 the higher levels of the town. Europe and Asia 
 have disputed for the possession of Mallorca, but it 
 was Europe that conquered, and it is Europe that 
 has given the place its dominating character. 
 
 The architecture of the Mediterranean in- 
 herits from Rome its most significant feature, 
 that quality of grandeur which proceeds from 
 sheer magnitude. Rome impressed it upon these 
 shores a first time when the Mediterranean was 
 
 20 
 
PALMA'S PALACES 
 
 simply a lake in the midst of a single empire ; and 
 when it had become almost obliterated in the 
 conquering raids of the northern and eastern 
 peoples, she impressed it a second time during 
 that period of her resurrection which we call the 
 Renaissance. Its scale is generous and imperial. 
 It is a symbol of the solidarity which Rome gave 
 to Europe. It expresses the dignity, the enduring 
 vigour, and also something of the boastfulness of 
 a domineering people, just as the hint of fantasy 
 in the Arab architecture betrayed the instability 
 of the Arab civilisation. But in the western 
 Mediterranean the Moorish influence has been 
 able to modify the Roman character. The Re- 
 naissance palaces, which rise steeply above the 
 narrow streets of Palma, unlike those of Italy, 
 obtrude no gay and ostentatious fagade. They 
 turn their backs upon the street. They are 
 barrack-like and austere. Here and there the 
 great expanse of wall is broken by a richly 
 carved window, and high up, just beneath the 
 eaves, where the eye almost forgets to look, the 
 mirador opens out in a row of dw^arf columns. 
 These prison-like palaces conform to the Moorish 
 jealous secrecy and distrust of an open social life. 
 They are built as if they had only two functions 
 to serve — ^to keep the light from getting in and 
 the women from getting out. But the great door- 
 way of the patio is always open, and as you pass 
 you may catch a glimpse of the charm which 
 
 21 
 
PALMA DE MALLORCA 
 
 these forbidding buildings enclose — delicate arches 
 and columns, the head of a well surmounted by 
 flowing ironwork, the refreshing greenery of 
 palms and plants. 
 
 Palma has no central heart and artery, as most 
 cities have, where their life beats most vigor- 
 ously. It is something of a maze. Its streets 
 seldom lead to anything definite or take you to 
 any notable show-place. They will take you, of 
 course, to the cathedral ; to the Lonja, which 
 seems too delicately beautiful ever to have been 
 an exchange, but then it was built in an age when 
 commerce still had a visible romance ; to the 
 Casa de Cort, with its heavy Renaissance pomp ; 
 to the Moorish bath in the Calle d'en Serra, 
 which is the only perfect relic of the Arab occu- 
 pation ; and to the nine-and-thirty churches lift- 
 ing up their towers to the unclouded skies. But 
 you find a sufficient recreation in letting the 
 streets guide you whither they will, up flights of 
 steps, past shops and palaces, through a sunny plaza 
 or a market-place, beneath the high walls of an im- 
 prisoning garden, itself a prisoner, with the mystery 
 that a hidden garden in a city always suggests — so 
 secret, so voluptuous, so inaccessible. Sooner or 
 later they will lead you back to the terrace on 
 which the cathedral stands, where you can look 
 out upon the smiling bay and listen all day to the 
 languid waves making rhythmic music at your feet. 
 
 22 
 
THE CATHEDRAL 
 
 Whoever writes the treatise on the art of the 
 right disposition of buildings in the landscape 
 will be wise in reserving the frontispiece for the 
 Cathedral of Palma de Mallorca. A benevolent 
 fate appears to have watched over almost all the 
 world's great monuments and placed them in the 
 one inevitable setting. In nine cases out of ten 
 they would suffer some irremediable loss of pro- 
 portion or dignity by transplantation. Remove 
 St. Mark's from its Piazza to the Acropolis, and 
 it is odds that it would look a trifle paltry and 
 garish ; one of Pharaoh's pyramids set down on 
 Ludgate Hill would press like an intolerable 
 nightmare on the breast of London ; Giotto's 
 campanile, if it stood upon the site of Palma's 
 cathedral, would lose its fineness of proportion 
 and assume something of the commonplace as- 
 pect of a lighthouse. The felicity of the site of 
 the cathedral cannot, however, be put to the 
 credit of the Christian architect who built it, for 
 he merely set it on the site of the Moorish mosque. 
 But in designing it he must have remembered 
 that it would have to bear the eternal challenge 
 of the sea. He gave it neither the tower nor 
 spire that are demanded by the cities of the 
 plains ; its own natural terrace exalts it near 
 enough to the skies. The campanile in which the 
 bells are hung is on the northward side, hidden 
 from the sea, and so low that it does not show 
 above the central, roof. He gave it magnitude, 
 
 23 
 
PALMA DE MALLORCA 
 
 but not the typical Mediterranean magnitude of 
 a mighty unbroken expanse of wall. Its flank is 
 serried by massive buttresses, repeating one 
 another with the rhythm and monotonous variety 
 of waves. And age and sun have given it a glory 
 which it was not in his power to give — a golden 
 glow, so soft and rich that only Nature's palette 
 could compass it. 
 
 As a man grows older, and a little more tired 
 of the chatter about art, I think he brings to the 
 gustation of any object of beauty a less intellec- 
 tual and more purely physical discernment. He 
 no longer comes in order to purify his taste or to 
 correct his judgment of this or the other school. 
 He has lost the keenness of youth for great argu- 
 ment about art (perhaps because he has found 
 out the true value of the lying Q.E.D.s), and has 
 become that thing that youth abhors — ^the un- 
 ashamed hedonist. He acquires the holiday- 
 making, even the tripping, frame of mind ; he 
 is frankly out for sensuous enjoyment. As he 
 looks with his eyes, his spirit is put to sleep ; the 
 mind forgets whatever learning it has pillaged 
 from aesthetic lumber-rooms ; the eye itself is 
 passive, and appears to perceive without report- 
 ing any articulate messages to the brain ; only 
 the body is awake and alert. He uncovers his 
 five naked senses, and only asks of art that she 
 shall gratify them or as many of them as she 
 can touch. And art responds so generously to 
 
 24 
 
A SIXTH SENSE 
 
 this ingenuous appeal that she gives herself to 
 him as she never gives herself to the cold analyst 
 who uses her only for purposes of dissection. She 
 communicates an almost bodily exhilaration, 
 heightening the sense of vitality, and yet seem- 
 ingly so independent of sight and touch and hear- 
 ing as almost to suggest the existence of a rudi- 
 mentary sixth sense — a sense which would be an 
 invaluable adjunct to the mental' apparatus of 
 the critic, refreshing his judgment and purging it 
 of pedantry and the prejudice of schools. You 
 may be shocked at the grossness of this method 
 of assay, but I am inclined to believe that it is 
 the most sure and spontaneous of intuitions. On 
 suddenly encountering the Velasquez pictures in 
 the Prado at Madrid, it is possible to have but 
 one single immediate sensation — merely that of 
 breathing purer air. The same sensation will 
 come upon you when you enter the cathedral of 
 Palma. It is almost like an alteration in the 
 specific gravity of the body, a sense of unaccus- 
 tomed lightness and buoyancy, a feeling as of an 
 ampler respiration of the lungs. 
 
 Although the impression of beauty is more im- 
 mediate and convincing in the cathedral of 
 Palma than in any other cathedral that I know, 
 its secret is more elusive. The eye commences 
 its voyage of exploration to discover the source 
 of the delight it feels ; but it is like a game of 
 blind-man's buff — aerial voices sound in every 
 
 25 
 
PALMA DE MALLORCA 
 
 quarter, but, quickly as you dart your glance 
 in their direction, you encounter only empty 
 space. The pillars of the nave rise with a delicate 
 dignity, but without the grace of clustering 
 shafts ; the capitals are simple and undecorated ; 
 the vaulting has no other ornament than that of 
 fine masonry. The eye passes upwards from the 
 pools of blue and orange on the stone flags, only 
 to be repelled by the garishness of the glass. 
 Above the eastern arch of the nave blooms an 
 immense rose window, which in colour and de- 
 sign faithfully reproduces that obsolete toy, the 
 kaleidoscope. It keeps you anxiously expectant 
 of the click which announces the hasty shuffling 
 of the fragments of glass into the next surprising 
 geometrical composition. There is no intricacy of 
 transepts which, with their interrupted glimpses 
 of alleys and arcades, give a charm to the design 
 of the simplest Gothic church. The eye returns 
 from its quest baffled, having found no definite 
 place of beauty to rest upon. 
 
 I have found the great beauty of the cathedral 
 in that most difficult triumph of the architect's 
 art, the exquisite manipulation of space. The 
 secret of its construction is that the architect has 
 thrown a canopy of stone over the greatest pos- 
 sible area with the least possible expenditure of 
 material. Too often in a Gothic cathedral the 
 tyranny of material robs the eye of its enjoyment ; 
 there is a kind of exhibition of brute strength, 
 
 a6 
 
THE JOY OF SPACE 
 
 which is imposing but fatiguing, as if a giant 
 were straining to support a superhuman burden. 
 But here the effort is concealed. The pillars leap 
 upwards with a lightness, almost with a gaiety, 
 which communicates that delight which we feel 
 in a difficult thing easily accomplished. The diffi- 
 cult art which the architect of Palma's cathedral 
 has mastered is to know how to carve out of the 
 void a certain definite body of space which you 
 can perceive and enjoy ; for it is only by circum- 
 scribing space that you can appreciate it. In the 
 rough quadrangle outside the cathedral, formed 
 by a miscellaneous grouping of buildings, al- 
 though the sky is inimitably far above you, there 
 is no sense of largeness ; but go inside, and al- 
 though the roof, not two hundred feet above your 
 head, shuts out the infinity of the sky, you are 
 conscious of moving more freely in a more ample 
 atmosphere. Most buildings imprison space, so 
 that a window or even a picture on the wall is need- 
 ful to provide a way of escape. In the perfect 
 building — and herein is the perfection of Palma's 
 cathedral — space is not confined, but rather 
 created : it is no longer a negative, but a positive 
 thing ; it floods round you like light, not oppress- 
 ing, but refreshing the senses. The extraordinary 
 modesty of this cathedral, which never obtrudes 
 itself — ^which, in fact, appears to recede as the 
 eye interrogates it — proceeds from the fact that 
 its beauty resides not in obvious ornament, but 
 
 27 
 
PALMA DE MALLORCA 
 
 in its arrangement of plain surfaces and bounding 
 lines which serve merely as the mould and recep- 
 tacle of space. 
 
 The cathedral is the most reasonable of Chris- 
 tian temples. Its body may be Gothic, but its 
 spirit is full of the old Latin sanity. Unless a man 
 has an overdose of the ascetic in his composition, 
 he must be aware of something tortured, painful, 
 unserene in too many of the cathedrals of the 
 North, a furtiveness in their intricacy, an op- 
 pressiveness in their sheer mass of masonry. 
 Palma's cathedral has not the mundanity of the 
 Renaissance, but it produces that sense of the 
 enfranchisement of the spirit which is special to 
 classical art. Indeed, it would appear that the 
 Church had found this temple too reasonable for 
 the proper exposition of her mysteries. Is it 
 another example of her unfailing wisdom that 
 she has always perceived the essentially pagan 
 nature of southern sunlight, so different from 
 that of the North, which descends upon the earth 
 like a benediction of God ? She appears to have 
 realised that her candles could not bum in the 
 unscrupulous blaze of a Mediterranean noon. 
 What the architect was doing to plan as much 
 window-space as would have served to illuminate 
 St. Paul's on a winter's afternoon, I cannot con- 
 jecture. But the Church has rectified his error. 
 She has blocked up the windows and expelled the 
 intruding light, so that on first entering the cathe- 
 
 28 
 
THE CATHEDRAL, PALMA 
 
PALMA DE MALLORCA 
 
 for a diverting thrill of the bizarre and the bar- 
 baric in its popular amusements ? Certainly I 
 thought so when I paid my twenty-five centimos 
 for a stall in the Teatro Balear. I chose the 
 Balear because the name suggested all that was 
 most local, insular, essentially Balearic, and in 
 spite of the ambiguous announcement which 
 stated that it was el unico teatro qioe se permite 
 vaciar en tres minutos — ^the only theatre which 
 permitted itself to be emptied in three minutes ! 
 I had expected to find something like one of 
 those little delightful stifling cafes in Barcelona, 
 where the stage is on the most intimate terms 
 with the stalls, and the copletistas address their 
 couplets to the members of the audience individu- 
 ally. I found the Teatro Balear a vast, preten- 
 tious hall where a personality flung over the foot- 
 lights must infallibly have been converted into 
 an insult. But the audience was so sparse that, 
 had it wished to do so, it could have emptied it- 
 self in much less than the advertised time. I sat, 
 however, with ears expectant of the exciting 
 staccato of the castanets. Suddenly the fights 
 failed ; from the back of the hall came a familiar 
 mosquito-like drone, and upon the white curtain 
 in front of the proscenium appeared the flickering 
 pictures of the cinematograph — ^the same as you 
 may see them anywhere else in the civilised 
 world, except that here the forked lightning 
 which appears undesignedly, but inevitably, to 
 
 30 
 
THE CINE 
 
 form a tragic accompaniment to these little 
 dramas played somewhat more luridly and in- 
 sistently than elsewhere. 
 
 In Spain they call it the Cine. It is surprising 
 that the genius of the English language, which, 
 as a rule, is prompt to dock the alien immigrants 
 of speech of their redundant syllables, has as yet 
 made nothing of that awkward mouthful. Cine- 
 matograph. Cine is apt, concise, sufficient, and 
 has that quality of all right words of being in 
 some degree expressive of the thing it stands for. 
 Perhaps its curtailment here is due to the fact 
 that it is more constantly before one's eyes and 
 on one's tongue. When you open the morning 
 paper you will be sure to find some brief but re- 
 spectful notice of last night's performance. You 
 will read that the function was animado, that the 
 pictures were aplaudisimos, or that there was 
 nn grandiose debut de nuevas peliculas — a gran- 
 diose debut of new films. 
 
 At first I felt that I had a grievance against 
 the Mallorquin. Tradition had led me to associate 
 the dance and not the Cine with his ardent 
 southern temperament. But undoubtedly there 
 must be times when a people finds its traditions 
 a little burdensome — especially when these tra- 
 ditions have been imposed upon it by senti- 
 mental Teutons and Anglo-Saxons in quest of 
 the romance which their own countries no longer 
 afford them. And just at present the Latin race 
 
 31 
 
PALMA DE MALLORCA 
 
 is very anxious itself to be unromantic and 
 Anglo-Saxon. 
 
 Somewhat reconciled by these reflections, 
 I painfully adjusted my vision to the required 
 focus and my mind to a more tolerant dis- 
 position. As the noiseless tragedies jerkily un- 
 rolled themselves a doubt insinuated itself whe- 
 ther, after all, my contempt of the Cine was 
 well founded. Behind the servile mechanism I 
 felt that there lurked the rudiments of an art. 
 Already it had acquired its conventions. When 
 the drama presented itself in a green light, it was 
 a warning that tragedy was imminent. Deprived 
 of speech, the .characters were compelled to in- 
 vent an elaborate symbolism of gesture. Thus, 
 when the heroine held her breast in her hands 
 and shook herself like a retriever emerging from 
 the water, one understood that she was under 
 the sway of uncontrollable passion. When the 
 hero, before committing the burglary, clenched 
 his fist and looked up to heaven, it was plain that 
 he was impelled to his crime by the injustice of a 
 ruthless capitalistic society. The hastening fig- 
 ures, always on the point of breaking into a trot, 
 reflected the purposeless hurry of our modem 
 age. The morality of the Cine is as unimpeach- 
 able as that of the modern democracy. Its crimes 
 are always of the venial sort that are only com- 
 mitted against the rich. Its justice is exclusively 
 poetic. Its humour has the obvious, boisterous 
 
 32 
 
THE ART OF DEMOCRACY 
 
 character which has always been dear to the 
 populace ever since Shakespeare tickled with his 
 buffooneries the groundlings of the Globe. I re- 
 flected that hitherto the attitude of democracy 
 to the arts had been a little uncertain. It has 
 viewed them with suspicion as the product of a 
 civilisation in which the proletariat did not have 
 the directing hand. I suspect that beneath an air 
 of robust contempt it has been galled by a secret 
 soreness. It has been stung by the reproach of 
 its own sterility. But in the Teatro Balear I 
 realised that this reproach was no longer justified, 
 and that the Cine, the ultimate art of our times, 
 was the sole and proper art of Democracy. 
 
 There is a sense in which all art is democratic 
 — at all events, in its beginnings. In the democ- 
 racies of the ancient world beauty came to birth 
 almost unconsciously, in the mere act of living. 
 But these democracies were warring and jarring 
 atoms. Their arts were local, and drew from the 
 soil a native flavour as precise and distinguishable 
 as that of their wine. The modern democracy, 
 whose birthday is variously dated 1789 or 1848, 
 is essentially international and cosmopolitan. It 
 works to impose uniformity upon the world. It 
 makes war upon the local differences in which 
 the earlier arts were nurtured. It is abolishing 
 dialects, and it would, if it could, abolish lan- 
 guages also, substituting a colourless mercantile 
 idiom, such as Esperanto. It suppresses every 
 c 33 
 
PALMA DE MALLORCA 
 
 costume that is special and appropriate, so that 
 the dress of the modern ploughman and even of 
 the modern scarecrow differs only in condition, 
 and not in spirit, from that which is worn in 
 Bond Street. Hence modern democracy has had 
 difficulty in creating an art ; because a song or a 
 dance or a melody, if they are to warm the blood, 
 must have something local as well as universal 
 in them. In the Cine, however, it has found a 
 medium of expression. The Cine confines itself 
 to those things which are cosmopoUtan. It ex- 
 presses the lowest common denominator of our 
 modern civilisation. It has no nationality . . . 
 I was pondering these things during an interval 
 between the dramas, when the young man who 
 occupied the stall next to mine began to be com- 
 municative. A common enthusiasm for the great 
 democratic art relieved us from the necessity of 
 a formal introduction. He told me that he was a 
 haberdasher's assistant, and opened his soul to 
 me as to a brother. For were we not all brothers ! 
 he exclaimed. For his part he did not believe 
 in nationality which separates men — ^not in 
 France, nor in Germany, nor in Italy, nor in 
 Great Britain ; and, he hastened to add, lest he 
 should seem to have presented the doctrine of 
 internationalism in too partial a light, not even 
 in Spain. Neither did he believe in a deity, nor 
 in a life in the world to come. Una vida, una 
 muerte — one life, one death — was his sufficient 
 
 34 
 
AN AFICIONADO 
 
 creed. And he might have added, one Cine. For 
 this young man with such an economy of beUef, 
 at any rate, beUeved in the Cine. He did not 
 wish to see the dance, the jota or the fandango, 
 because it was a local thing and tended to per- 
 petuate the distinctions of nationality. But, con- 
 sciously or sub-consciously, he was aware that 
 the Cine was not a divider of peoples, but a re- 
 conciler. Its films carried the same sentiments 
 of humanity, the same undenominational moral- 
 ity, the same venerable humour, to the costers of 
 London, the apaches of Paris, the mougiks of 
 Moscow, and the rationalistic young haber- 
 dashers of Palma de Mallorca. It represented 
 the triumph of the brotherhood of man over the 
 separatist tendencies of the nations. It stood for 
 the solidarity of modern Europe. Therefore this 
 young man was an aficionado of the Cine ; there- 
 fore he was one of those who gave animation to 
 the function, whose nightly applause was re- 
 corded in the morning papers ; and therefore he 
 parted from me with the cordial wish that he 
 might find me in my place at the grandiose debut 
 de nuevas peliculas on the morrow. 
 
 Diu-ing Holy Week Palma grieves — or feigns to 
 grieve ; for, though its mourning is profound, it 
 is not profound enough to hide the serenity of its 
 smile. The streets are silent. The Ayuntamiento 
 
 35 
 
PALMA DE MALLORCA 
 
 has decided by sixteen votes to nine (for even in 
 Catholic Mallorca there is a secularist remnant) 
 that all wheeled traffic be prohibited from the 
 evening of Thursday to the morning of Saturday, 
 except such as is necessary for the conveyance of 
 doctors and scavengers. The only sound in the 
 city is that of the bleating of lambs. Almost 
 every courtyard resounds with their plaintive, 
 interrogatory cries. But between the hours of 
 twelve and three on Good Friday, men with 
 blood-stained aprons pass from house to house ; 
 little by little the bleating ceases, and at last 
 utter silence reigns over the city. The women pass 
 from one church to another, visiting the monu- 
 mentos, dressed from head to foot in black and 
 smiling seductively beneath their rich lace man- 
 tillas. In spite of its ostentation of woe, their 
 mourning dress has a gala aspect. In these white, 
 sun-soaked cities of the Mediterranean black is 
 seen to be' what Velasquez knew it to be — ^the 
 most voluptuous of all the colours. The women 
 know it too, and give it its full value by thickly 
 powdering their faces — even although the deep 
 shade of the patios where their days are spent 
 has already paled them to the tint of ivory. 
 
 The great day of Holy Week is not Good Friday, 
 but Thursday, Jueves Santo, the day on which the 
 institution of the Eucharist is commemorated. 
 On that day the great procession of the Sangre 
 passes through the streets. It sets out from the 
 
 36 
 
THE PROCESSION OF THE SANGBE 
 
 Iglesia del Hospital in the afternoon, and when 
 night has fallen it is still winding its way with a 
 glow of candles through the steep and tortuous 
 calles. It is preceded by the guardia civiles on 
 horseback, in the pride of gala uniform, cocked 
 hat, gold tassels, and spotless white breeches. 
 They are followed by a military band playing 
 a dead march, and soldiers, with arms reversed, 
 stepping slowly to the weeping music. Then 
 come the penitents of the various cofradias — 
 medieval figures, with girdled gowns and tall, 
 conical headgear which comes down over their 
 faces like an Arab woman's veil. Through the 
 slits in the mask gleam roving impenitent eyes, 
 which appraise the women in the balconies with 
 a calculating, impartial gaze. In their hands they 
 carry lighted candles and the various emblems 
 of the Passion, a miniature ladder, a scourge, a 
 sword with the wax ear of the high priest's ser- 
 vant adhering to it, and also packets of caramels 
 which they distribute among the crowd. In their 
 midst are borne banners, lanterns, the images of 
 the Virgin and of Christ carrying His cross. The 
 COTporation is preceded by the maceros, men 
 whose shaven faces you have seen a hundred 
 times in the pictures of Bellini and Ghirlandaio. 
 I had often wondered whether the Middle Ages 
 had not impressed an individual stamp upon the 
 face which these later times had obliterated. In 
 England the faces of most men seem to have lost 
 
 37 
 
PALMA DE MALLORCA 
 
 the old precision and singleness of meaning, as 
 though modern civilisation had blurred them 
 with many conflicting thoughts and lightly felt 
 emotions. But in Spain, perhaps because its 
 civilisation is not quite modern, the centuries 
 have brought no change. It only needed the dis- 
 guise which their office compels the mace-bearers 
 to wear — ^hair falling to the shoulders, and a 
 fringe which makes a straight line half an inch 
 above the eyes — ^to translate them back to the 
 fifteenth century. The faces are the same — ^the 
 grave, hard features, the expression of serenity, 
 half humorous and a little brutal. The members 
 of the corporation are in evening dress. They 
 appear to be worried, rather hot, and much con- 
 cerned to prevent the melting wax of the candles 
 from dripping upon their trousers. 
 
 Finally, towering unsteadily in the air, comes 
 the image of the crucified Christ. Its outstretched 
 arms almost touch the walls on either side of the 
 narrow street. The images carried in the earlier 
 part of the procession had been banal and real- 
 istic — ^the productions of those factories of re- 
 ligious waxworks which flood modern Catholicism 
 with a stream of spurious sentiment. The figure 
 of the Sangre is wisely conventional. It is 
 shrouded in a purple veil. Long hair falls down 
 the back ; from the waist to the knee hangs a 
 purple skirt, richly embroidered and shining with 
 stones ; the breast is covered with passionate, 
 
 38 
 
RELIGIOUS REALISM 
 
 exotic flowers. Even the crowds, to whom the 
 spectacle had become merely a hohday show, felt 
 a moment's awe and dropped upon the knee as 
 this figure of splendour and tragedy moved 
 sorrowfully past. 
 
 The religion of the Mediterranean is untouched 
 by Northern mysticism. It is terribly explicit. 
 Every stage of the drama which happened two 
 thousand years ago at Jerusalem is re-enacted 
 with a literal detail which the imagination rebels 
 against. The vacant cross is set up behind the 
 high altar of the cathedral, a strip of white linen 
 hanging down from the arms, and the figures of 
 Mary and John on either side. The choristers in 
 the ga;llery simulate the earthquake by a sudden 
 deafening stamping of the feet. The figure of the 
 crucified is carried upon a bier from the foot of 
 the cross with all the pomp of funeral and buried 
 in the tomb. The morning of Easter is celebrated 
 by the ceremony of the Encuentra, when the 
 image of Mary meets that of Christ with music 
 in the market-place. Then when Palma, by the 
 rehearsal of so many moving scenes, has at last 
 persuaded itself into a kind of woe, it flocks 
 to the Plaza de Toros, and in the spectacle of the 
 slaughter of six young bulls regains its normal 
 cheerfulness. 
 
 * * 
 
 * 
 
 If you have an ear that listens to the unspoken 
 voices of what we obtusely call inanimate objects, 
 
 39 
 
PALMA DE MALLORCA 
 
 you will have discovered in your journeyings to 
 and fro that the temper of a town is often some- 
 thing very different from the temper of the 
 people that inhabit it. The two are rarely in 
 complete accord. Often they appear to be un- 
 intelligible to one another, sometimes mutually 
 contemptuous, sometimes fiercely at feud. In 
 general this dislocation between a town and its 
 inhabitants is produced by age. Towns are natu- 
 rally conservative. Their memories are far- 
 reaching and tenacious. They have a difficulty 
 in accommodating themselves to our ways, 
 having already adapted themselves to the modes 
 of distant generations. Towns are only less un- 
 changing than a landscape ; while of all men 
 townsmen are the most mutable. One has always 
 a little pity for a town that is obviously conserva- 
 tive when it is in the hands of a radical populace. 
 But in Southern Europe the democracy has the 
 art of possessing itself of a town that is aristo- 
 cratic in its breeding with a wonderful sympathy 
 and tact. The people have leisure, and leisure 
 breeds dignity. They are not overawed by the 
 relics of bygone splendour ; they take them for 
 granted, and yet appear to be not altogether in- 
 sensible to their influence. They go about among 
 their ancient palaces and churches with the ease 
 of a man who is at home, and also with some- 
 thing of his half-conscious pride. I have seen 
 beggars sitting in Palma Cathedral with their 
 
 40 
 
A CORNER OF THE MARKET, PALMA 
 
THE TEMPER OF TOWNS 
 
 cloaks flung round them, not abashed at being 
 surrounded by so much grandeur and yet not 
 quite indifferent to it, but with an air of posses- 
 sion, hke kings in their own palace. An English- 
 man has not the same manner of quiet fami- 
 liarity with his ancient monuments. He enters 
 a cathedral with a self-conscious air and with a 
 respectful curiosity, as though it were a national 
 museum. If he chances to visit a palace, his atti- 
 tude is correct and deferential ; but he cannot 
 naturally assume the grand manner which the 
 place demands ; a certain air of insignificance 
 and vulgarity settles upon him, and he is aware 
 of it. He is said not to have broken with his past 
 so radically as other peoples have broken with 
 theirs. It is true, and it is just his unfailing 
 respect for the past which prevents him from 
 moving among ancient things with the simple 
 calm of a people that does not distinguish the 
 past from the present. 
 
 There appears to be no incompatibility of tem- 
 per between the citizens of Palma and their city. 
 But it should not be difficult for a modern people 
 to inhabit Palma without friction, for although 
 the city lived its great days long before Don 
 Jaime the Conquistador rode in through the 
 Moorish gate of Beb-alcofol on that New Year's 
 Eve of 1229, it has the secret of preserving the 
 serenity of youth. At one point, however, the 
 city and the citizens have come into sharp col- 
 
 41 
 
PALMA DE MALLORCA 
 
 lision. The citizens have found the city walls un- 
 modern or unhygienic, and therefore they are 
 tearing them down with a vigour which they dis- 
 play in no other of their amusements. It is a 
 formidable task, for they were some six hundred 
 years in building. It is easy to upbraid Spaniards 
 and Italians — especially Italians — ^for the van- 
 dalism with which they handle their immemorial 
 towns. Of course, it is distressing that they have 
 not the aesthetic eye and do not gladly live in in- 
 sanitary slums because they once were palaces. 
 Gasometers and electric standards and other dis- 
 figuring conveniences they might well leave to the 
 northern barbarians who know no better. But it 
 must be an oppressive thing to live beneath the 
 weight of the dead hand of the past. The north- 
 ern tourist with his guide-book in his hand is quite 
 content to perambulate a town as though it were 
 a museum, but it is another thing to have to live 
 in a museum from year's end to year's end. I 
 cannot feel unsympathetic with the activity of 
 the Latin races who are anxious to let the breath 
 of day into the museum atmosphere. They also 
 want to be braced by the invigorating air of 
 modern life, to breathe the good, thick factory 
 smoke and the acrid fumes of petrol. For the 
 life which brought these embattled towns into 
 being was energetic and tumultuous, and if the 
 Latin peoples are again to bring art to birth, it 
 will not be by regretfully contemplating their 
 
 42 
 
SERENO 
 
 past, but by regaining the fierce vitality of the 
 men who built their cities with swords in their 
 hands. 
 
 But whatever access of energy may come to its 
 citizens, Palma will always be serene. There is 
 an unfailing reservoir of serenity in the wells of 
 the placid night, when there is no stir nor motion 
 throughout the sleeping city, and when out of 
 the stillness comes the sonorous cry of the watch- 
 man : — 
 
 m 
 
 3 
 
 ^i 
 
 :S^=i= 
 
 3=^ 
 
 ^=i 
 
 Ala - ba ^ do sea JHos. Las do ■ oe. 
 
 Praised be God. Midnight. Serene. 
 
 43 
 
II 
 
 THE COAST 
 
 When En Pere Martel gave his dinner-party to 
 King Jaime on that memorable spring afternoon 
 in 1229, the King asked him, " What is the ex- 
 tent of Mallorca ? " The shipmaster supposed 
 that it was about three hundred miles round. 
 His figures were nearer the truth than those of 
 medieval travellers usually were, but still, he 
 almost doubled its extent ; for, according to the 
 modern ordnance surveyor, the circumference of 
 the island is two hundred and sixty-five kilo- 
 metres, and assuming that a kilometre is exactly 
 five-eighths of a mile, which I believe it is not, 
 that should be, according to my calculation, a 
 hundred and sixty-five miles and five-eighths. 
 Such is the actual extent of the coast-line, and 
 such, I suppose, it would seem if you were to sail 
 round it in a falucha ; but when you are actually 
 within the island and travelling round it on foot, 
 the truth is that you rarely come across the sea 
 at all. 
 
 Mallorca is curious and notable among islands 
 for this reason, that, although it is most indis- 
 
 44 
 
FEAR OF THE SEA 
 
 putably " a kingdom in the sea where God 
 pleased to put it," as King Jaime's barons in- 
 formed him, yet the sea appears to have a kind 
 of terror for it. In remote ages, when the Medi- 
 terranean was still an enclosed lake, and Africa 
 was joined to Europe at Gibraltar and Sicily, 
 the Balearic Islands formed a continuation of the 
 Sierra Nevada of Spain. Mallorca is still, as it 
 were, an island in spite of itself. It is impossible 
 to conceive of its being married to the sea as 
 Venice is yearly married by her priests. She breeds 
 a race of men who are lovers of the soil rather 
 than of the sea. Although the serene and smiling 
 Mediterranean seems to entice them to the coast, 
 they have turned their backs upon it and built 
 their towns inland. Palma, it is true, lies along 
 the shores of its bay, but until the other day it 
 was careful to keep entrenched within its guar- 
 dian walls. With this one exception, there is not 
 another town upon the coast, scarcely even a 
 fishing-village, and only one or two timid and 
 unfrequented ports. 
 
 This dread of the sea is an inheritance from 
 other times, not without its reasonable founda- 
 tion. It was not so much a fear of the sea itself, 
 which, after all, is a very placid sea with only 
 occasional freaks of treachery, but rather a fear 
 of those who sailed upon it. A frontier is always 
 a source of unrest, even when there is only a 
 single nation on the other side of it, and that not 
 
 45 
 
THE COAST 
 
 a hostile one ; but the frontier of Mallorca, 
 which is its coast, was exposed to all the nations 
 who have ever learned to make themselves at 
 home upon the sea — from the Phoenician to the 
 Turk-— and the sea has a curiously dissolvent 
 action upon the morals of a nation. Fear of the 
 vengeance of the Moors whom they had dispos- 
 sessed, and of the depredations of the Corsairs, 
 caused the Mallorquins to draw away from their 
 natural frontier, so that even to-day when you 
 sail round the desolate coast you appear to be 
 passing by an uninhabited island. The towns lie 
 high and dry, three or four miles from the shore, 
 stretching out a white road like a tentacle to a 
 little fortified port or a watch-tower, from which 
 the beacons once flamed the warning of the 
 enemy's approach. Thus it is that when you 
 make the circuit of Mallorca, you travel along a 
 road that shuns the coast, and have little sense 
 of being upon an island at all. 
 
 From the traveller's point of view the coast of 
 Mallorca is not three hundred miles, as En Pere 
 Martel said it was ; nor yet a hundred and sixty- 
 five, as the modern ordnance surveyor says it is, 
 but only about thirty. It stretches from An- 
 draitx, the westernmost town of the island, to 
 the point where the road begins to zigzag down 
 into the valley of Soller. After leaving SoUer, 
 the carretera, or rather the mule-track, climbs up 
 into the mountains, loses itself in a labyrinth of 
 
 46 
 
COLLADO DE LA BATALLA 
 
 mighty ravines, and does not strike the sea again 
 until it reaches the port of PoUensa on the east 
 coast. 
 
 * 
 
 It was a burning, noon when I set out from 
 Palma to walk the twenty miles of earretera that 
 lead to Andraitx. The broad road, dust smoth- 
 ered and deserted, wound among pines and olive 
 groves. On the right hand rose the spurs of the 
 western chain of mountains, covered with pine 
 and ilex and carob trees ; on the left stretched 
 the smooth savannahs of the bay. This smiling 
 paradise was King Jaime's first impression of the 
 island he had come to win back for Christendom. 
 Landing at the western extremity of the island, he 
 found his advance opposed by the Moorish army 
 midway between Andraitx and Palma. On the 
 left-hand side of the road, beneath the shade of a 
 giant pine, a stone pillar surmounted by an iron 
 cross marks the spot where the battle was joined 
 on the 12th of September, 1229. As I passed over 
 it the ancient battlefield was drowsy with the 
 peace of the May afternoon. No sounds broke 
 upon the silence but the hammering of an old 
 road-mender and the plaintive Moorish melody 
 that a shepherd boy was. singing among the 
 fields. They ceased as I went by, and curious, un- 
 comprehending eyes were fixed upon the tra- 
 veller. 
 
 47 
 
THE COAST 
 
 On the road in Mallorca you can't help feeling 
 self-conscious. You will find that daily you pro- 
 vide a spectacle, if not for gods, at all events for 
 Mallorquin men, women, and children. To see a 
 man walking from nowhere to nowhere, with no 
 reason that would appear convincing to a guardia 
 civil, merely for the pleasure of doing it, when he 
 might cover the distance with no appreciably 
 greater expenditure of time or money in a dili- 
 gencia, is a recreation that happens only twice or 
 thrice in their lifetime. Moreover, you will make 
 the discovery, if you have not made it before, 
 that your nationality is not the abstract entity 
 you might have supposed it to be, merely a glow 
 or ardour residing in the inmost consciousness, 
 but a really definitely and physical thing — a kind 
 of British X-rays, which emanate from your body 
 and penetrate walls, doors, and shuttered win- 
 dows without encountering the least resistance. 
 A town when you enter it may be plunged pro- 
 foundly in the peace of its afternoon siesta, but 
 although your footfalls are as silent as a cat's 
 you will awaken it as infallibly as if you marched 
 through preceded by a military band playing the 
 national anthem.. The shutters open as if a magic 
 had touched them, and the windows disgorge 
 perplexed and curious heads ; the caf6s empty 
 their crowds of domino players into the plaza ; 
 the children in the nun's school cease to chant 
 the dynasties of kings and pour out into the street 
 
 48 
 
THE TELL-TALE RAYS 
 
 to gape at the phenomenon. It would appear 
 that every stage of your journey from Charing 
 Cross had been accurately reported in the local 
 press, and that you had arrived at the very 
 minute of the scheduled time. 
 
 What is more astonishing still is that this in- 
 fluence of nationality which your person radi- 
 ates proclaims you to be not merely a forastero, 
 but an ingles. In the manner of those retiring 
 animals who assume the colour of their environ- 
 ment as a means to leading an unmolested life, 
 I had bought a golden-green corduroy coat with 
 striped drill breeches, and for a collar sub- 
 stituted a yellow handkerchief with purple spots. 
 I had shod my feet with alpagartas, a kind of 
 heel-less canvas shoe with a hemp sole, and 
 found that walking without the accustomed 
 cheerful noise of nailed boots was almost as 
 mysterious as walking without a shadow. In 
 every outward circumstance I know that I was 
 the counterpart of a Mallorquin, because I had 
 seen my double driving goats to a fair. But you 
 cannot trifle with your birthright. The disguise 
 was of no avail. The secret rays sent out their 
 confidential, truthful messages, and the tell-tale 
 whisper passed from mouth to mouth, " Mire — 
 ingles ! " 
 
 The curiosity which the traveller in Mallorca 
 excites during his day's progress is concentrated 
 into a formidable inquisition when he arrives at 
 D 49 
 
THE COAST 
 
 night at the fonda. Not the least glorious of the 
 liberties of Britain consists in this, that the sub- 
 ject can enter any inn in England, Scotland, 
 Wales, or Ireland, and if he has the price of a bed 
 and breakfast in his pocket, these two prime 
 necessities of life will be given him- and no ques- 
 tions asked. In Latin countries there is more of 
 the talk about Liberty and less of the thing. To 
 apply for shelter is often as involved a process 
 as if one should apply for outdoor relief. It is 
 not enough that a man has an empty stomach 
 and aching limbs — ^he must also have a name 
 and a native town and a province and a profes- 
 sion, and many other things which he commonly 
 goes abroad in order to forget. The Mallorquin 
 is hospitable in the open-hearted and open- 
 handed manner of earlier times ; he is not sus- 
 picious, but he is curious, as all men are curious 
 in small communities where each knows the 
 other's business, and a certain importance still 
 attaches to the act of travelling. Mallorquin 
 families ramify all over the island, and if some 
 rare occasion obliges a man to visit a neighbour- 
 ing town, he stays with his grandfather or his 
 aunt or his second cousin. The fonda, therefore, 
 at all events, in the smaller towns, is the place 
 for the evening's recreation rather than for the 
 night's repose. 
 
 It must be admitted that the Mallorquin fonda 
 is a disappointment. In Mallorca there is all the 
 
 50 
 
THE MALLORQUIN FONDA 
 
 material for the inn of the heart's desire. There 
 are great wide-eaved buildings, with spacious 
 courtyards and interior galleries, baronial kit- 
 chens, fire-places before which oxen could be 
 roasted whole, ingle-nooks as large as a fair-sized 
 parlour, with hams and sausages dependent from 
 the rafters. But these are the alquerias, the old 
 granges, many of them dating from the times of 
 the Moors, which you may only visit for the 
 ostensible purpose of begging a cup of cold water. 
 I know none of them that have been converted 
 to the uses of an inn. The fonda is a more trum- 
 pery affair. It is primarily a cafe, where it is 
 naturally assumed that you will order nothing 
 more nor less than a glass of black coffee, sweet- 
 ened in the making to the degree which suits the 
 fondistd's palate, and a glass of anisado, the 
 favourite Mallorquin liqueur. Stretched from the 
 four corners of the ceiling to the acetylene gas-jet 
 in the centre are paper festoons, conceived in a 
 scheme of primary colours, which serve no pur- 
 pose, utilitarian or aesthetic, except to provide 
 roosting-places for the flies at night. Its decora- 
 tion is unromantic. It is sprinkled with marble- 
 topped tables. At the end of the room stands a 
 counter, and fixed against the wall behind are 
 several rows of shelves, crowded with polychro- 
 matic bottles of liqueur. 
 
 Such was the fonda at Calvia, a sad little vil- 
 lage in this western corner of the island. I had 
 
 51 
 
THE COAST 
 
 tired of the interminable carretera, and decided 
 to make a detour through the lost, hilly country 
 that lies north of the Collado de la Batalla. The 
 night was falling when I arrived at the inn, and 
 goini^up to the fondista who was serving out 
 drinks behind the counter with the air of a 
 grandee of Spain, I asked, not for coffee or ani- 
 sado, but for a bed. The clicking of the dominoes 
 at half a dozen tables stopped instantaneously. 
 The tension couldn't have been more strained if 
 I had asked for his money or his life. A bed ! 
 It was a matter for the police. The Secretario of 
 the village was sent for, not altogether because 
 the occasion demanded quite such rigorous mea- 
 sures, but because he had the reputation of being 
 fluent in the English tongue. If he still enjoys 
 that reputation, it is thanks to my benevolent 
 duplicity in pretending familiarity with the 
 strange, personal idiom which he appeared him- 
 self to have invented. To do him justice, I must 
 admit that he had a good working knowledge of 
 the numerals up to ten. He held in his hand a 
 sheet containing that printed inquisition which 
 vexes the traveller in every country of the civilised 
 world except Britain and America. By looking 
 over his shoulder I was able to understand the 
 questions as he translated them into his private 
 dialect. The examination appeared to differ from 
 that of a pedagogic nature only in the fact that it 
 was not competitive. But it was more personal. 
 
 52 
 
THE SECRETARIO 
 
 What was my name ? It was a very simple name, 
 and I pronounced it slowly and distinctly. The 
 Secretario, however, began to suggest a number of 
 alternative pronunciations, and finally asked me 
 to write it down. I produced a letter from my 
 pocket and showed him the name written upon 
 the envelope. The cloud which gathered on his 
 brow told me that something was amiss. It ap- 
 peared that my name was not at all what I had 
 said it was. My name was " Esq." He found a 
 difficulty in pronouncing " Esq.", and asked me 
 how it was done. I explained that it was not 
 pronounced at all — it was a kind of title which 
 people conferred upon themselves. A title ! He 
 glanced at the drill trousers and at the handker- 
 chief which flaunted with unseemly abandon 
 where the collar should have been. But the 
 Spaniards are a courteous people, and he made 
 no comment. What was my province ? I was 
 not conscious of belonging to a province. A men- 
 tal picture of the map of England gave no hint 
 of one, so I informed him that in England we 
 didn't have provinces. The reply seemed un- 
 satisfactory, but he passed on to the next inquiry. 
 My profession ? Here I was at a loss for a con- 
 vincing answer. But the position was becoming 
 serious. A man who had two names, one of 
 which he couldn't pronounce, who didn't know 
 what province he came from and was uncer- 
 tain of his profession ! Unconsciously the Sec- 
 
 53 
 
THE COAST 
 
 retario J;hrew a glance across the road. I 
 noticed that it rested upon a door with the 
 ominous word carcel inscribed upon it. If I was 
 to escape incarceration, it was clearly time to be 
 emphatic. I remembered the camera I was carry- 
 ing, and replied that I made photographs. His 
 face showed a light of understanding. A retra- 
 tista ! Then I would take his portrait ? For how 
 much — for twenty-five centimes ? By all means. 
 He was reassured. My confidence also was re- 
 stored, and remembering that we had provinces 
 in England after all, I hastened to add that mine 
 was Canterbury. The situation was saved, and 
 the Secretario said that I might have a bed. 
 
 * * 
 
 * 
 
 Andraitx lies among its orchards on the slope 
 of a green amphitheatre of hills, looking down 
 upon its port some four or five miles away. 
 Round a shoulder of the bay the island of Dra- 
 gonera, where the forces of the Conquistador 
 landed, crouches dragon-like upon the waters. 
 From Andraitx I struck northwards to the peril- 
 ous coast which looks towards Spain. Here be- 
 gins the twenty-mile stretch of road which hugs 
 the sea. A cart-road leads from Andraitx up a 
 .narrowing valley and then diminishes int^ a mule- 
 track. As you press upwards the orange and 
 almond and fig trees are left behind ; the ubiquit- 
 ous olive also disappears, and you enter a region 
 
 54 
 
65 
 
MALVASIA OF BANALBUFAR 
 
 of steep ravines and broken escarpments, where 
 the sturdy Aleppo pine grapples the red soil with 
 tenacious roots. The narrow path runs along a 
 terrace in the face of the cliff. On the one hand, 
 the naked mountains shoot into the sky ; on the 
 other, some hundreds of feet below, lies a glittering 
 expanse of bright indigo, enclosing pools of clear- 
 est purple and emerald, with a white fringe where 
 the waters chafe the roots of rocks. The only trace, 
 of human life is a ruined watch-tower, uselessly 
 guarding the barren coast ; not a sail on the sea, 
 not a roof among the trees ; utter solitude and 
 stillness from the peaks of the mountains to the 
 shining floor of the sea. The landscape and sea- 
 scape make a harmony of three colours — blue of 
 the sea, bright green of the pines, and blood-red 
 of the soil — ^the tricolour of the Mediterranean. 
 After leaving Andraitx it is four hours before you 
 come again to the home of men. At Estallenchs, 
 a little white, flat-roof ed village, sUpping down the 
 steep slope of the hills, the carretera begins again. 
 Four miles beyond the cliffs form a kind of cup, 
 lined with terraces of vineyards, and in the midst 
 of the cup lies the ancient town of Baiialbufar, 
 famous for its malvasia, the finest wine of the 
 island. 
 
 One morning, when the shadows were still long 
 in the streets, I went to the bodega of the Ba- 
 ronia. It is an ancient castle, standing on a ter- 
 race overhanging the sea, enclosing a courtyard 
 
 55 
 
THE COAST 
 
 with a carved well-head in the midst. The vaults 
 were dark and cool, lined with a double row of 
 capacious barrels. Into one of these the steward 
 dipped a rod, to the end of which was attached a 
 small vessel like an inverted candle extinguisher, 
 and ladled out two wineglassfuls of the pale 
 golden wine. It is a fortunate thing for some 
 wines and many plays that they are only sub- 
 mitted to an indulgent after-dinner criticism. 
 The seven-o'clock-in-the-morning mood is less 
 complacent ; the test more severe. But if wines 
 have their special and appropriate hours, assur- 
 edly the malvasia of Banalbufar is an early morn- 
 ing wine. It has a kind of matutinal freshness 
 which in the midnight restaurant would perhaps 
 evaporate into insipidity. It assuages rather 
 than inflames the mind ; it has no passion in it ; 
 the soil of the island gives it a character like that 
 of the people, mild and suave, but a little grave. 
 I am not sure that it would travel well, although 
 once it used to travel to imperial Rome. But when 
 it is drunk in a cool Moorish courtyard, upon the 
 edge of the sea, when the sun is still low upon 
 the water, it yields up all its spirit and moves 
 the mind to memories of the quiet pauses in the 
 stormy life of the Mediterranean. 
 
 After leaving Banalbufar it is possible to keep 
 still in company with the sea by following a path 
 that dips down into a wide, flat valley ; but the 
 carretera makes a long inland circuit by way of 
 
 56 
 
THE VALLEY OF SOLLER 
 
 Esporlas and joins the high road from Palma to 
 Valldenlosa, the dehghtful valley at the head of 
 which stands the convent where Georges Sand 
 spent her winter in Mallorcawith Chopin. The road 
 regains the coast at Miramar, and from thence 
 winds along the mountain-side, high above the sea, 
 passing the little town of Deyd, perched securely 
 on a hill-top, until it turns sharply to the south 
 and begins to descend into the valley of SoUer. 
 
 If you arrive at this turning-point about 
 the time of sunset, you will have a vision of 
 as great beauty and splendour as any which 
 this island has to offer. At the end of the valley 
 rises a mountain-barrier as sheer as the wall 
 of a gigantic fortress, its northern extremity 
 buttressed by Puig Mayor, the loftiest mountain 
 in the island, rising to nearly five thousand feet. 
 As the level light of the sun strikes the naked 
 rock of the mountain-tops they glow with pure 
 scarlet, as if washed with blood. Their skirts are 
 hidden beneath the dark green of the pines ; the 
 lower slopes are covered with the silvery mist of 
 the olive groves, which descend in innumerable 
 terraces ; at their foot the wide, level valley 
 swells out in one luxurious orchard — oranges, 
 apricots, lemons, figs, almonds, and here and 
 there a single mast-like palm. In the midst of 
 this orchard gleam the white houses of the town, 
 clustering thickly round the church and scatter- 
 ing in isolated dots all along the plain. A torrent 
 
 57 
 
THE COAST 
 
 comes down from the cleft in the mountains and 
 cuts a ravine through the midst of the town. 
 Three miles away shines the little blue lake which 
 forms the port, and beyond it lies the open sea. 
 Very rightly did Dameto, the seventeenth-century 
 chronicler of Mallorca, say of SoUer that it was 
 " the Tempe or Paradise of this kingdom and an 
 epilogue of the gardens of the world." 
 
 * 
 
 The town of SoUer is rapidly losing its ancient 
 character, but it preserves the memory of the 
 Corsairs more vividly than any other town in the 
 island. Every year, on the 11th of May, it holds 
 a fiesta to celebrate the anniversary of the victory 
 of the men of SoUer over Ochiali and his mixed 
 army of Turks and Moors in the year 1561. The 
 church bells are rung, a procession passes through 
 the streets, and down at the port the Simulacra 
 takes place, a kind of pageant of the whole 
 bloody business, when men in Moorish garb land 
 in the harbour, seize and carry off the women, 
 and finally allow themselves to be routed by the 
 victorious Christians. The procession has a re- 
 ligious character, for it escorts from the parish 
 church to the Oratory of the Hospital the very 
 .image of the Virgin which was mutilated by the 
 Moorish scimitars. But it also includes boys and 
 girls in fancy dress ; the boys with gilt cardboard 
 crowns and trailing scarlet robes, representing 
 
 58 
 
> 
 ■< 
 
 O 
 
 n 
 
THE llTH OF MAY 
 
 the Corsair chiefs ; the girls gorgeously dressed 
 in the silks and embroideries of the sixteenth 
 century, their fingers hidden beneath rings, and 
 their bodices and skirts covered with the very 
 chains and crosses and precious stones that lured 
 the African sea-robbers to SoUer three hundred 
 years ago. They personify the famous Valentas 
 Donas de Can Tamany, two valiant ladies who 
 slew a Moor as he was breaking in through the 
 window of their house with a bar or tranca of the 
 door. The bar itself is carried triumphantly in 
 the procession, adorned with myrtle. At night 
 bands play in the street, the plaza is ablaze with 
 fireworks, and the whole populace gives itself up 
 to rejoicing as though the victory were not 
 merely a historical memory, but a deliverance 
 from a present danger. 
 
 The obvious sincerity of the rejoicings gives 
 a more significant meaning to the title which has 
 been given to the Corsairs — " the scourge of 
 Christendom." In SoUer, as indeed throughout 
 the islands, the people never speak of the Cor- 
 sairs, but only of the Mows. It is true that ever 
 since the Moors were driven out of Mallorca by 
 the Catalan conquerors in 1231 they brooded 
 over vengeance and schemed for the re-conquest 
 of their island kingdom ; but they only became 
 an intolerable scourge to the island when the Turk 
 came westward from Constantinople and taught 
 them how to sail and to plunder. The time and 
 
 59 
 
THE COAST 
 
 the place made the western Mediterranean in the 
 sixteenth century a happy hunting-ground for 
 sea-robbers. The wealth of the newly discovered 
 Americas was pouring into the ports of Spain and 
 Italy. From the East came the heavily laden 
 argosies bringing silks and spices and ivory from 
 the Indies. Through the straits of Gibraltar 
 at one end, and the channel between Sicily and 
 Tunis at the other, the treasure ships sailed into 
 the western basin of the Mediterranean as into a 
 net. The north coast of Africa seemed to have 
 been formed by nature to be the home of pirates ; 
 a coast that was indented with creeks and shallow 
 harbours where the pirate galleys drawing but 
 little water could take refuge ; a sea that was 
 visit|ed by sudden and treacherous storms which 
 made pursuit difficult for the unwieldy Spanish 
 galleons ; a country with an impotent govern- 
 ment, where the Corsairs could horde and enjoy 
 their spoils with impunity. " Before these Cor- 
 sairs have been absent from their abodes much 
 longer than perhaps twenty or thirty days," said 
 Diego de Haedo, writing of Tunis, " they return 
 home rich, with their vessels crowded with cap- 
 tives, and ready to sink with wealth ; in one in- 
 stant, and with scarce any trouble, reaping the 
 fruits of all that the avaricious Mexican and 
 greedy Peruvian have been digging from the 
 bowels of the earth with such toil and sweat, and 
 the thirsty merchant with such manifest perils 
 
 60 
 
THE CORSAIRS 
 
 has for so long been scraping together, and has 
 been so many thousand leagues to fetch away, 
 either from the east or west, with inexpressible 
 danger and fatigue. Thus they have crammed 
 most of the houses, the magazines and all the 
 shops of this Den of Thieves with gold, silver, 
 pearls, amber, spices, drugs, silks, cloths, velvets, 
 etc., whereby they have rendered this city the 
 most opulent in the world : insomuch that the 
 Turks call it, not without reason, their India, 
 their Mexico, their Peru." 
 
 The Corsair fleet was to the sixteenth and 
 seventeenth centuries what the Foreign Legion 
 is to the twentieth — a refuge for all the rene- 
 gadoes and desperate spirits of Europe, an ob- 
 livion where men could drown despair in a life of 
 hardship and violence. Their captains were 
 Turks or apostate Christians, their fighting-men 
 mostly Moors, their rowers Christian slaves. 
 Their history is nothing but a monotonous series 
 of plundering raids. Without arts, except those 
 of seamanship and slaughter, destroyers of wealth 
 which others created, they contributed nothing 
 to the sum of things but a certain kind of brutal 
 romance. As their confidence grew with their 
 strength, they aimed at bigger prey than papal 
 galleys and Spanish treasure-ships. Their armies 
 sacked the cities of the Mediterranean shores. 
 The inhabitants of the Balearic Islands hved in 
 continual dread of their raids. PoUensa was at- 
 
 6i 
 
THE COAST 
 
 tacked in 1543, Valldemosa in 1552; Andraitx 
 was pillaged in the following year, and again in 
 1555. SoUer, next to the capital the wealthiest 
 town of Mallorca, inevitably excited their greed. 
 The raid upon SoUer is typical of the expeditions 
 which kept the Mallorquins in terror of these 
 nomads of the sea and drove them from the coast 
 of their island. 
 
 On the night of the 10th of May, 1561, SoUer 
 slept uneasily. There were rumours of a great 
 Corsair fleet which had anchored in the harbours 
 of Ibiza, and was said to be waiting for the full 
 moon before it bore down on the north coast of 
 Mallorca. In the evening of that day the miracle- 
 working crucifix had been carried through the 
 streets. Double guards were put in the fortress 
 at the port ; the cannon were ready loaded. 
 Many of the people had carried their valuables to 
 the church for safety. Orders were given for the 
 women and children to be ready to take the road 
 to the mountains at the first signal of danger. 
 
 It was the night of full moon. The shadow 
 of the church struck in sharp outline against 
 the gleaming gravel of the plaza. The heavily 
 scented air of the warm, spring night hung 
 like incense over the orange groves. In the 
 stillness the water rippled over the stones in the 
 bed of the torrent and made a music in the 
 market-place. From time to time the narrow 
 streets resounded with the clatter of a horse's 
 
 62 
 
THE TOREBNTE, SOLLEB 
 
THE ALARM 
 
 hoofs — ^the guard going round to see that the 
 sentries were at their posts. Within the tall, 
 quiet houses was distress of women and love made 
 keen by the dread of danger. 
 
 On the little breeze that rises just before the 
 dawn there came the long moan of a conch, blown 
 by one of the watchers at the port. The slave- 
 driven galleys of the Corsairs were seen creeping 
 into the harbour. There followed two sudden 
 roars from the cannon, and then the bells gave 
 tongue in all the steeples of the town. The town 
 awoke with a cry ; the people rushed into the 
 streets, half dazed with sleep and terror. The 
 priest was already at the altar of the parish 
 church saying Mass. The men ran to the plaza, 
 buckling on their swords. There the captain of 
 the SoUer militia, Juan Angelats, was busy mar- 
 shalling his forces. The men knelt down and 
 kissed their daggers where the guard of the hilt 
 made a cross with the blade, while Angelats in- 
 voked the protection of the Virgin. Then the 
 little army got to its feet and marched off down 
 the Calle Nueva in the direction of the port. The 
 women hastily made bundles of all that they 
 treasured ; those that had mules loaded the pan- 
 niers with precious things — caskets containing 
 the household jewels, rich embroideries, finely 
 worked brass lamps, rosaries, crosses, and bags 
 of ducats. The din of the tocsin drowned the 
 screaming of the children. The dazed old men 
 
 6,3 
 
THE COAST 
 
 gathered up useless trifles. The priests brought 
 the sacred Host out of the churches. At last, 
 after much precious time had been wasted, the 
 crowd of fugitives began to stream out of the 
 town towards the mountains. 
 
 When the cannons spoke at the port OchiaK 
 knew that the raid upon SoUer would not be 
 child's play. He withdrew from the harbour and 
 directed his ships to a place known as the Coll de 
 la Ilia, where he landed his men without resist- 
 ance. Then the Corsairs, seventeen hundred 
 strong, divided into two bands, one of which was 
 to march straight up the road leading from the 
 port to the town, the other to make a circuit by 
 Binibassi on the north-east and enter the town 
 by the Calle de la Luna. Swiftly and secretly 
 the second party, led by the famous Izuff, hur- 
 ried across the moonlit country, forded the river, 
 trampled through the dewy orchards, and sud- 
 denly burst upon the fugitives as they were pour- 
 ing out of the town. The flight had been delayed 
 too long, for some had wasted the precious mo- 
 ments in gathering together all the household 
 goods that they were loath to leave behind ; others 
 vainly believed that the Moors would never suc- 
 ceed in actually reaching the town. A cry of 
 terror went up from the women when they saw 
 the white turbans of the Moors among the 
 orange groves and their scimitars shining in the 
 moonlight. They threw down their treasvu-es, 
 
 64 
 
A NIGHT OF TERROR 
 
 snatched their children up into their arms, and 
 fled back to the town. The dark, sinewy figures 
 flew after them, caught them by the skirts and 
 by the hair, threw them down, and savagely 
 bound their wrists. A knife-thrust quickly ended 
 the feeble resistance of the old men. Then a rush 
 was made to the houses. The invaders went from 
 room to room, hurled everything of value into 
 the streets, and set fire to the rifled houses. The 
 doors of the church were battered down. The 
 two priests who threw themselves in front of the 
 tide were cut to pieces. Chalices, crosses, reli- 
 quaries, embroidered frontals, were snatched 
 from the altars. The Moslems hacked with knives 
 at the images of the saints, and mutilated that of 
 the Virgin with special fury. The carved furni- 
 ture was piled together in the nave and fired. 
 When they had spent their fury on the symbols 
 of the misbelievers' faith they returned to the 
 streets to collect their booty and their captives. 
 The white light of dawn showed the streets 
 strewn with the plunder of the houses and the 
 bleeding bodies of the old men. All the women 
 who were strong enough to work as slaves or 
 beautiful enough to grace the Moorish harems 
 were bound together in gangs. They were 
 dragged from their knees — a blow with the flat 
 of the sword accompanied the command to march 
 — the booty was shouldered, and captors and cap- 
 tives moved off towards the ships. 
 E 65 
 
THE COAST 
 
 But all this time the men of SoUer had not been 
 idle. At the bridge over the river outside the 
 town they had met the main army of the Cor- 
 sairs, just as the news reached them that the 
 other band had entered the town by the Calle de 
 la Luna, and was already plundering the houses 
 arid doing violence to the women. Their first im- 
 pulse was to return and defend their wives and 
 children, but the counsel of Angelats was that 
 they should await the attack of the oncoming 
 Moors. They fell upon the invaders with fury, 
 and after a savage fight drove them back to 
 the shore. Then they hurried back to the town, 
 reinforced by the bandits who in those days in- 
 fested the hills, with their lean, savage hunting- 
 dogs. As soon as the Corsairs saw their retreat 
 cut off, they turned on their captives and buried 
 their knives in the bodies of the women and girls. 
 Then, flinging down their treasure, they fled as 
 best they could to the ships, pursued by men and 
 dogs ; and the chronicler remarks that it was 
 noticed that never before had the dogs shown 
 such mad fury as when they tore down the flying 
 
 Moors. 
 
 The galleys were already being pushed off 
 from the shore. All through the night the Chris- 
 tian slaves, chained to their oars, had Ustened 
 feverishly to the distant shouting and firing in 
 the town, hoping .against hope that the defeat of 
 the Corsairs might give them back their liberty. 
 
 66 
 
''.". ^i 
 
 ffgm_^ 
 
 ^ '^■ 
 
 
 1^^^^..:-'^^ 
 
 . ,,^ ^^;j,^^^-^-.: 
 
 
 '..■-..■ -""^^SS 
 
 I^^Mii 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^BM 
 
 i 
 
 0P^ 
 
 
 <■ fl r " 
 
 '■■ '"^v^-- -,;.«, 
 
 
 SOLLEB AND PUIG MAYOR 
 
THE MORNING AFTER 
 
 Now the boatswains ran along the plank between 
 the banks of rowers and with frenzy plied the 
 lash on their naked backs. The fugitives dashed 
 through the water amidst a shower of stones from 
 the pursuers. The slaves bitterly bent over their 
 oars, and the long craft shot out into the sea. 
 
 The victors returned and began to set their 
 town in order. The dead were carried into the 
 houses. Messengers were dispatched to Palma to 
 fetch physicians and balms for the wounded. The 
 plunder, scattered all along the road to the port, 
 was gathered up and collected in the market- 
 place, where each man identified his own. The 
 morning wind blew away the smoke of the smoul- 
 dering houses. The May sun shone down into the 
 valley upon the gleaming town lying as peace- 
 fully among its orchards as on any other morning 
 of the year. But the memory of that wild night 
 has persisted through the centuries, and it will 
 never perish while the bells still ring on the 11th 
 of May and the mutilated Virgin is carried 
 through the streets from the Oratory of the Hos- 
 pital to revisit the scene of her desecration. 
 
 67 
 
Ill 
 
 THE MOUNTAINS 
 
 Mallorca is the only island of the Baleares 
 which has a true sierra. The whole extent of the 
 northern, or more accurately the north-western, 
 coast, from Andraitx at the west to the port of 
 PoUensa at the east, is buttressed by a chain of 
 mountains, Alpine in .character, opposing an 
 abrupt escarpment towards the distant coast of 
 Spain, and sloping in gentler gradations on the 
 side towards Africa. At two points the range is 
 broken by the pleasant valleys of SoUer and Vall- 
 demosa. SoUer lies almost at the foot of the 
 highest peak of the chain, Puig Mayor. 
 
 As the eagle flies — for I never saw a crow cross- 
 ing the Puig Mayor — it is not more than twenty- 
 four miles from SoUer to the port of Pollensa. 
 But in a district where the altitude varies from 
 sea-level to more than four thousand feet; and 
 the road from a macadamised carretera to a track 
 rather more rugged than the bed of a torrent, a 
 geographical mile is merely a convention of 
 
 68 
 
THE ELASTICITY OF MILES 
 
 speech. It is a relative, elastic, shifting entity, 
 as movable as the feasts of the Church. In the 
 morning, when you are walking with the Mediter- 
 ranean spread out at your feet like a map, it may 
 be only a matter of a few mouthfuls of intoxi- 
 cating air and the chorus of a song ; towards 
 noon it begins to swell out into its full comple- 
 ment of seventeen hundred and sixty yards ; and 
 between two and four, especially if you are 
 climbing up a stony mule-track that appears to 
 have been untouched since the Moors left it some 
 six or seven centuries ago, it utterly confutes the 
 calculations of the painstaking people who draw 
 up tables of measures for the arithmetic books 
 and demonstrates the lamentable and incurable 
 mendacity of statistics. And herein lies the wis- 
 dom of the Mallorquin — and for that matter of 
 the countryman all over Europe — in reckoning 
 distance not by miles or kilometres, but by hours. 
 He views the meddlesome activity of a paternal 
 government in pegging out the carretera into hun- 
 dreds of metres and thousands of metres with a 
 benevolent contempt. The Minister of Public 
 Instruction at Madrid may decree that it is forty 
 kilometres from SoUer to Puerta-PoUensa, but 
 he knows better, and calls it roundly ten hours. 
 Theriefore, if you are well advised, you will make 
 a two days' journey of it. Moreover, happily for 
 you, an inspired youth, in some year of the thir- 
 teenth century which I have forgotten, discovered 
 
 69 
 
THE MOUNTAINS 
 
 a miraculous image of the Virgin on the slope of 
 a hill almost precisely midway between SoUer and 
 PoUensa. The folk of the time very properly 
 built a shrine about it and instituted pilgrim- 
 ages ; so that even if you yourself are not travel- 
 ling on the pious business of a pilgrimage, you 
 may spend a night in the hospederia at Lluch and 
 sleep gratuitously in the damp sheets which the 
 monks provide for you. 
 
 There are two ways of walking or riding from 
 Soller to Lluch — for driving is out of the question. 
 From Biniaraix, a village about two miles north- 
 east of Soller, you can take the mule-track which 
 climbs like a staircase up the steep ravine known 
 as the Barranco, and then, at the summit, leaving 
 the sugar-loaf Puig de Olofra on your right, pass 
 through a long, stony, high-lying valley until you 
 come to the cascades and the clear blue-green 
 pools of Gorch Blau. Or you can follow a path 
 which takes the seaward side of Puig Mayor and 
 brings you down into the valley again about ten 
 minutes beyond the gorge. Here the two routes 
 converge, and here you find yourself in the very 
 heart of the mountain rampart which runs along 
 the whole of the northern coast. It is the point of 
 intersection of three valleys. Behind lies the Pla 
 de Cuba, along which you have come from Biniar- 
 aix ; in front, a narrow ravine through which the 
 Torrente de Pareys thunders to the sea; and a 
 third valley swings round to the right, breaking a 
 
 70 
 
CONCHITA 
 
 way through the hills down into the southern 
 plain. Taking the cart road which runs along a 
 ledge of this third valley, and then leaving it to 
 plunge down through a wood, after two hours' 
 walking you come suddenly upon Lluch, snugly 
 hidden in a bend of the valley. 
 
 There is no cordial against fatigue like a sight 
 of the sea, and so I chose the seaward route from 
 SoUer to Gorch Blau. But no sooner had I scaled 
 the left shoulder of Puig Mayor than I was 
 wrapped in a cloak of mist, and from thence to 
 Calsreys, where the road begins to dip into the 
 valley again, I saw nothing but Conchita looming 
 immense in the mist a few paces ahead with her 
 panniers protruding like kettle-drums on either 
 side of her, and Pepe perched sparrow-like aloft. 
 Conchita, I should have said, was the mule, and 
 Pepe the muleteer. Like Agag, Conchita walked 
 delicately, but with a better reason ; for besides 
 Pepe and my valise, not to mention a potato 
 omelette and a bottle of wine, she was carrying 
 a matter of fifty or sixty pounds avoirdupois of 
 as solid red sandstone as ever went to the build- 
 ing of Don Jaime's cathedral at Palma. I had 
 already formed an unfavourable view of her cha- 
 racter. Her fastidiousness in picking her way 
 among the boulders convinced me that she was 
 taking an exaggerated and feminine view of the 
 difficulties of the route ; it seemed, moreover, to 
 convey a reproach that I should have exposed 
 
 .71 
 
THE MOUNTAINS 
 
 her to the hardships of this unnecessary journey. 
 It was not until we arrived at Lluch that I 
 learned the whole truth and regretted the un- 
 charitableness of my judgment. Now, her em- 
 barrassment came about in this way. 
 
 I never travel quite at ease unless I have with 
 
 me half a pound of China tea and a volume of 
 
 English prose. I scarcely know which indulgence 
 
 is the more vicious ; for it is obvious that the art 
 
 of travel consists much less in changing one's 
 
 customary degrees of latitude and longitude than 
 
 in changing one's inveterate habits of mind and 
 
 body. The choice of a book, when it is to be the 
 
 companion of one's solitude for many weeks, is 
 
 not a matter to be left to the hazard of the 
 
 moment. While I was hesitating in the election, 
 
 among many alternatives I remembered that a 
 
 certain professor had once told me that a man 
 
 who had not read Gibbon's Decline and Fall was 
 
 still fundamentally uneducated. At the time I 
 
 thought the discrimination arbitrary, as it left 
 
 me outside the pale ; and yet, although I took 
 
 no steps to place myself within the ranks of the 
 
 cultured, the remark never ceased to rankle. 
 
 It occurred to me that now at last, was an 
 
 opportunity for removing the stigma, and so, 
 
 having had the seven volumes sent out from 
 
 London, I threw the first of them into the valise. 
 
 I noticed, however, that the famous fifteenth 
 
 chapter formed the first of the second volume, 
 
 72 
 
MR. GIBBON'S SCRIBBLE 
 
 and therefore it was necessary to pack in Vol. II 
 together with Vol. I. Just then there came into 
 my head that remark of the Duke of Cumber- 
 land, who, when Gibbon came to present him 
 with the third volume, which was dedicated to 
 His Royal Highness, exclaimed, " What 1 what ! 
 another damned thick square book ! Always 
 scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon ! " 
 A curiosity to know what immortal scribble was 
 contained in this third volume compelled me to 
 put it in along with the other two. Now, it is a 
 fact that a man seldom stops half-way when once 
 he has begun upon an action that he is half 
 ashamed of, and so, well aware that this was a 
 ridiculous provision for a journey that offers so 
 much entertainment in the matter of natural 
 scenery, I hastily bundled the four remaining 
 volumes into the valise. 
 
 " Mules have this advantage over railways," I 
 said, " that they make no charge for excess 
 luggage." 
 
 The advantage was mine, but the disadvantage 
 was Conchita's. It was clear even to Pepe's in- 
 telligence that in weight and substance a potato 
 omelette and a bottle of wine were no match for 
 the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Ac- 
 cordingly, he effected an equipoise by filling the 
 other pannier with the three rocks of red sand- 
 stone, which caused Conchita to walk with such 
 lack of ease. 
 
 73 
 
THE MOUNTAINS 
 
 As I had paid eighteen pesetas for the convey- 
 ance from SoUer to PoUensa of myself, my vaUse, 
 and also of the sandstone rocks, although not 
 actually stipulating for the latter, Pepe naturally 
 inquired, as soon as we were entered into the 
 cloud at the summit of the shoulder of the Puig, 
 whether I did not intend to mount. I declined, 
 as I had not the heart to add to Conchita's em- 
 barrassments, whereupon Pepe, being untroubled 
 by similar scruples, promptly scrambled up on 
 to the vacant seat. The sight of Pepe enthroned 
 upon the sheepskin caused me some unreasonable 
 annoyance. The arrangement, I reflected, was 
 undoubtedly the one that gave the greatest hap- 
 piness to the greatest number, since it was certain 
 that I preferred to walk, that Pepe preferred to 
 ride, and that of two evils Conchita preferred 
 that Pepe should ride rather than I. But it was 
 also an arrangement that involved a nicety in the 
 matter of etiquette. As the flocks of various 
 owners are pastured on the slopes of the Puig, 
 the path to Lluch is intersected by many gates. 
 Now, to stand haughtily on one side while Pepe 
 w^s compelled to descend from his perch in the 
 cloud to open them, seemed an excessive waiting 
 upon dignity, an illiberal exaction of the value of 
 the eighteen pesetas to the uttermost centimo. 
 On the other hand, to open them myself and wait 
 deferentially until Conchita's stern was well clear 
 6i the radius of the closing gate seemed to verge 
 
 74 
 
ARAB MELODIES 
 
 upon the other extreme of obsequiousness. A 
 possible solution of the difficulty might have been 
 to have walked a considerable distance ahead and 
 so to have allowed the intervening mist to screen 
 the discourtesy of shutting the gate upon the 
 advancing Pepe. But the mist was so thick and 
 the track so ill-defined that in this way we might 
 have parted company altogether. The journey 
 resolved itself, therefore, into a prolonged trium- 
 phal progress for Pepe. At intervals of a few 
 hundred yards I waited for him like a flunkey at 
 his lord's park gates, while he received the 
 homage with undisguised and impish glee. 
 
 " The advantage of railways over mules," I re- 
 flected, " is that they do not raise the problem of 
 the social order in so acute a form." 
 
 Pepe, but for his eyes, which were beautiful as 
 a toad's, would have been an ugly imp ; but, 
 like most ugly children, he had a divine voice. 
 Or rather, he had two voices, one of which corre- 
 sponded to the imp in his nature, and the other 
 to the divinity. As we groped our way through 
 the mist he crooned to Conchita plaintive melo- 
 dies that had all Arabia in them — ^the very same, 
 no doubt, that the turbaned Moors had chanted 
 as they passed along this same track in the dis- 
 tant centuries before Pepe's forefathers had dis- 
 possessed them of their isla dorada. It was a 
 tender, languorous voice, and as he sang I saw 
 the glittering courts of the Alhambra, full of the 
 
 75 
 
THE MOUNTAINS 
 
 heat and peace of the long, sleepy afternoon, and 
 the dusky, sloe-eyed daughters of Granada steep- 
 ing their jewelled wrists in the cool depths of the 
 
 fountains and 
 
 " ArrS ! Arr6 ! " came the rasping voice which 
 the vocation of donkey driving seems inevitably 
 to produce all the world over, and we were back 
 in the comfortless mist again, and the three rocks 
 of sandstone and the seven thick, square volumes 
 were drumming most damnably against Con- 
 chita's ribs. 
 
 It was dusk when we entered the sandy plaza, 
 set with its regular alleys of plane trees, in front of 
 the collegiate church of Nuestra Senora de Lluch. 
 This holy spot, according to the chronicler Da- 
 meto, is the Loretto, the Montserrat or Pilar of 
 the island kingdom ; but it wears the aspect 
 neither of age nor of sanctity. Rather it gives an 
 impression of prosperity and solidity, and con- 
 veys the indefinable suggestion of a substantial 
 banking account somewhere in the background. 
 It is a caravansary of spacious, unsightly build- 
 ings erected to house the pilgrims who come to 
 pay their devotions to the Black Virgin, whom 
 you may see for ten centimos in the chapel. The 
 place seemed already sufficiently vast, but the 
 masons were at work upon it when we arrived, 
 raising another of those forbidding structures 
 
 76 
 

 M 
 o 
 
 o 
 o 
 
 o 
 
NUESTRA SENORA DE LLUCH 
 
 which appear to be designed to combine the maxi- 
 mum of solidity with the minimum of comfort. 
 A hearty lay brother clapped me on the back by 
 way of greeting, and led me to my bedroom 
 through resounding corridors, whose damp plas- 
 ter walls retain even in March the icy chill of 
 December. There in the deepening twilight I con- 
 sumed the remnant of the potato omelette and 
 the bottle of wine. The rules of the convent do 
 not actually prescribe dining in one's bedroom. 
 In the plaza is a wine-shop where, besides wine, 
 you can buy bread, cheese, and ensaimadas (a 
 kind of sugared bun — it should be eaten warm 
 from the oven, but they make it perfectly no- 
 where outside Palma) ; and attached to the 
 monastery is a kitchen where a good woman 
 provides many of the things necessary for 
 human existence, exclusive of butter, milk, and 
 meat. 
 
 In the evening, wandering among the dismal 
 labyrinth of corridors, I heard the murmur of a 
 chant. I followed in the direction of the sound, 
 and opening a door I felt a sensation of space 
 about me, and discovered that I was in the 
 western gallery of the church. Below me, the 
 dark nave gaped like the mouth of a pit. Pre- 
 sently I discerned a crowd of figures seated on 
 benches which ran parallel with the length of the 
 nave, facing a chapel on the south side of the 
 church. A faint light came from the altar of the 
 
 77 
 
THE MOUNTAINS 
 
 chapel. Just at the foot of the steps separating 
 the chapel from the nave was a choir of boys, 
 sitting on stools ranged in a semicircle. As I 
 watched, an aged priest took a key, to which a 
 long white ribbon was attached, and imlocked 
 the door of the tabernacle. Men and boys fell on 
 their knees before the monstrance which con- 
 tained the Blessed Sacrament. 
 
 In shrill, nasal voices the boys began to sing 
 the Xitany of the Saints. The harsh invocations, 
 alternating with the sullen murmur of the re- 
 sponse, produced a sense of tedium, which the 
 changelessness of the repetitions carried to the 
 very verge of pain. Very soon I grew weary of 
 the chant and wished for the end, for I was still 
 tired after the walk over the mountain. I mar- 
 velled how the men in the nave below, who had 
 been labouring since the early morning, could 
 bear to kneel rigidly there on the bitter, hard 
 stones, listening to this endless refrain, when the 
 burdensome day was so long and the precious 
 night so short. I was astonished at the harshness 
 of the Church in imposing this mechanical exer- 
 cise upon her children at the close of day, and I 
 wondered whether her unfailing mundane wisdom 
 had not for once deserted her. 
 
 " If she would retain her children," I said, " she 
 must show herself more kindly and intelligent. 
 She must look to the heretics, and make her wor- 
 ship, like theirs, pleasant and full of ease. She 
 
 78 
 
THE LITANY 
 
 must provide comfort for the body, and entertain 
 the mind with bright and ingenious novelties. 
 She must abandon her vain repetitions. She must 
 march with the times, accommodate herself to 
 modern improvements. This torture of the limbs, 
 this dark vault of a church, this interminable 
 index of forgotten names — this will never do. She 
 must abandon it all, or her children will abandon 
 her ! " 
 
 Sancte Michd-el, Sancte Gabri-el, Sande Rapha- 
 el — chanted the boys, but no musical notation 
 could ever express the violence of the stress with 
 which they clung to the long, penultimate sylla- 
 bles. Slowly I began to realise that the Church's 
 wisdom had not failed her, after all. At the close 
 of a day of manual toil the mind is no less spent 
 than the body. Behind its dull material rampart 
 it is drowsy and hard to reach. Its channels of 
 communication are obstructed ; the aching senses 
 fail to bring any messages from the outer reason- 
 able world. A flood of eloquence would spend it- 
 self ineffectually against those hardened, fleshly 
 walls; epigram could not penetrate them, or 
 logic overleap them. But the inflexible rhythm 
 of the Litany, ceaselessly beating upon the ear, 
 first conquers the outworks of the body, and at 
 last possesses the inner citadel of the mind. This 
 reiteration at first is almost physically painful ; 
 one resists, and then one surrenders to it. An 
 intoxication, like the intoxication of wine, creeps 
 . 79 
 
THE MOUNTAINS 
 
 through the Hmbs, and finally reaches and in- 
 flames the spirit. Sancte Micha-el, Sancte Gabri-el, 
 Sancte Rapha-el, the great procession of the hea- 
 venly hierarchies began to unroll itself before the 
 interior vision. Sancte Grego-ri, Sancte Augusti- 
 ne, Sancte Hieron-yme, the endless defile of doc- 
 tors and saints went by ; . the strife of distant 
 centuries was re-enacted ; ancient controversies 
 and the defeat of fatal heresies were recollected. 
 Sancte Stepha-ne, Sancte Lauren-ti, Sancte Vincen- 
 ti — ^tragic figvires of the martyrs, recalling for- 
 gotten savageries and an age when faith was no 
 less fierce than lust. Sancte Bernar-de, Sancte 
 Domin-ico, Sancte Francis-co — names which 
 spread out Europe like a map and showed it gar- 
 risoned with fortresses of prayer. All Angels and 
 Archangels, all Orders of Blessed Spirits, all Patri- 
 archs and Prophets, all Holy Innocents — in the 
 pomp of the reverberating chant the pageant 
 stretched out to the crack of doom. Then I saw 
 how the life of this handful of simple men had its 
 roots in the remotest past and was fed from the 
 very sources of our civilisation. What vague con- 
 ception they had of the mystical essences they 
 had been invoking is neither here nor there. 
 Likely enough their minds were as empty of 
 thought as the bare flags they knelt on ; or if at 
 all any conscious thought was stirring within 
 them, it was of the wine-shop in the plaza and 
 heartening red wine and the comfortable heat of 
 
 80 
 
THE CITY MIND 
 
 the brasero. But their being was held in the vice- 
 Uke grip of roUing sound, dazed with this parade 
 of power, sensible of forces outside time, more 
 real and substantial than the masses of tangible 
 stone that had strained and tired their muscles 
 throughout the labouring day. 
 
 In a book about Spain by a South American 
 critic the writer commiserated with the people of 
 the country places on the lack of distraction 
 in their life. Their existence appeared to him 
 as sterile and vacant as that of cattle. They had 
 no enlightenment, no evening press, no cinemato- 
 graph, no cheap reprints of Spencer and Tolstoi, 
 no debating societies. He expressed their fate in 
 a phrase : " They die before they have lived." 
 " At this hour in the great cities," I reflected, 
 " they will be reading the latest editions of the 
 evening papers. They will know how many men 
 have killed themselves this day and how many 
 men have killed other men. They will have in- 
 formed themselves of further details in the inti- 
 mate life of royal persons and of the latest 
 ' breeze ' among the politicians in Parliament, and 
 of the fraction of a length by which the favourite 
 was beaten. Africa and India will have contributed 
 their tale of calamities, and the cables will have 
 faithfully reported the scandals of the Antipodes. 
 We, in this fold of the hills, know nothing of 
 all these things ; but we have seen the centuries 
 pass before us and had a glimpse of the pageant 
 
 F 8i 
 
THE MOUNTAINS 
 
 of immortal things." Then I knew that the critic 
 was wrong, and that perhaps it was the others 
 who would die before they had lived. 
 
 Then came the Litany of the Blessed Virgin, 
 with those jewelled apostrophes that transcend 
 poetry — Rosa Mystica, Turris ehurnea, Stella ma- 
 tutina — ^then the Elevation and the Benediction. 
 The priest and the acolytes and the choir-boys 
 went away down the nave with the lights. The 
 men got up off their knees and walked stiffly out 
 of the church. As they stumbled across the plaza 
 in the darkness to the wine-shop they laughed 
 deep-chested laughter and swore mouth-filling 
 oaths, and above their heads burned the fiery 
 swords of Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. 
 
 Men who rest their limbs at the close of a day's 
 march know that there are two kinds of repose — 
 the repose of an enchanted comfort and the re- 
 pose that is merely a prolongation of fatigue. I 
 have noticed a similar quality in the repose of 
 ancient towns. In Italy you will find towns that 
 are only old because they were founded two thou- 
 sand years ago ; age has not worn out their 
 spirit ; they seem to rest from sheer love of ease, 
 not from paralysis. The repose of Spanish towns 
 is different. They, too, are resting after centuries 
 of furious life, but they are still oppressed with a 
 
 82 
 
DEAD TOWNS 
 
 painful fatigue. Their spirit is burnt up. They 
 are asleep, but they do not dream ; they are 
 heavy with peace, but they are not serene ; they 
 have not even the decent composure of death ; 
 they are merely extinct. They have little of the 
 romance of age. If abandoned palaces still stand 
 in their streets, their splendour is buried beneath 
 a coat of whitewash. For these towns seem to 
 have forgotten their glorious past. Not only do 
 they know no gaiety or mirth, but also they are 
 dead even to the emotion of despair. They have 
 become commonplace ; they have grown modern 
 without growing young. Such towns you will find 
 all over the Peninsula, but seldom in Mallorca, 
 for Mallorca has the most ancient sea to keep it 
 young and fresh. But such a town you encounter 
 in PoUensa. 
 
 You feel it even in the approach. As soon as 
 you have climbed out of the valley of Lluch and 
 descended through the wood that covers the steep 
 slope of the ridge uppn the other side, you enter 
 upon a dusty stretch of carretera that lies in the 
 trough of a long, hot valley. The town of Pol- 
 lensa is hidden from sight behind a knoll in the 
 valley, so that at once you pass from the silence 
 of the fields to the silence of the streets. It ap- 
 pears at first to be silence, but it is that silence 
 which is composed of minute and monotonous 
 noises — the whirr of the spinning-wheel, the 
 click-clack of the hand-loom, and the never- 
 
 83 
 
THE MOUNTAINS 
 
 ending plaintive song. In the plaza ancient men 
 follow the sun in its daily revolution round the 
 square, warming their bones against the sun- 
 baked walls of Santa Maria de los Angeles, dazed 
 and torpid, like flies at the end of autumn. They 
 still wear the balloon-like Moorish breeches, and 
 themselves seem to remember an age before the 
 Revolution gave their children liberty, equality, 
 fraternity, and trousers. , Ancient women — and 
 all the women who have ceased to be children are 
 ancient here — sit in the shadow of their patios, 
 while life slips through their fingers as evenly and 
 swiftly as the thread which they twine from the 
 distaff. 
 
 Juan, the waiter at the fonda, may be ancient 
 or he may be youthful, for here youth itself seems 
 to suffer the general infection of age. It is only 
 in a special sense that he may said to be the 
 waiter, for he waits less upon the infrequent guest 
 than upon death and eternity. He waits with his 
 head buried in his hands and his hands spread 
 out upon a little marble-topped table near the 
 window, in the sun. At his side lies a stale news- 
 sheet, not unfittingly styled La Ultima Hora — 
 life, indeed, appears here to have reached its ulti- 
 mate term, and PoUensa waits impassively for 
 the strike of the hour. He has painfully spelt out 
 the results of last month's National Lottery ; the 
 fact that the tickets with the winning numbers 
 are invariably dispatched to towns where there 
 
 84 
 
JUAN 
 
 are already pesetas in plenty — ^Bilbao and Valen- 
 cia and Barcelona — does not inspire him with any 
 sense of mismanagement in human affairs ; it is 
 some four or five centuries now that PoUensa has 
 seen the prizes of life pass by it, 
 
 When I gave him twenty-five centimos, which 
 make one real, it could scarcely be said that he 
 awoke to life, but his apathy relaxed somewhat. 
 Whether he had an illusion of at last having ren- 
 dered a service, or whether some spring of grati- 
 tude in him was touched by the gratuitous reward 
 for having rendered none, I cannot tell, but he in- 
 'sisted on accompanying me to the port. Not that 
 he contemplated walking there, for had he not 
 seen Conchita disemburdened of my valise and the 
 carreton, in which he proposed to accompany me, 
 waiting at the door ? With an approving eye he 
 watched me lift my luggage into the cart, and 
 then took his seat beside me. At the first venta 
 that we came to he had the vehicle stopped, and 
 got out to buy cigars at five centimos apiece for 
 himself, the driver, and me. At the next we 
 stopped again, and this time it was to offer me 
 anisado dulce. I seemed already to have received 
 back my modest regalito with interest ; but on 
 our arrival at the port, having again superin- 
 tended me as I disposed of the valise, he could 
 not part without a farewell health in aniseed 
 brandy — which this time we drank seco. In Spain 
 there is a democracy older and more humane 
 
 85 
 
THE MOUNTAINS 
 
 than that of the radical news-sheets. And so - he 
 returned to PoUensa, to fold his hands upon the 
 table in the window and continue his long wait- 
 ing upon death. 
 
IV 
 
 THE PORT 
 
 PuERTO-PoLLENSA is nothing more than a string 
 of fishermen's cottages standing at the water's 
 edge. But it is a place where content shps into 
 the soul as easily as sleep into a child's body. 
 
 On this north-eastern side of the island the 
 coast-line sweeps round in a deep, broad inden- 
 ture, into which the land thrusts out a long, 
 narrow arm, dividing it into two bays of unequal 
 size. The larger bay is that of Alcudia, the 
 smaller that of PoUensa. The port of PoUensa, 
 however, is a port only in name. That of Alcudia 
 has a certain importance ; it is, in fact, visited by 
 a steamer which runs twice weekly to Menorca, 
 some forty miles away. But if Puerto-Alcudia 
 has the commerce, Puerto-PoUensa has the 
 beauty. The bay of Alcudia is void and form- 
 less ; that of PoUensa admits just enough of the 
 sea and no more. The sea creeps in as though 
 enticed towards the shore, and then is folded 
 within two embracing arms, captured, tamed, 
 smoothed, robbed of its inhuman quality, so that 
 if you were to paint a picture from the port, look- 
 
 87 
 
THE PORT 
 
 ing out over the bay, you would inevitably paint 
 not a seascape, but a landscape. Instead of look- 
 ing out upon a wide Sahara of sea, which brings 
 weariness of spirit to all but those who have been 
 bred upon the coast, you are confronted by an 
 opposing shore, with a gentle contour of hills, and 
 in a level hollow between them the old walled 
 town of Alcudia, brooding on the water's edge. 
 As you stand upon the quay, the entrance to the 
 bay is hidden behind one of the promontories ; 
 but the bay has this advantage over -the Italian 
 lakes, which it so much resembles, that the sailing 
 ships which steal into it under a crowd of white 
 canvas communicate a sense of freedom and 
 escape, and bring tidings of storms and echoes of 
 the talk of men in distant lands, and messages of 
 strange happenings in the far-off world. 
 
 Almost at the southern extremity of the cres- 
 cent of cottages which form the port stands one 
 which is exalted above the others by the dignity 
 of a whitewashed fagade, with four rough-hewn 
 columns and a second story. In front of it is a 
 kind of terrace, raised a step or two above the 
 beach, bounded by a low wall and roofed with a 
 parral, over which an awning can be thrown when 
 the sun becomes too fierce. You might pass this 
 cottage a hundred times without knowing it to 
 be an inn. It is too humble to possess a sign — 
 indeed, how should it, since it does not even 
 possess a name ? It is simply the /onda of Don 
 
 88 
 
A PROFILIC FIRE 
 
 Antonio. You enter it and find yourself in a kind 
 of wine-shop, paved with small pebbly stones, 
 furnished with a few tables and chairs, a couple 
 of barrels of wine, a counter, and a shelf contain- 
 ing numberless varieties of anisado, brandy, and 
 rum. The kitchen opens out on the right and the 
 stable on the left. By an arrangement seemingly 
 irrational, but certainly immemorial, the fire is 
 kept, not as you might suppose in the kitchen, 
 but in the stable. Perhaps I should have said 
 the parent fire, for it does not itself do the 
 menial work of the establishment, as a normal 
 British fire would do ; its function is merely to 
 produce offspring — infant fires which are carried 
 away to perform their various household duties. 
 Thus, if you want your toes warmed, the ma- 
 donna goes into the stable and the grey mare 
 stands aside while she detaches a living fragment 
 and puts it into a brasero or circular brass dish 
 which stands upon a little wooden platform in 
 the wine-shop ; another fragment is caught and 
 put into a pan to warm your bed ; a third is 
 brought into the kitchen to boil your lobster, and 
 still another to light your cigar. 
 
 But the especial glory of Don Antonio's fonda 
 is upstairs. At the stairhead is a kind of landing 
 or patio, with bare stone floor and bare white 
 walls, full of that extreme peace and coolness and 
 space which are found, I think, in no houses in 
 the world but those which have not forgotten the 
 
 89 
 
THE PORT 
 
 tradition of the Moors. It has one small window, 
 unobstructed by glass, closed by two wooden 
 doors, massive and panelled hke the doors of a 
 dwarf cathedral, so that if you shut out the air 
 you shut out the light also. 
 
 Now, I am disposed to believe that, together 
 with the discovery of printed books, of cinemato- 
 graphs, of America, and other calamities of a 
 like universal character, must be included the in- 
 vention of plate-glass ; for it has destroyed the 
 essential quality of windows, which is not so 
 much to admit light as to make pictures. The 
 window of a modern house is seldom a real win- 
 dow, but merely a transparent piece of wall ; it 
 is too large ; it has no proportions ; it has no 
 judgment ; it does not select, but admits all 
 things indiscriminately. It does not leave in the 
 mind that memory of a deliberately composed 
 view, as a perfect window should. For the mem- 
 ory of views seen through windows is almost as 
 tenacious as the memory of scents, and it is one 
 of the things that keep the mind sweet for those 
 who live in the viewless cities. Unlike the pro- 
 portions of the perfect human body, the propor- 
 tions of the perfect window are reducible to a 
 certain canon, and I can affirm that these pro- 
 portions are twenty-four inches by thirty-five — 
 I speak of a climate where the sun is no niggard — 
 for such was the size of the window in Don 
 Antonio's patio. It formed in itself a whole gal- 
 
 90 
 
THE PICTURE GALLERY 
 
 lery of pictures, and by the finest masters. Thus 
 in the early morning you had a Turner, an apoca- 
 lyptic vision of flaming sky, mountains veiled in 
 purple mist, and a stretch of bloodstained water ; 
 towards noon you had a Corot — his early period, 
 when he painted brown-walled towns like Aleu- 
 dia and the gentle slopes of tawny hills ; in the 
 afternoon, when the outlines were expunged in 
 the quivering, heated air and the eye was stung 
 by sparks of light refracted from the facets of a 
 thousand lapping waves, you had a series of im- 
 pressions by Monet ; in the evening the lines re- 
 sumed their precise definition, and the view as- 
 sumed the severity and repose of the Italian 
 primitives ; and your last picture before you 
 closed the wooden doors of your gallery at night 
 was a nocturne by Whistler — a deep purple sea 
 barred by the black mass of the jetty, one dis- 
 tant light and a violet, star-sown sky. 
 
 Now, if Don Antonio's window had been built 
 in the plate-glass era you would not have had 
 these easel pictures, but merely a panorama. . . . 
 
 Of food at Don Antonio's fonda there is God's 
 plenty, but it is somewhat sharply restricted in 
 respect of variety. As a matter of fact, there are 
 but four dishes. First, sopa, which you may con- 
 sider indifferently as bread damped with a thin 
 soup, or a thin soup overlaid with damp bread. 
 Then tortilla, or omelette, and a Mallorquin 
 omelette is capable of an almost infinite number 
 
 91 
 
THE PORT 
 
 of disguises. Thus you can have tortilla with 
 potatoes, with tomatoes, with peas, with gariic, 
 with onion, and it is difficult to decide which is 
 the best. Next, pescado frito — ^the menu does not 
 differentiate between the various species of fish, 
 but the range extends from the octopus-like 
 cuttle-fish, which has been speared with a trident 
 by torchlight during the night, to the shark-like 
 tunny, of which there is usually one hanging up 
 in the stable. Finally, puchero, a miscellaneous, 
 collective dish, which may be regarded as an 
 amalgamation of the three foregoing, together 
 with anything else that is within reach at the 
 time of cooking, the whole qualified with garUc. 
 The dietetic regimen is invariable, but the ma- 
 donna is too nice in her civility to serve up a 
 meal without first consulting your wishes. Of 
 course, it is understood tacitly on both sides that 
 the capacity of the larder will not stretch beyond 
 the four above-mentioned dishes, and as likely 
 as not the sopa is already on the boil. But this 
 does not prevent the conduct of a ceremonious 
 form of deliberation and selection, which stimu- 
 lates if it does not satisfy the palate. We touch 
 lightly upon a variety of elegant dishes, as though 
 we had all the resources of Elagabolus to draw 
 upon. No delicacy is too remote or extravagant 
 to be brought within our purview. This, how- 
 ever, is rejected as unseasonable, that as innutri- 
 tions, and the other as possibly injurious to the 
 
 92 
 
A VARIABLE MENU 
 
 liver, so that by a happy chance we find that our 
 final choice has fallen upon soya, tortilla, pescado 
 frito, and puchero. Occasionally, for variety's 
 sake, we may arrange the order thus : (1) tortilla,, 
 (2) sopa, (3) puchero, (4) pescado frito ; or, again, 
 (1) pescado frito, (2) puchero, (3) tortilla, and (4) 
 sopa. Indeed, I worked it out with paper and 
 pencil one evening between the courses, and I 
 arrived at the conclusion that there were no less 
 than twenty-four possible permutations, but as I 
 left before the twenty-fifth day I was unable to 
 verify my calculations. 
 
 Now, all this, together with the patio upstairs 
 and as much wine of a mild, sherry-like character 
 as would keep a man all day on better terms with 
 existence than he has any right to be, and as 
 little water as would keep him only on somewhat 
 distant terms with cleanliness, you may have for 
 three pesetas a day — call it two and threepence. 
 Of course, if you are such an one as cannot be 
 easy without luxuries, you must pay for them. 
 Thus, every night I took with my coffee two 
 cigars and an anisado seco, for which I had to pay 
 ten centimes extra. But this, of course, is op- 
 tional. 
 
 Nothing happens at the port except the act of 
 living, which is also the greatest and most diffi- 
 cult of the arts. But as the individualism which 
 
 93 
 
THE PORT 
 
 has involved and perplexed the other arts has 
 not yet arrived at the port, it is an act which is 
 performed traditionally — that is to say, with ease 
 and serenity, with a little cruelty, and with a 
 certain primitive grace. There are no irksome 
 utilitarian preoccupations, for the port has not 
 invented that infinity of wants which complicates 
 life in great cities ; the only absolute necessities 
 are food, sun, and a little anisado, which are sup- 
 plied without stint by the bounty of the sea, the 
 heavens, and Don Antonio. But the lapse of time 
 is agreeably diversified by a number of minor 
 activities, as little burdensome and almost as un- 
 conscious as the act of breathing. 
 
 A little before six o'clock Don Antonio de- 
 scends the stone staircase, opens his front door, 
 takes a deep chestful of cool, sea-scented air — 
 Don Antonio's chest is built upon the large, 
 heavy, Roman model — and having surveyed the 
 pomp in the eastern sky, expectorates towards it 
 twice or thrice, which is a manner of salutation 
 and approbation of the opening day. There is a 
 certain ring of finality in the act ; it dispels inde- 
 cision ; it expresses the gusto with which a man 
 sound of wind and limb and conscience welcomes 
 existence; it indicates that all is well with Don 
 Antonio's world ; it is the hearty amen of his 
 morning orisons. As he goes off to rouse up the 
 grey mare who has been basking all night in front 
 of the glowing embers, a brisk jingling of little 
 
 94 
 
THE CAPITAN 
 
 bells salutes the ear, and a herd of goats is driven 
 round the corner. Catalina, with her shining 
 morning face, comes out of the fonda and pro- 
 ceeds to draw from their generous udders the 
 milk for your morning coffee. 
 
 Half an hour later a gaunt figure in a dilapi- 
 dated uniform emerges from a neighbouring cot- 
 tage and slouches towards the inn to see if any 
 of the little fragments of fire have by chance 
 kept awake all night, for in the middle of March 
 there is still a sting in the early morning air. 
 After Don Antonio, he is the most important per- 
 sonage of the port. His face wears an expression 
 of mild disgust, ennui, and fatigue, as of a man 
 who would be administering the affairs of an em- 
 pire if the effort were less exhausting, but con- 
 descends instead to regulate the customs of a 
 petty port. The port is too insignificant for him. 
 He is a man of wide travel and many accom- 
 plishments, for he has visited not only the neigh- 
 bouring peninsula, but also the Americas and 
 Liverpool and Cardiff, and can express himself 
 in English with emphasis, if not with subtlety, 
 upon the quality of intoxicating drinks, as " good 
 rum," " bad rum," " dam bad rum." When first 
 I saw him in the tatters of what in the ' early 
 eighties must have been a captivating uniform, 
 I was willing to believe him to be an exiled 
 general whose ambitions had perhaps once em- 
 broiled in bloodshed some obscure, equatorial re- 
 
 95 
 
THE PORT 
 
 public, or a soldier of fortune broken in the 
 Carlist wars, or some other like heroic soul whom 
 fate had marked out for disaster and defeat. Per- 
 ceiving me to be a foreigner and a solitary, he 
 introduced himself to me, and said, with a trace 
 of something authoritative in his manner : 
 
 " Caballero, I am the Capitan of the carabine- 
 ros. My command extends from the hut you can 
 just see upon the beach to the lighthouse at the 
 point," and he indicated his territory with the 
 deprecatory gesture of a decayed nobleman dis- 
 playing the remnant of his ancestral demesne. 
 "If at any point between these extremities the 
 caballero finds himself in danger, let him call for 
 me, and I and my force will come to his assist- 
 ance." The force consisted of another veteran yet 
 more dilapidated than himself, but I thanked 
 him, assured him that I was happy to put my- 
 self under his protection, that I was satisfied that 
 the force would be adequate for every emergency, 
 and so left him, wondering what unknown perils 
 might lurk beneath the beguiUng aspect of the 
 sleepy port. 
 
 About seven o'clock the fishing-boats arrive, 
 and the Capitan slouches to the end of the jetty 
 to watch the disembarkation of the tunny fish. 
 He regards them with a doubtful and suspicious 
 eye, as though perhaps they might not be inno- 
 cent tunny fish after all, for his profession has 
 taught him that things are not always what they 
 
 96 
 
GULL-FIGHTING 
 
 seem. Having satisfied himself, however, that 
 neither British tobacco, nor French hnen, nor 
 German hardware are secreted in their capacious 
 insides, he strolls back to the terrace in front of 
 the fonda to smoke a cigar and enjoy the growing 
 warmth of the sun, with the just satisfaction of a 
 man who has done his duty by his king and 
 country. 
 
 The chief diversion of the day consists in a 
 kind of cock-fighting with seagulls. 'Whenever 
 one of the two sailing ships which constitute the 
 sole shipping of the port arrives from Cette or 
 Marseilles or Genoa, its miscellaneous cargo is 
 sure to include a number of these luckless birds, 
 known in Mallorquin as virats. Apparently they 
 are witless creatures that have ventured upon a 
 voyage too great for their strength, and, being 
 ignorant of the deceitfulness of the heart of man 
 and his strange relish of painful sports, they have 
 let themselves be enticed on board by the lure of 
 food. Immediately on their disembarkation they 
 are hurried off to the cock-pit — the terrace in 
 front of the fonda — and there, seemingly too 
 fatigued to fly, they run along the ground with 
 a grotesque hurry, seeking the oblivion of dark 
 corners among the confusion of sails and barrels. 
 They are quickly jerked by the tail out of their 
 asylum, and planted down beak to beak in the 
 sunlight. They view one another without ani- 
 mosity, however, and in order to kindle the spark 
 G 97 
 
THE PORT 
 
 of battle it is necessary to ruffle the equanimity 
 of their temper. With shouts of " Ole ! Ole ! " 
 the urchins of the port hustle them against each 
 other until they are provoked to a considerable 
 heat of irritation. Mistaking the true cause of 
 their mutual aggression, they join their discord- 
 ant human cries to the general clamour and com- 
 mence a spirited onslaught. As soon as one of 
 the combatants, however, secures a too predomi- 
 nant advantage over the other, it is slapped on 
 the head and body until it loosens its hold. Then 
 follows a brief breathing space and an adjustment 
 of ruffled feathers until the signal is given for the 
 next round to begin. So they are kept sparring 
 steadily, though with flagging energy, until noon 
 calls the spectators to adjourn for the midday 
 comida. 
 
 While I am taking my coffee in the sun after 
 lunch there appears to be a feeling that I am in 
 need of distraction. The virats are dragged from 
 their uneasy siesta and set fighting again by 
 beautiful boys with eyelashes of a sweeping 
 length which I had formerly beUeved existed 
 only in the imagination of the artists who design 
 the fashion-plates for ladies' journals. The battle 
 rages languidly throughout the afternoon. Dust 
 dims the gay sheen of their feathers and flies, with 
 their sure instinct for the approach of death, settle 
 fearlessly on their wings. I felt a melancholy 
 satisfaction to know that the hour of their release 
 
 98 
 
A LINGERING DEATH 
 
 was drawing near. But not yet. The impatient 
 boys grow tired as soon as they cease to respond 
 to the plainest provocations, and abandon them 
 to their petticoated brothers. But though the 
 gulls have no more fight left in them, they have 
 still gracelessness enough to pinch the tender 
 fingers of the infants. The indignant Capitan 
 ties up their beaks with string ; another string is 
 fastened to their leg, and the children drag them 
 about as an English child would drag a toy engine, 
 put them on their heads with outstretched wings 
 and laugh to see the struggles of the fantastic 
 living headgear, embrace them in all but fatal 
 caresses. It is not until the third or fourth day 
 of their captivity that their life wears out. They 
 lie on the parapet in the evening with their 
 breasts against the stone, the strong wings that 
 used to flash in the sun limp and broken, the eyes 
 that used to survey the gleaming sapphire plain 
 of the Mediterranean dull and unseeing. Occa- 
 sionally they lift a filmy eyelid and look out 
 where their fellows are wheeling in their airy 
 kingdom over the sea ; but even this effort seems 
 to become more and more difficult until the film 
 falls for the last time and they soar out into 
 whatever sublime ether receives the spirits of 
 tortured virats, over a sea unharried by men with 
 food in their hands and guile in their hearts. 
 
 Meanwhile the simple business of the port goes 
 forward — so far as there can be said to be any 
 
 99 
 
THE PORT 
 
 going forward in a manner of life which is almost 
 wholly traditional and immemorial. The men 
 dry their nets on the beach or sit in the shade of 
 their houses stitching the large lateen sails of 
 their faluchas. The women croon an endless lul- 
 laby over the little brown-fleshed animals in their 
 arms ; the children plait the long grasses of the 
 marsh into a fibrous rope, rubbing them into 
 strands with a swift, dexterous motion of the 
 palms. The stillness of the sleepy afternoon is 
 only broken by the splashing of the waves, which 
 rise and fall a hundred paces from the beach, as 
 though too languid to reach the shore, and the 
 still more monotonous and languid chanting of 
 ancient melodies, which seem to express aU the 
 fruitless pain of labour and all the fruitless de- 
 spair of love. The sun wheels round the bay 
 until Alcudia, which in the morning stood out 
 a black silhouette against the light, burns and 
 flashes across the water like a jewel. A sense of 
 timelessness is evoked, wholly different from the 
 burdensome sense of age which is the atmosphere 
 of ancient cities. There is scarcely a sight or a 
 sound here that attaches you to our century ; the 
 very notion of centuries becomes indistinct and 
 meaningless. The occupations of the men and the 
 simple instruments of their labour are unchanged 
 since the days of their fathers and the old time 
 before them ; they seem to lose their trivial cha- 
 racter and to become symbohcal of the proper 
 
 100 
 
EVENING AT THE FONDA 
 
 life of man before it was corrupted by a multitude 
 of desires. It is the life which our race has lived 
 on the shores of the Mediterranean since the race 
 began. 
 
 It was Keats who said that the setting sun 
 always put him to rights, and I have read that a 
 man who can watch the sun set every day has no 
 business to complain of life. But here, if it were 
 protracted into a long twilight, the sunset would 
 be a tragic affair. Happily the dark leaps upon 
 the bay with a sudden vigour, and blots out 
 Alcudia and the hills and the figures on the beach, 
 and hushes at last the unending melancholy 
 chant. 
 
 The doors of the fonda are shut ; the brasero is 
 replenished with fire ; a smoky oil-lamp is lit and 
 hung up on the wall. The small wine-shop is 
 filled with sailors and fishermen, cards are 
 brought out, and coffee and anisado are served 
 in frugal quantities. Two of the men have gui- 
 tars ; the rest play cards to a low, heart-breaking 
 accompaniment. Presently a few women come 
 in, like nuns dressed from head to foot in black, 
 and one or two girls with quiet, gleaming eyes. 
 They seat themselves on benches round the wall 
 and talk in whispers. The boys, tired out with 
 mVa^fighting, sit with the men and watch the 
 guitar-players sleepily. 
 
 After a time, a youth with a bright red sash 
 round his waist and a bright yellow scarf round 
 
 lOI 
 
THE PORT 
 
 his neck. gets up and beckons to a girl who is sit- 
 ting near the door. Her arms are bare from the 
 elbow, a shawl hangs from her shoulders, the 
 back of her head is covered by a coloured panuelo, 
 and she wears a skirt that reaches to her ankles, 
 though she is a mere child of twelve or thirteen 
 years. Her sister pushes back her hair under the 
 handkerchief, gives her chin a playful upward 
 tilt, spins her round and gently pushes her out 
 into the middle of the room. For a moment or 
 two she stands limp and motionless, her shght 
 figure contracted into a shy, shrinking attitude. 
 Then, at the first vibrating note of the guitar, 
 she starts into life, throws out her bare arms on 
 either side, and with a graceful swaying motion 
 of the body moves a few paces backwards and 
 forwards. The movements of the dance are not 
 very clearly articulated — ^perhaps the rough cob-~ 
 bles of the floor prevent any special delicacy of 
 footwork. At first the dancers pace slowly to and 
 fro along parallel lines, without advancing or re- 
 ceding. Then they go forward, meet one another, 
 and cross over into opposite corners. The dance 
 and the music quicken. The girl, with a light, 
 backward kick, makes a sudden tiirn. The youth 
 spins round even more sharply. They cross over 
 from side to side more and more frequently, cir- 
 cling round one another in a series of abrupt revo- 
 lutions as they pass. The dance takes possession 
 of the whole body, the arms and hands and head 
 
 102 
 
THE DANCE 
 
 as well as the feet. The rhythm of the boy's 
 movements is almost lost in their energy ; he 
 ducks his head under his arm ; his arms revolve 
 like windmill sails ; he leaps tiger-like towards 
 the girl, and then, suddenly recovering himself, 
 slips past without touching her. Some of the 
 men have brought wooden spoons from the 
 kitchen, which they use as castanets, beating an 
 energetic rhythmic accompaniment. Suddenly 
 the music stops, the youth drops upon one knee, 
 his head against the girl's breast, looking up into 
 her face. For an instant she stands surprised, as 
 it were, in a graceful poise, motionless, but with 
 the flame of the dance still quivering in her body, 
 and then walks gravely back to her seat by the 
 door. Not a word of applause ; not a bravo, not 
 an old. The guitars strike up again, a sailor leads 
 out a dark-skinned girl of eighteen, and the dance 
 repeats itself, but with a less childish grace on 
 the part of the girl, with a more calculated pose, 
 and surer and more decisive steps. 
 
 The women in black who were sitting round 
 the wall appeared to be verging upon old age, as 
 old age is counted in Mediterrianean countries. 
 As a matter of fact, I suppose they were not 
 much over thirty ; but the sun had traced a net- 
 work of lines round their eyes, and labour and 
 child-bearing had driven the youth out of their 
 figure. Throughout the evening they had sat so 
 silent and unnoticed that I was surprised when a 
 
 103 
 
THE PORT 
 
 man took one of them by the hand and attempted 
 to lead her out to the dance. She refused, how- 
 ever — ^refused in that emphatic, vehement, and 
 categorical manner in which Spaniards refuse 
 when they intend to consent. Finally, hungering 
 to dance, she allowed herself to be pulled by the 
 man and pushed by her friends into the arena. 
 I supposed the dance would prove a stiff, me- 
 chanical affair ; but the music seemed to loosen 
 her limbs, and the fierce rattle of the castanets 
 to put a fire into her blood. As she danced, the 
 long winter, which is woman's portion round the 
 Mediterranean, vanished, and she recaptured for 
 a few moments the springtime of her lost youth. 
 It was not a less graceful, but a more careful, 
 dance than that of the girls. Her body did not 
 abandon itself, as theirs did, to the ecstasy of 
 the moment, but seemed to be waiting upon the 
 mind and moving to a former, half-remembered 
 measure. Then, as suddenly as the music stopped, 
 the spell was broken, the recaptured grace de- 
 serted her, and as she wrapped the black shawl 
 round her again the burden of years almost 
 visibly leapt upon her back. 
 
 And now the Capitan, who had all this time 
 been engaged in gloomily gnawing a grizzled 
 moustache, suddenly awoke from his frustrate 
 dreams. I had supposed that he had not the 
 power to cast aside either his dignity or his de- 
 spair, even if he had the wish, but to my surprise 
 
 104 
 
THE CAPITAN BESTIRS HIMSELF 
 
 he stepped out into the middle of the room and 
 began to dance with a startUng animation. His 
 figures were involved and peculiar to himself. 
 He disdained the gentle swaying motion of the 
 youths. His movements had something unfore- 
 seen abo^ut them, a military abruptness of attack 
 and retreat. He appeared to be jointed like a 
 marionette and his limbs to be manipulated by 
 numberless secret wires. He pawed the air and 
 brandished his legs like a playful colt ; he gave a 
 series of lightning kicks, frontwards, sidewards, 
 and backwards, in the manner of a French boxer. 
 As he gyrated, his tatters fluttered madly in the 
 air and described a frenzied shadow-dance on the 
 wall, so that the whole room began to flicker like 
 a cinematograph, and the eye was bewildered as 
 with the antics of a bedevilled scarecrow. It was 
 the grand climax. No one had the hardihood to 
 challenge comparison with the carabinero. 
 
 The hour was nearly midnight. In the early 
 part of the evening the boys had followed the 
 movements of the dancers with the patient gaze 
 of animals ; now their dark, humid eyes were 
 closed and their heads sank on to their chests, 
 
 " Ahora, senores, el ultimo ! " exclaimed one 
 of the guitar-players, a black-faced mariner with 
 gleaming teeth. He struck a few sonorous 
 phrases upon the guitar, and then, with a howl 
 like that of a wolf in pain, he burst into a weird 
 and vehement song. His head was thrown back, 
 
 105 
 
THE PORT 
 
 the muscles swelled in his throat, which was bare 
 to the chest, and his eyes had that look of sight- 
 less intelligence which comes to men who are 
 occupied with an interior vision. The coplas were 
 strepitous, monotonous, drawn out into an in- 
 jfiinite wail. There was the same weariness in 
 them, the same maddening, stupefying rhythm 
 as in the litanies of the Church. Their deliberate- 
 ness was almost unbearable, and provoked a de- 
 sire to cry out for cessation and relief ; but as 
 they gradually overpowered the senses the pain 
 passed into a kind of ecstasy, although the uneasy 
 ecstasy of a drug. It was a music which rent the 
 heart. But, like all traditional music, it seemed 
 not so much to express a present emotion as to be 
 preoccupied with a far-off, dimly remembered de- 
 light. The eager, frenzied reiteration was like an 
 effort to keep imprisoned the passion which had 
 been brought back with difficulty from some dis- 
 tant region of the mind and was always on the 
 point of escaping. He sang in Mallorquin, and I 
 knew no more of the song than that it was of love 
 and the soul and a woman whose beauty was 
 more than that of the Queen of Heaven. Then a 
 change came over his singing. The harsh, strident 
 tones became infinitely tender, so that it was like 
 a voice coming from a great distance. The song 
 that had raged and stormed like flames in a wind 
 now dropped to a whisper, and when it ceased 
 altogether we scarcely knew it. 
 
 io6 
 
BON NIT TENGA 
 
 There was a silent pause after he had finished. 
 Then someone opened the door, and the cool 
 night air drove in. The drowsy boys raised their 
 heavy lashes and looked about them dreamily. 
 The women and the girls pulled their shawls 
 closely over their heads. A few last glasses of 
 anisado were drunk, and then, each with a " Bon 
 nit tenga " to Don Antonio, the men and the 
 women went away to their several homes along 
 the beach. 
 
 107 
 
THE PLAIN 
 
 If their consent were asked, I think all men 
 would choose to live among mountains or by the 
 sea. The life of hill-towns and ports is fed by ex- 
 haustless reservoirs of air and sea, which are at 
 once tranquiUising and invigorating. Mountain- 
 eers may be a sad people — ^frequently they are — 
 but they rarely have the torpor of men who are 
 indifferent. Their very melancholy is a vital 
 thing; it is as poignant as their outbursts of 
 joy ; it is a hint of their sensitiveness to enduring 
 things. In hill countries Nature is more emo- 
 tional. Every day is dramatic with sunset and 
 sunrise, with surprising interludes of light in a 
 far valley and sudden gatherings of gloom. If the 
 landscape can depress the spirit with melancholy, 
 it can also touch it with moods of unaccountable 
 exaltation. Men who live in ports are notoriously 
 happy — although, perhaps, theirs is the insecure 
 happiness of men who have danger for their bed- 
 fellow. The quarrelsome noise and strident music 
 that fill a port at night have the defiance of a kind 
 of triumph over the clamouring sea. The aspect of 
 
 io8 
 
UNREPOSEFUL LANDSCAPE 
 
 ports is always cheerful. They are the windows 
 through which a land looks out upon the world 
 and into which blow the freshening winds from 
 all the four quarters. They can never grow stag- 
 nant, for the going out of every ship is a visible 
 adventure. 
 
 But in the plains, and especially in the southern 
 plains, the atmosphere is charged with a certain 
 oppressiveness and lethargy. The plain of Mal- 
 lorca extends from the foot of the northern sierra 
 to the low range of hills which fringe the southern 
 coast, covering almost the whole extent of the 
 island. The landscape, as in all Mediterranean 
 countries, has little real sense of repose. It sug- 
 gests immense age in a way that a northern land- 
 scape never does. The plain of Mallorca has worn 
 the heart out of countless generations, and it is 
 stamped too clearly with the mark of their pain- 
 ful labour. It has responded to their labour, but 
 stubbornly ; its fertility is coaxed, as it were, by 
 a ceaseless, watchful attentiveness. It is kept 
 alive by being continually fed with little draughts 
 of water which never seem lavish enough to 
 quench its eternal thirst. In this land, where 
 there are no rivers, but only a few winter torrents, 
 water has acquired a preciousness like that of 
 wine. It is handled in small quantities and with 
 frugality ; it is carried about in a two-armed 
 earthenware jar, which is the direct descendant 
 of the Roman amphora, though time has coar- 
 
 109 
 
THE PLAIN 
 
 sened the graceful flow of the hnes. It is searched 
 for deep in the earth, drawn up out of the norias, 
 the wells which the Moors dug to irrigate the soil. 
 Almost every little holding has its circular stone 
 platform, where the blindfolded mule goes round 
 and round, yoked to the long branch or wooden 
 bar which turns the wheel. The water spills out 
 of the earthenware buckets, which overturn as 
 they reach the top of the wheel, and trickles 
 through a network of acequias, or little stone 
 channels, in and out among the fields of parched 
 wheat and beans. 
 
 The landscape has not that generous verdure 
 which we in the North habitually associate with 
 an agricultural country. Its foundation is a fierce 
 red, softened by a kind of silvery haze — ^the dusty 
 sheen of the olives. The olive is everywhere, and 
 everywhere it has the appearance of immemorial 
 age. One supposes that once it must have been 
 young, but always it is writhing in agonised 
 shapes, with often a suggestion of a kind of 
 striding movement, as though it were trying to 
 escape from the torture of the Mediterranean 
 noon. Its vitality is amazing ; through the most 
 decayed and shattered trunks it draws up a sap 
 which by some miracle nourishes a beautiful 
 plumage of silver leaves. It has followed man as 
 he pushed step by step westward along the coasts 
 of Europe and Africa. It is the very foundation 
 of his comfort and his wealth. It ranks with wine 
 
 no 
 
THE SYMBOLIC OLIVE 
 
 as one of those simple luxuries which, having be- 
 come necessities, mark the definite arrival at a 
 certain stage upwards from the insecure savage 
 life. Its fruit is always on the table whatever 
 else may be lacking, for at the humblest fonda 
 they would never dream of setting food before 
 you without a dish of cleansing olives. It recalls 
 the antiquity of the Mediterranean civilisation, 
 and might well stand for the symbol of it — ^just 
 as the palm is the symbol of Islam, branchless, 
 severe, inflexible. 
 
 The plain is dominated by the olive, but its 
 colour is varied by other growths : the carob 
 tree, whose rich dark green serves as a foil to the 
 more delicate grey of the olive ; the almond, 
 which turns the plain in spring into a flowering 
 orchard ; the fig, with its creeping, lateral 
 branches which seem to love to hug the ground ; 
 the pale, unsightly, fleshy cactus, like some ex- 
 otic nightmare growth, sucking strange nutri- 
 ment out of the stony soil. For a moment in 
 March the whole plain smiles beneath the sea of 
 almond blossoms ; but when this moment of 
 gaiety is past the iron hand of summer grips it in 
 a vice as hard as the frost of winter, and its ex- 
 pression once more becomes arid, painful, ex- 
 hausted. A silence settles upon it, and if any 
 noises disturb it they have a note of pain and 
 weariness — the wailing of Moorish songs with 
 which the boys keeping the herds answer one 
 
 III 
 
THE PLAIN 
 
 another from distant fields, the creaking of a 
 wooden plough as it grates through the stubborn 
 earth, the groaning of a cart crawling along the 
 endless white roads, which break the heart of 
 man and beast more than the sharp rise of 
 a hill. 
 
 Though the landscape bears the mark of human 
 industry as plainly as a city, there is rarely a 
 trace of a human habitation to be seen. It seems 
 as if some traditional fear of the open coimtry 
 still clung to the people, as if they had not yet 
 forgotten the sudden raids of the revengeful 
 Moors, the warning beacon on the watch-towers, 
 the hurried arming of the men, the flight of the 
 old and the weak into the hills. Although their 
 life is spent in the fields, they are still townsmen. 
 Every morning shortly after sunrise the migra- 
 tion sets out from the town to the country, and 
 every evening at sunset it flows back again to the 
 town. All day the men and women bend over the 
 burning furrows, the children play beneath the 
 shade of the olives, the dogs sleep beside the pile 
 of household goods, the mule revolves round the 
 noria. In the evening men, women, and children 
 crowd into the long, narrow carts, and the whole 
 army of labourers hurry back to shelter them- 
 selves against the night behind the friendly walls 
 
 of the town. 
 
 * * 
 
 * 
 
 112 
 
DEFENCELESS DEFENCES 
 
 Alcudia and PoUensa belong to the plain, al- 
 though their ports bring them into touch with 
 the sea. When you approach it, you find that 
 Alcudia does not lie upon the water's edge, as it 
 appears to do when seen from the other side of the 
 bay. It is placed almost midway on the rocky 
 isthmus of low-lying land that joins the mainland 
 with the chain of hills running out into the sea. 
 In the days of the Moors and the Corsairs prox- 
 imity to the sea meant danger, but Alcudia was 
 founded in an earlier age when the pax Bomana 
 ruled over the waters of the western Mediter- 
 ranean. Its natural defencelessness was con- 
 verted into strength by a double circuit of mas- 
 sive fortifications. 
 
 Approaching it from the seaward side, I found 
 my way barred by ruinous but still formidable 
 defences, first a ditch and an outer rampart, 
 then a wide moat and the ponderous main wall 
 of the city. I searched about until I found a 
 breach, through which I crept, stooping very low. 
 This is not the usual way in which the Alcu- 
 dians ent^r their city, but coming up from the sea- 
 shore from Puerto PoUensa I missed the main gate- 
 way on the La Puebla road. It was perhaps the 
 way by which the Corsairs entered that night in 
 A.D. 1558, when Dragut sacked the city. Stones 
 and debris were scattered about just as they had 
 fallen. If appearances were to be believed, the 
 assault had been made but a few hours ago, and 
 H 113 
 
THE PLAIN 
 
 I was following upon the heels of the invading 
 army. I found myself among narrow streets, and 
 I was amazed at their silence and desertion, until 
 I remembered that, of course, the city had been 
 sacked and its inhabitants put to the sword. A 
 few survivors, however, old women and children 
 for the most part, thrust their heads fearfully out 
 of doorways as I passed, but drew them in again 
 when I turned to look at them. The flies, how- 
 ever, had not capitulated. They still held the 
 town in great force, as they had held it through 
 all the vicissitudes of its fate — ^under Barbarossa, 
 under Don Jaime the Conquistador, under the 
 Moors, under the Vandals, under the Romans. 
 Doubtless they had ridden into the Roman camp 
 which formed the nucleus of the city on the 
 chargers of the centurions, had assisted at its 
 foundation, had watched the building of the am- 
 phitheatre and the construction of the walls. 
 They had observed its prosperity and its decUne 
 with equal indifference ; in the course of ages 
 they had become habituated to conquest and re- 
 conquest, and had learned to view the revolutions 
 of man in their proper historical perspective. On 
 this present afternoon they were chiefly concen- 
 trated in the cafe, a garrison in the heart of the 
 city where the remnant of the manhood of Alcudia 
 still held out. The cafe was not small, but it was 
 crowded to the utmost limit of its capacity, and 
 smoke filled those interstices of space which were 
 
 114 
 
DOMINOES 
 
 not occupied by flies and men. The men were 
 drinking coffee with an air of depression, the flies 
 were sipping anisado with gusto and animation. 
 Both in their different ways were apparently 
 making the best of things, but the philosophy of 
 the flies was clearly of a more optimistic com- 
 plexion. Doubtless they found the cafe at least 
 as cheerful as the harems of the Moors, and cer- 
 tainly more liberally provided with anisado than 
 the formal palaces of the Renaissance, which 
 still stand in the neglected streets. 
 
 Moreover, they were able to pass the time with- 
 out having recourse to dominoes, a diversion 
 which I suspect generates much of the depression 
 of Alcudia. It is played with something more 
 than the earnestness of an international chess 
 match. No gambit requires more deliberation 
 than the selection of the piece with which to open 
 the game. After examining all the pieces in his 
 hand, as though he were reading his fate in the 
 number of the pips, the Alcudian will at last push 
 forward a double five, withdraw it, begin a fresh 
 scrutiny of his pieces, and finally, with the air of 
 a man who has made an irrevocable resolution, 
 push it forward again. The next player has only 
 one piece which contains the corresponding five 
 spots, but does he play it out recklessly ? Not at 
 all. The game calls for reserve and gravity. He 
 handles every other piece in turn, notes their 
 difference from the piece upon the table, lays 
 
 "5 
 
THE PLAIN 
 
 them reluctantly aside, and then, when the 
 adversary has been kept long enough in suspense, 
 beguiled into hopes that he would fail to play, 
 the cunning fellow slides it forward with a smile. 
 At the end of half or three-quarters of an hour 
 the players' hands are almost empty, and the 
 strain becomes intense. Even if a player has but 
 one piece in his hand, and that piece of the wrong 
 number, he does not lightly pass his turn, but 
 smokes the third of a cigarette before he reluc- 
 tantly shakes his head. The game ended, the 
 pieces are turned back upwards, shuffled, dealt 
 out again, and a new game begun. So the long 
 afternoon wears on, with only an interval when 
 the diligence starts for La Puebla and the players 
 walk to the glass door of the cafe to see it pass. 
 There is little in Aicudia to detain the visitor 
 from entering the diligence and driving away. 
 There are the two gateways, as prim as if built 
 out of a child's toy bricks, which watch over the 
 roads leading to the port and La Puebla ; there 
 are Renaissance palaces in the back streets, very 
 pathetic beneath a smiling coat of whitewash; 
 there was once an ancient Gothic church before 
 it fell into the hands of the restorers ; there is the 
 cafe ; and there are the ponderous walls, still 
 guarding this city, which has long since been 
 rifled of its wealth and beauty. 
 
 ii6 
 
THE WAITING PATIO 
 
 The plain is full of country towns — ^La Puebla, 
 Muro, Santa Margarita, Petra, Sineu, Campos, 
 Villafrancha. Too often, however, they do not 
 live — they mortify. They are in the midst of the 
 country, but the country does not refresh them. 
 The high road does not lead to them, as it does to 
 towns that are happy and occupied, but merely 
 through them, not pausing to let you make their 
 acquaintance, but hurrying on into the country 
 again, plainly apologetic for bringing you to a 
 place which cannot divert and may easily depress 
 you. The carretera narrows and is flanked by 
 houses, but it does not become a street — ^it never 
 loses its dust or its sun or its silence. The houses 
 are neither new nor old, neither mean nor afflu- 
 ent ; they have the uniform expression of middle, 
 age and middle class. They are shuttered, as 
 though full of mourning. The doorway is wide 
 and round-arched ; the door is always open, and 
 discloses a patio — ^bare, stone-flagged, cool and 
 dark like a well. Round the walls stands an 
 astonishing array of cane-bottomed chairs, await- 
 ing a company which never arrives — or rather, it 
 arrives but twice or thrice in a lifetime, on those 
 occasions which men instinctively feel to be mo- 
 mentous : birth, marriage, and death. Certainly 
 the company has no part in determining these 
 events, but the occasion demands its presence, 
 and its presence demands food ; it seats itself 
 upon the chairs ; it partakes of wine and sweet- 
 
 117 
 
THE PLAIN 
 
 meats ; it is silently communicative of condo- 
 lence or congratulation ; and it departs until the 
 next crisis of nature calls it together again. In 
 the long intervals between the summonses the 
 patio is commonly tenantless. If for any reason 
 you wish to summon the inmates, you enter and 
 call out, ''Ave Maria!" As likely as not the 
 name of the madonna is Maria; it is not her, 
 however, that you are invoking, but the Blessed 
 Virgin. If you are impatient, you become more 
 emphatic, and exclaim, " Purisima !" At length, 
 from some distant quarter of the house will come 
 the response, " Sin pecado concebida " — born with- 
 out sin. These doctrinal preliminaries over, it is 
 possible to discuss worldly business. 
 
 The silence of the streets is scarcely interrupted 
 by the chanting of the children in the nuns' school 
 — passively chanting the lists of the four cardinal 
 virtues and the seven deadly sins. The town 
 seems to lack the vitality to commit a deadly sin 
 or even a cardinal virtue. One supposes that they 
 learn the names of these things as they learn the 
 names of distant countries with their capitals and 
 principal rivers, and have as vague a notion of the 
 connotation of the words. But the black-clothed 
 cura who paces up and down in the narrow shade 
 peers over his breviary into the patios, as though 
 he suspected vice to be lurking within their gloom. 
 The town is surely guilty of no crime but perhaps 
 a little republicanism — for the main industry of 
 
 Ii8 
 
APATHY 
 
 Mallorca is shoemaking, and although the con- 
 nection between making boots and revolutions is 
 obscure, it is notorious that all cobblers are cer- 
 tainly radicals and probably republicans. In the 
 plaza, therefore, you will find a Centro Republi- 
 cano where vague revolutions are planned nightly, 
 and also a Centro Catolico where they are con- 
 demned. 
 
 In the plaza there is more dust, more silence, 
 and more sun ; but chiefly sun — sun that is 
 pitiless, immoderate, inquisitorial, without modu- 
 lation, without gaiety, sun of the Mediterranean 
 noon. For in the plaza it is always noon — 
 noon of day or noon of night. It is never 
 visited by those suggestive half-lights which di- 
 vest objects of their reality and provoke the heart 
 to indefinable imaginings and desires. The town 
 is always definite and real and prosaic ; it im- 
 agines nothing and desires nothing except ease 
 from labour. The nights here are more obscure 
 and opaque than anywhere else ; they do not 
 whisper to the soul disturbing things — ^there 
 would be none to listen or to understand if they 
 did ; they are mute ; they are made not for 
 loving, but for sleep. For though there is marry- 
 ing and giving in marriage in the town of the 
 plain, one doubts whether there is love. Certainly 
 there are no places for making it. At the town's 
 end the carretera stretches onward in a blank, 
 straight level, without a hedgerow, without a 
 
 119 
 
THE PLAIN 
 
 sheltering wood — with only a few solitary palms, 
 austere and forbidding, like sentinels of Africa, 
 standing aloof from the earth and negotiating 
 with the skies. A little further on, the funereal 
 plumes of the cypresses wave over the walls of 
 the cemetery — an unweeded garden, a camposanto 
 without sanctity and without resurrection, a town 
 of the dead, but where sleep and silence and aban- 
 donment are scarcely more final and complete 
 than in the town of the living. 
 
 Such a town was La Puebla, to which I walked 
 one evening from Alcudia. I entered the plaza 
 just as the angelus bell was ringing, and the men 
 were standing outside the Centro Catolico with 
 their hats off, and outside the Centro Republicano 
 with their hats on. It is the sort of town one 
 would expect peasants to build when they herd 
 together. It has no proper civic sense, no dignity, 
 no variety, no proportions. It would appear that 
 a town must be lived in, and not merely slept in, 
 before it can acquire any intimate, social cha- 
 racter. The streets are long, narrow thorough- 
 fares, each like the main street of a village, driven 
 through rectangular blocks of buildings. The 
 town is full of sewing machines ; it is the ter- 
 minus of the railway from Palma, and has the 
 appearance of being merely a depot for the col- 
 lection and expedition of the produce of the 
 country-side. It was not unnatural, therefore, 
 that when I halted in the plaza in the evening, 
 
 120 
 
PRIMERA COMUNION 
 
 the first question I was asked should be, Que vende 
 usted — What have you got to sell ? And truly, 
 unless a man has something to sell, he is misusing 
 his time in visiting La Puebla. 
 
 But there is one day in the spring of every year 
 when for some hours the busy sewing machines 
 are silent, and La Puebla forgets its preoccupa- 
 tion of buying and selling and ceases to talk of 
 duros and pesetas. It is the day when all the 
 towns of Southern Europe are gladdened by a 
 brief rejuvenescence, when they are visited by 
 the vigour of the spring and feel the sap of young 
 human life pushing up within them. It is the day 
 of the Primera Comunion. 
 
 I was out in the streets a little after seven, when 
 I saw a vision of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The 
 piper, however, was not pied, but clad from head 
 to foot in sober black ; and although he did not 
 pipe, the little black-bound book which he car- 
 ried in his hand had magic enough in it to compel 
 a horde of children to follow at his heels. He 
 stalked through the streets until he came to the 
 church, and there the black portal swallowed up 
 both him and his victims, like Hamelin's moun- 
 tain. I followed, and found the children clustered 
 round a priest in the midst of the nave. He was 
 asking them a number of questions of a meta- 
 physical nature, to each of which they replied, 
 with all the shrill affirmation of their little souls 
 and bodies. Si, Padre ! Si, Padre ! Indeed, so 
 
 121 
 
THE PLAIN 
 
 eager were they to assent to truth that^when, in 
 the course of his harangue, the priest shpped in 
 a merely rhetorical question — ^for he was some- 
 thing of an orator — ^their voices still continued to 
 exclaim vehemently, Si, Padre! Si, Padre! 
 until an admonitory frown informed them that 
 in this case the correct reply was in the negative. 
 After they had blithely assented to all manner of 
 unspeakable verities — and also accidentally to 
 one or two heresies — ^the priest went up to the 
 altar and began to sing Mass. The black-clothed 
 figure, however, whom they had followed through 
 the streets, stood up at the western end of the 
 church and proceeded to read aloud out of his 
 little book. In some perplexity as to which of the 
 two competing functions had the better claim to 
 their attention, they settled the doubt by attend- 
 ing to neither. 
 
 When Mass was said, the priest came down 
 from the altar and stood upon the steps leading 
 into the nave. Two little boys took their stand 
 on either side of him, holding lighted candles as 
 tall as themselves. Two others, kneeling in front 
 of him, held up a long white cloth unsteadily on 
 a level with the tips of their noses. The priest, a 
 large bulk of a man, with a full-fleshed face like 
 that of a weary pierrot, proceeded to administer 
 the Communion languidly. The boys came fir^t, 
 in batches of four or six at a time, with hands 
 folded meekly upon their breasts and a look of 
 
 122 
 
SUBMISSION 
 
 bewilderment in their eyes. Kneeling down, they 
 took the cloth between their finger and thumb, 
 thrust their chins over the edge, and opened their 
 mouths like young sparrows waiting to be fed. 
 As soon as the wafer rested on their protruding 
 tongues their arms were seized by anxious nuns, 
 and, without a moment for recollection or spiri- 
 tual digestion, they were snatched away and 
 pushed and hustled down a narrow lane of parents 
 and spectators with piety expressed in their folded 
 hands and annoyance written manifestly on their 
 faces. 
 
 As soon as the boys had thus been all securely 
 folded into the Church it was the turn of the girls 
 — odd little figures of old women, with black silk 
 hoods over their shoulders and black mantillas 
 on their heads. But there were some dressed all 
 in white, half hidden beneath their bridal veils, 
 with their long hair hanging unplaited at the 
 back and crowned with a garland of wild flowers 
 — little tragic queens who seemed half to guess 
 that this was but the first submission of a life 
 which for them was to be but a sequence of sub- 
 missions. There was something sinister in the 
 contrast between the freshness of their bodies and 
 the ancient building with its pompous relics of 
 dead centuries, between the sunlit plaza outside, 
 where their brothers and sisters were heedlessly 
 playing pelota against the sacred walls, and 
 the funeral gloom within, where the Church was 
 
 123 
 
THE PLAIN 
 
 already twisting its mighty roots about their fear- 
 ful hearts. She appeared to be unjust and rapa- 
 cious. Was not life inexorable enough that she 
 must forestall the inevitable processes of nature ? 
 Let them play a little longer in the sun before 
 the shadows come ! 
 
 Outside in the sun a long table was spread with 
 sugared buns. After the two hours' service the 
 children came pelting out of the church and clus- 
 tered round it eagerly. Too eagerly, indeed, for 
 the cura, who took a long, willowy stick like a 
 fishing-rod and beat them on the head to make 
 them keep a proper distance. Certainly it could 
 not be said that the Church showed herself a par- 
 ticularly fond mother on the day on which she 
 gathered her children within her arms. Perhaps 
 she was giving them a foretaste of her discipline, 
 on the principle of that general in the Thirty 
 Years War who used to let off a cannon or two 
 against the recruits coming to enlist imder his 
 banner — ^the beggars had got to taste powder 
 sooner or later, and the sooner the better ! But 
 as soon as their impatience was curbed, the chil- 
 dren were mollified with the sugared buns. Not 
 that they needed mollification, for they seemed 
 to perceive no unfitness in a welcome which might 
 appear to the sentimental outsider sour and im- 
 politic. To them it was merely an incident, 
 neither more nor less irrational than any other, 
 in that amazing episode of buffeting, ear-boxing, 
 
 124 
 
THE PEIMBEA COMUNION 
 
THE REQUIEM 
 
 abusing, caressing, and embracing, which consti- 
 tutes childhood in a country where the adults are 
 children also. 
 
 At Muro, the next town that I came to, the 
 church again was the centre of life. This time it 
 was a requiem. Outside, the light was white and 
 blinding, but within it was night. In the centre 
 of the nave stood a catafalque, covered with a 
 heavy velvet pall. Children were lighting candles 
 for the repose of the soul of the dead, and the 
 shrieking of matches upon the stone flags almost 
 drowned the murmur of the priests ; for the 
 children were extracting what amusement they 
 could out of the service by blowing out the can- 
 dles as soon as they were lit for the pleasure of 
 lighting them again. A few ancient men and 
 women were sitting about on benches and stools, 
 watching the rehearsal of their own obsequies 
 with a lugubrious fascination. 
 
 There are churches which inspire devotion, 
 and there are churches to which you have to 
 bring your own devotion with you ; the churches 
 of the plain are of the latter sort. They were 
 built for the most part in the seventeenth 
 century, when religion — at all events, in south- 
 ern countries — was pompous and rhetorical 
 rather than devout. The heavy gilt of the 
 altars, their swelling, bombastic curves, their 
 well-nourished cherubs, suggest the mundane 
 style of Louis-Quatorze furniture. One breathes 
 
 125 
 
THE PLAIN 
 
 the close atmosphere of a royal boudoir. But in 
 the churches of these dead towns there is always 
 some pious business going forward. Without a 
 theatre, without political meetings, without a 
 police-court, without even a Cine, they find their 
 one unfailing entertainment in the Church. She 
 dramatises life for them, putting the common in- 
 cidents of birth and death in a large setting, 
 staging the seasons of life and the seasons of the 
 year with a certain grandiose pomp. Every 
 phrase and every gesture has crystallised into a 
 convention, but her dramas are still more en- 
 thralling than those of the Cine, because they are 
 made out of the raw stuff of life and are not 
 merely the animated pictures of a picture. She 
 raises misfortune to the level of tragedy, and pre- 
 sents the routine of existence as a spectacle to 
 which the whole universe is attentive. 
 
 * 
 The road from Muro to Arta sweeps round in a 
 wide curve of twenty miles, though drawing near 
 to the sea never coming within sight of it. But 
 the land feels its influence. Near the coast the 
 southern plain breaks out into stony, wind-swept 
 moors, the trees diminish, the olives and almonds 
 disappear. As the carretera approaches Artd it 
 rises into the southern range of hills. As I 
 climbed the slope I overtook a few peasants walk- 
 ing to Capdepera. After the inevitable catechism 
 
 126 
 
WINTER IN JEST 
 
 had been asked and answered I would have 
 pressed on, for it was growing late. But the pea- 
 sants quickened their step to keep pace ; for there 
 is an influence in empty spaces of country at 
 night which does not inspire anything so 
 definite as fear, but which keeps men together. 
 We walked on, not speaking, but nevertheless 
 very sensible of a kind of communion with one 
 another, each one being surrounded and pro- 
 tected by a certain convoy of human companion- 
 ship. We passed through Art^, the Ardjan of the 
 Moors, with its castle on the hill and its church 
 whose arched buttresses form an arcade of strong 
 light and shadow in the sun, and four miles fur- 
 ther on came at last to Capdepera, the eastern- 
 most town of the island, quite close to the sea. 
 
 In Mallorca, winter has no terrors for anyone 
 except the Mallorquin, who crouches from an 
 imaginary cold over the imaginary heat of a 
 hrasero. Autumn joins hands with spring and 
 winter is elbowed out. Occasionally, however, in 
 the early months of the year, the winter seems to 
 resent its exclusion from the dance of the seasons 
 and sets to work to scatter discomfort over the 
 island. It rains in the plain and snows on the 
 mountains, and blows great guns all round the 
 coast. But it isn't really serious. It can't keep 
 up the farce for more than three days, and on the 
 morning of the fourth the sun bursts out laugh- 
 ing, and you shoulder your pack and take the 
 
 127 
 
THE PLAIN 
 
 road rejoicing. While it lasts the discomfort is 
 extreme, for Mallorca is fortified against the sun, 
 but not against the rain. As soon as the skies 
 grow grey its serenity collapses ; it becomes dis- 
 consolate ; it has no resources, and there is 
 nothing for it but to play dominoes in the cafe 
 until the weeping fit is over. 
 
 One of these blustering, belated energies of 
 winter overtook me at Capdepera, but unfortu- 
 nately I took it seriously and did not wait until 
 the fourth morning. At the fonda the rain lashed 
 in through unglazed windows, and confused the 
 operations of bathing and dressing. Cheered by 
 the anticipation of hot coffee, I greeted the land- 
 lord with a show of heartiness which vanished 
 when he told me that the only morning beverage 
 which he supplied was cold water, or, if it were 
 insisted upon, vino negro. Nothing warming was 
 to be had nearer than the cafe in the plaza, a 
 large, bare room as dreary as the fonda, but drier. 
 Here I was served by the Emperor Trajan, 
 though now he calls himself Miguel ; but I knew 
 it was he because I had seen his bust in the British 
 Museum and I recognised the features at once — 
 they are large, solemn, and rather foolish. 
 
 I had parted with my valise and the seven 
 thick, square volumes at La Puebla. It is idle to 
 expect to find literature at a Mallorquin fonda. 
 At Capdepera there was an Apostohc Indulgence 
 addressed to Don Francisco Mir, in which " our 
 
 128 
 
DAMPED SPIRITS 
 
 most holy Father Pope Leo' XIII, who felici- 
 tously governs the Church, in consideration of an 
 alms of fifty centimos of a peseta, granted to Don 
 Francisco permission to eat wholesome meats 
 during Lent and on certain other days of vigil- 
 ance and abstinence, and to enjoy the same in- 
 dulgence when he was on his travels in foreign 
 lands where Lenten fare was not obtainable, 
 always provided that he, Don Francisco, thereby 
 avoided giving cause for scandal." There was 
 also an elementary reading-book for Mallorquin 
 children which consisted of moral maxims, such 
 as los ninos desobedientes gustan al diahlo — dis- 
 obedient children please the devil. The informa- 
 tion was not cheering, so I returned to play 
 dominoes at the cafe, where I spent the first and 
 second day. The third day was Palm Sunday, 
 and hoping to find some animation in the church, 
 I went out into the rain to search for it. I found 
 a dispirited congregation languidly waving damp 
 palms in the air, while three unharmonious 
 priests were engaged in a triangular duel of chant- 
 ing and responses. It was then that I despaired 
 of Capdepera, and resolved hot to wait for the 
 fourth morning to break. I was compelled, how- 
 ever, to wait until the very verge of dawn, for the 
 diligencia does not leave Capdepera until two 
 hours after midnight. There appears to be no 
 plain necessity for so late — or early — a departure, 
 unless it be for the convenience of theatre-goers, 
 I 129 
 
THE PLAIN 
 
 for Capdepera boasts a theatre as well as a Cine. 
 Trajan — I mean Miguel — ^informed me that there 
 was to be a performance that evening, and 
 if I cared to divert myself there until the dili- 
 gencia left, he would be pleased to accompany me. 
 At eight o'clock we were seated in the first row 
 of the balcony benches. Miguel provided a bag 
 of pea-nuts, and I a packet of cigarettes at fifteen 
 a penny. The theatre was about as large as a 
 good-sized railway waiting-room and rather less 
 ornate. It possessed an orchestra, however, which 
 consisted of a drum and cymbals supported by a 
 bassoon and violin. The violinist had the mis- 
 fortune to be blind, but he was attended by a 
 little boy who poked him in the ribs as soon as 
 he saw the bassoon-player's cheeks begin to swell, 
 thus securing that all the instruments should at 
 least start fairly level. The curtain rose upon an 
 impassioned love scene between the hero and 
 heroine. At first I was a little puzzled at hearing 
 two voices speaking simultaneously, although the 
 lips of one only of the actors appeared to move. 
 The second voice, however, turned out to be that 
 of the prompter, whose function was not so much 
 to prompt as to dictate. It was a little discon- 
 certing until you became accustomed to it and 
 made up your mind which monologue to hsten to. 
 The prompter had the more powerful and melli- 
 fluous voice, but he refrained from encroaching 
 upon the prerogative of the actors and generously 
 
 130 
 
THE ART OF PROMPTING 
 
 suppressed any emotion in rendering his part. 
 He recited in a firm, breathless, but unexpressive 
 monotone : — 
 
 " Gracias a Dios I have at last in my posses- 
 sion the desired license Now approaches the 
 longed for day when I may at last embrace thee 
 and seal our love with the irrefragable seal of 
 matrimony Ay de mi ! how much I have suffered 
 I who have never trembled before anybody trem- 
 ble before thee O amada mia I feel something 
 which I cannot express — and this something 
 without a name is the most delicious transport 
 
 of paradise I become pale " And just as the 
 
 prompter was becoming pale the hero was ar- 
 riving at the point of producing the desired 
 license. He took up the colourless monologue, 
 punctuated it, emphasised it with energetic ac- 
 tion, made it vibrate with passion, so that, where- 
 as the prompter had left us almost unmoved, the 
 hero carried us off on a flood of emotion. It was 
 the touch of a great artist, and the feat was the 
 more striking when one considered that at the 
 same time that he was stirring the audience, he 
 was also picking up the thread of the drama half 
 a dozen sentences ahead. This moving scene, 
 however, was soon interrupted by the villain, who 
 announced with a cheerful leer that the reservists 
 had just been called out to serve in the campaign 
 against the Riffs and that the hero was due to 
 sail the next day for Africa, 
 
 131 
 
THE PLAIN 
 
 In the next act the heroine was lachrymose and 
 disconsolate. She was being consoled by her 
 father, but she refused to be comforted — ^as, in- 
 deed, she might very well have been if only she 
 had recognised as clearly as the audience did that 
 the voice of her father was really that of her 
 lover, who had only partially concealed his cos- 
 tume and his identity beneath a long cloak and a 
 white beard. For, in spite of the imposing list of 
 dramatis personse printed on the programme, the 
 whole burden of the performance fell upon the 
 prompter, assisted only by the hero, the heroine, 
 and the villain. At first I was at a loss to under- 
 stand the reason of the long monologues, which 
 appeared neither to advance the action nor to 
 amuse the audience ; but Miguel explained to me 
 that they were necessary in order to give the 
 actors time to transform themselves into the 
 other characters. 
 
 In the third act the villain appeared with a 
 more brutal and cheerful leer than before, and 
 broke the news to Dolores that a Riff bullet had 
 found a lodgment in her lover's heart. She 
 swooned beneath the shock. We, however, felt 
 no surprise, for the prompter had already in- 
 formed us of the event a minute and a half be- 
 fore, and our attention was now taken up with 
 listening to a rapid precis of the hero's last words 
 from the same source of early information. Natu- 
 rally, however, the villain lied, for in the next act 
 
 132 
 
THE TRAGEDIANS 
 
 the hero reappeared paler than ever, but with 
 half a leg shot off — at least, the part below the 
 knee, which was doubled up behind, was under- 
 stood to be missing. The psychology of the 
 heroine was complex. She did not argue that a 
 lover with half a leg was better than none at all 
 but took the pessimistic view that the proper' 
 denouement was for both to commit suicide, which, 
 in defiance of every canon of good taste, they pro- 
 ceeded to do in full view of the audience. They 
 suspended themselves from a tree, and though 
 the drag of their clothes at the shoulders sug- 
 gested a hook at the back, they both put out their 
 tongues and simulated hanging most unplea 
 santly. The villain went off into the wings de- 
 claring that he would shoot himself — there hardly 
 seemed to be an adequate reason, but tragedy 
 was in the air. We distinctly heard a report be- 
 hind the scenes, but when the curtain fell upon 
 the discovery of the unfortunate lovers by a 
 guardia civil, his face wore a leer which it was 
 impossible not to recognise. 
 
 It was a lugubrious little play, and if the mo- 
 tives of the characters were occasionally obscure, 
 the spectators were none the less sensibly affected. 
 So much so that it was necessary to console them 
 with a zarzuela, in which the heroine danced so 
 prettily that gaiety was soon restored. It was 
 past midnight before we were back in the cafe, 
 attempting to dry our steaming clothes over an 
 
 133 
 
THE PLAIN 
 
 almost lifeless brasero, and to drive the chill out 
 of our bodies with coffee and anisado. At last the 
 jingling of bells announced that it was two o'clock 
 and the diligence had arrived. 
 
 " Diligences carry passengers and mails," says 
 the guide-book, " but they are not used by the 
 aristocracy." It is very true. They are used 
 chiefly by substantial women carrying the pro- 
 duce of their gardens to market, commercial 
 travellers, and strolling players. On climbing 
 up into the conveyance, I found that the four 
 corner seats were occupied by the prompter, the 
 hero, the villain, and Dolores. The villain was 
 nursing a bulging yellow silk handkerchief, about 
 the size of a Christmas pudding, which contained 
 the night's takings, all in copper. He was also 
 smoking a villainous contraband cigar. The dili- 
 gence seemed very small and very full when we 
 started, but it grew smaller and fuller as we went 
 on. When it was quite full we stopped again at 
 Artd, and two large countrywomen came in out 
 of the darkness and the rain. Inside also it was 
 perfectly dark, except for the glow of the villain's 
 cigar, and therefore it must have been by acci- 
 dent rather than by design that the larger of the 
 countrywomen chose my knees to sit upon. She 
 was in no way inconvenienced, however, and, 
 resting her head upon my shoulder, she was soon 
 breathing heavily in a deep sleep. The shutters 
 of the windows were closed, but the rain drove 
 
 134 
 
THE "BLACK HOLE" 
 
 in through the slanting laths of wood and put out 
 the villain's cigar. He struck a match to re-light 
 it. In the momentary flare I caught a glimpse of 
 a very dishevelled Dolores. The colour had faded 
 from her lips and was trickling down her chin. 
 Sleep came easily to the rest of the company, but 
 passed me over. I attempted to find comfort by 
 reminding myself that this was the true atmo- 
 sphere of the " good old times." But the atmo- 
 sphere was too heavy with garlic and stale cigar 
 smoke to be romantic. The hours lengthened out 
 into the timelessness of a nightmare. The dawn 
 broke at last and revealed a ghastly spectacle — a 
 locomotory Black Hole of Calcutta, crawling over 
 the rain-sodden landscape, compact with a damp 
 mass of humanity twisted into those gross shapes 
 which the body assumes when it escapes from the 
 control of the waking consciousness. About five 
 o'clock I saw through the shutters with unmea- 
 sured relief the tall white tower of the church of 
 Manacor rising up out of the plain. 
 
 135 
 
MENORCA 
 
VI 
 
 THE LOST JEWEL 
 
 An April noon in the Mediterranean — and the 
 steely seas and sullen skies of Britain. 
 
 For two hours we had been coasting along the 
 southern shore of Menorca — ^that lost limb of the 
 British Empire. For all that the eye could tell, it 
 might have been one of the outer Hebrides. Half 
 a mile away a low barrier of brown rock rose 
 abruptly out of the water ; away behind stretched 
 a dreary expanse of land, seemingly for the most 
 part as flat as a billiard table. A couple of bald 
 eminences, not attaining the dignity of moun- 
 tains, protruded in the midst of it. 
 
 Slipping through the channel at the south-west 
 corner, between the mainland and the islet of 
 Aire, we encountered the full blast of the north 
 wind which sweeps over the island and beats its 
 straggling foUage towards the south. A steep bas- 
 tion of red cliff strikes out eastward, sheltering 
 the entrance to the finest harbour of the Mediter- 
 ranean, esta preeiosa joya, as the Spaniards call it 
 —this precious jewels thrice set in the imperial 
 crown of Britain and thrice lost. 
 
 139 
 
THE LOST JEWEL 
 
 Beyond the heights of La Mola, from which the 
 sleeping cannon look down upon the mouth of 
 the harbour, the northern shore of the estuary 
 shelves down to the water's edge in grassy slopes, 
 giving it a kind of kinship with the Scottish loch. 
 Half-way up the narrow, winding arm of the sea, 
 upon a jutting angle of the northern shore, stands 
 Georgetown — ^for though it has got the brand- 
 new Spanish name of Villacarlos, Georgetown it 
 was and Georgetown it will remain, until its 
 square, squalid, Georgian houses are thrown down 
 into the sea. Almost opposite the town lies the 
 little island which the British tars with grim 
 facetiousness christened Bloody Island — ^it was 
 there that the Sawbones of the old wooden navy 
 practised his rough-and-ready surgeonry. 
 
 Half a mile beyond, a bend of the harbour re- 
 veals the town of Mahon — a long line of pink and 
 white buildings stretching along the quay-side, 
 and a crowd of grey and white houses huddled 
 together on the crown of the cliff above. But the 
 eye that has grown familiar with the face of 
 Mediterranean cities detects a strangeness in its 
 aspect. The houses have not the imposing Roman 
 magnitude ; their colour is not the tostado of 
 Spain — ^the warm brown of stone burnished by 
 centuries of the meridional sun, but the discon- 
 certing whiteness of whitewash ; the pitch of the 
 roofs suggests a more northern latitude ; the 
 windows are frankly and grotesquely British. An 
 
 140 
 
|5 
 O 
 
 w 
 o 
 
 t3 
 
IMPERIAL ARCHITECTURE 
 
 execrably paved street climbs up the steep ascent 
 from the quay, and you find yourself, not in a 
 Mediterranean city, with its air of languor and 
 recollection of forgotten pomp, but in a prim, 
 mean, prosaic, eighteenth-century English sea- 
 port. The domination of Romans, Vandals, By- 
 zantines, Moors, Spaniards, and French has left 
 scarcely a trace, but, fresh as a coin from the 
 mint, Mahon bears the impress of the seventy 
 years of British occupation. It presents the 
 amazing phenomenon of a fragment of Cornwall 
 midway between Africa and Spain. " We have 
 forgotten it," I was told when I spoke to the 
 people of the time when their fathers were sub- 
 jects of the English king ; but the town has not 
 forgotten. The very names of the streets — George 
 Street, Hanover Street — are a perpetual reminder. 
 The houses were clearly built by a race that had 
 not yet learned to fear the rigour of the Mediter- 
 ranean sun. Moors and Spaniards, who build to 
 exclude rather than to admit the light, space their 
 windows economically in a generous extension of 
 wall. In Mahon they are planted largely and 
 boldly, in rows of two and three, fitted with 
 sashes and divided by laths of white-painted wood 
 into six square panes — ^just as they are in the 
 Hackney Road. The balcony — ^that one solace of 
 women in southern lands — is almost as little 
 known as in Devonport or Falmouth. The Church 
 of Santa Maria, it is true, has the proper Mediter- 
 
 141 
 
THE LOST JEWEL 
 
 ranean quality — ^the imposing simplicity which 
 comes from sheer unrelieved expanse of wall ; 
 but its fagade is made ridiculous by the intru- 
 sion of four sash windows, which give it some- 
 thing of the air of an eighteenth-century meeting- 
 house. 
 
 Beneath the disfigurement and dilapidation of 
 almost every town that remembers the dominion 
 of Rome, there is rarely absent a hint of grandeur 
 and suggestion of Imperial power. The English 
 are the one Imperial race who never learned to 
 build imperially. The plan of our architecture, 
 like that of our empire, has been a little hap- 
 hazard, informal, conceived without imagination, 
 uninflamed by a grandiose idea. It has never 
 found means to translate the adventuring spirit 
 of our race. Especially here in the Mediterranean, 
 where the eye instinctively adopts a larger stand- 
 ard, the impression is pitifully meagre and com- 
 monplace. The best we have given to the town 
 is that air of propriety and simple decorum, 
 which perhaps we acquired in those days when 
 our fortunes were linked with those of Holland. 
 
 So clearly has the little town preserved the tra- 
 ditions of the time when the Blakeneys, the An- 
 struthers, and the Townshends held their petty 
 court here, bickered with the ecclesiastical au- 
 thorities and ostentatiously attended the Pro- 
 testant worship in the Church of San Jose, that 
 it is not in the least surprising to come across a 
 
 142 
 
THE MEMORY OF WORDS 
 
 tablet by the roadside setting forth in Georgian 
 Latin the virtues of Governor Kane and the 
 " honorabiUs Henricus Edwardus Fox." Less 
 British-sounding names would appear foreign and 
 out of place. When you see the urchins of the 
 port playing at knuckle-bones in the gutter and 
 hear them call out " knur-kle," it is not the 
 English word that at first sounds strangely, but 
 the unfamiliar accent. Many are the English 
 words embedded in the Menorquin dialect. Be- 
 cause the English sailor called for his liquor in a 
 bottle or a mug, the fisherman of Mahon still 
 orders his botil or moch of wine. Mitjamen, the 
 name for the guardia marina, does not present a 
 very English character in print, but it is merely 
 " midshipman " disguised. And a curious re- 
 minder of the periods both of the English and 
 the French occupation exists in the idiomatic ex- 
 pression for a handful of people, cvMre jans y un 
 hoy — four Jeans and a boy. 
 
 Perhaps the illusion was suggested by the 
 water-colour drawings of British redcoats, drawn 
 up in files like lead soldiers, which I had seen in 
 the Ateneo at Mahon ; but certainly when I left 
 the houses behind, the country no less than the 
 town seemed to wear the same familiar aspect of 
 England. Not the England which makes pictures 
 
 143 
 
THE LOST JEWEL 
 
 in one's dreams when one has been long in exile — 
 the essential England of deep pastures, drowsy 
 lanes, hedgerows, and village greens — but that 
 other older, half alien, Celtic England of the west. 
 Here were the stony, wind-swept wastes of Corn- 
 wall, the wide landscapes ruled by long lines of 
 crumbling stone wall, the stunted trees cowering 
 before the sea-wet gale. Nearer to the southern 
 coast the land becomes more bleak and barren, 
 the soil thinner, the grass scantier, until the walls 
 enclose only fields of solid rock, and the fields 
 bear no other harvest than stones, stacked thickly 
 together like sheaves. When the last white- 
 washed farm is left behind, the narrow cart-road 
 loses itself in wandering paths which lead down 
 to the sea through a labyrinth of ravines. If you 
 choose the right one, you come upon a cove of 
 clear emerald water, above which rise a hundred 
 feet and more of sheer golden rock, and suddenly 
 — for although the landscape has been leading 
 you backwards through the centuries, the tran- 
 sition is still all too abrupt — ^you fijid yourself in 
 the very cradle of our race, the rock-city of Calas 
 Covas. 
 
 In the dim morning of the world this place was 
 populous with men, though who can even con- 
 jecture whence they came, or what was their like- 
 ness or their speech ? Hunters of beasts and also 
 the hunted, they hewed out places of refuge in 
 the face of the chff . The wall of rock presents the 
 
 144 
 
THE ROCK-CITY 
 
 appearance of a honeycomb of caves — some mere 
 dens, like the lairs of wild beasts, with barely 
 space enough for a man and a woman to crouch 
 together for . shelter from the driving storms, 
 others spacious chambers with alcoves and col- 
 umns of living rock and rude windows opening 
 upon the sea. If one of the primeval cave-dwellers 
 could return in his body to this cove, he could 
 scarcely tell that ten years had passed since last 
 the rocks ech9ed to his voice. He would find all 
 the landmarks of the village undisturbed. He 
 would go past the familiar boulder that has de- 
 tached itself from the rock ; he would swing him- 
 self up the cliff by the well-known footholds ; he 
 would know the cave that used to be his own ; 
 he would find the print of his axe as fresh and 
 sharp as on the day when he smoothed the lintel 
 of the door ; he would look out through the 
 narrow square doorway upon the same picture 
 of emerald water and golden rock. For though 
 since the days when he lived here Nineveh and 
 Babylon and Carthage have risen and perished, 
 and the face of the earth has been changed be- 
 yond all knowledge, this is a place which time has 
 forgotten to remould. It stands as it did in the 
 twilight of the world's dawn. 
 
 I had been thinking so long of far-off things 
 that I had scarcely noticed that the sun had slid 
 down into the sea, and that ragged, purple 
 clouds, edged with fire, were streaming up out of 
 
 K 145 
 
THE LOST JEWEL 
 
 the horizon. The cheerful noises of the day, 
 which from time to time come faintly echoing 
 down the ravine from the farms beyond, had 
 ceased ; the less cheerful but still comfortable 
 noises of the night, the guttural chorus of the 
 frogs, the plaintive music of the nightingales, 
 never reach this desolate coast. The surge of the 
 sea was intermittent, and every wave that slipped 
 back down the crumbling beach left a gap of 
 silence, as though a multitude of men had stopped 
 their breath. The cords which in all but the most 
 savage places of the world attach a man to his 
 own age were relaxed, and I felt myself to stand 
 at the furthest limit of the vista of time, the van- 
 ishing point where history becomes involved in 
 the very catastrophes of the material structiu'C of 
 the earth. That subtle human influence which 
 places where men have long inhabited most cer- 
 tainly absorb, distilled and became palpable like 
 dew. The sense of unease which always hangs 
 about habitations abandoned by men was the 
 more disquieting here because it was impossible to 
 shape any picture of the manner of life their in- 
 habitants had lived. They lived too near the begin- 
 nings of time and they lived too near the brute. 
 The dread of this tenantless city pursued me up 
 the ravines and among the barren fields. It was 
 a comfort to see the white road beneath the stars, 
 stretching like a rescuing arm from the towns of 
 living men down into this haunted abyss. But it 
 
 146 
 
OUR LADY OF MONTE TORO 
 
 was not until I smelt the smell of rank tobacco 
 and drank the sour red wine in the cafe of the 
 village of San Clemente that I felt the reassuring 
 contact of familiar things and gladly surrendered 
 myself again to the fetters, so often irksome, of 
 this present time and civilisation. 
 
 At the summit of the miniature mountain, 
 almost in the centre of the island, stands a little 
 whitewashed church, to which pilgrims climb 
 barefooted to beg our Lady of Monte Toro to in- 
 tercede for them. And being healed of their in- 
 firmities, they hang their rings and earrings, their 
 rosaries and crosses and precious stones, about 
 the image of the Mother and her Son and go down 
 the hill rejoicing. 
 
 Standing upon the little terrace outside the 
 church, you look down upon what seems not to 
 be a real island, but only a page out of an atlas, 
 on which a coloured island is outlined against a 
 faint blue sea — so dominating is the standpoint 
 and so miniature the scale. At the westernmost 
 extremity is the white dot which marks Ciuda- 
 dela, and at the easternmost rise the heights 
 above Mahon. To the north is the almost land- 
 locked harbour of Fornells, no bigger than a pool 
 of rain-water when the blue sky is reflected in it. 
 The indented coast-line forms the boundary of a 
 
 147 
 
THE LOST JEWEL 
 
 chart rather than of a landscape. The view shows 
 itself in a mosaic of greens and browns — ^the dark, 
 irregular masses of wild olives, the light green 
 squares and triangles of stony wheat-fields, and 
 the liver-coloured patches of naked soil. Here 
 and there a town shines like a drift of newly fallen 
 snow. Sprinkled among the fields are dots of pink 
 and white, the painted farmsteads which have in 
 some way never acquired a local character, but 
 belong to the same order of architecture as that 
 of the doll's house. 
 
 So small, so bare, so insignificant in aspect, it 
 is difficult to believe that this toy island ever had 
 any part in the stormy life of Europe. It is 
 scarcely credible that the tumult of the nations 
 should have made itself heard above the surge of 
 its seas and the singing of its winds. Yet it has 
 in its turn received the mark of every civilisation 
 and suffered violence at the hands of every people 
 that has struggled for the supremacy of the 
 Mediterranean. Like all the other islands of the 
 archipelago it has been a shuttlecock in the con- 
 test between East and West, tossed from the 
 Carthaginians to the Romans, from the Romans 
 to the Moors, and from the Moors to the Spani- 
 ards. But, unlike the others, it found no rest even 
 when the power of Spain had finally beaten off 
 the last of the marauding Corsairs. For the game 
 of Europe versus Asia being finally decided in 
 favour of Europe, the new game of the Balance 
 
 148 
 
THE ISLE OF UNREST 
 
 of Power began among the European nations, 
 and Menorca was dropped like an ounce weight, 
 now on one side, now on the other side of the 
 scale. England, casually piecing together an 
 empire out of the pickings of the moribund terri- 
 tories of Spain, coveted that precious jewel the 
 harbour of Mahon. Thrice her squadrons bore 
 down upon the island, upon which she set such 
 a price that once, in her exasperation at losing it, 
 she did a thing that astonished Europe. She shot 
 poor Admiral Byng. Dans ce pays-ci il est bon 
 de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encou- 
 rager les autres, sneered Voltaire. France, scarcely 
 less covetous, for a short spell of the seven un- 
 easy years between 1756 and 1763 made herself 
 mistress of the isle. Conquered and reconquered, 
 Menorca had to wait till the nineteenth century 
 had dawned before she was rid of the last of her 
 alien masters. 
 
 But even with the knowledge that all this re- 
 cord of contention is most indisputably written 
 down in many truthful histories, still, as one looks 
 down from the height of Monte Toro upon the 
 island sequestered among its lonely seas, it costs 
 an effort to believe that it has lived in the very 
 vortex of human trouble. The lazy mules wind 
 their way through the lanes beneath their piled- 
 up burdens ; the oxen drag the plough painfully 
 through the stony fields — ^the plough that does 
 not cut the soil like a knife, but stabs it with a 
 
 149 
 
THE LOST JEWEL 
 
 heavy iron spear-head, the very same that the 
 Romans used. All around there is a slumbrous 
 noise of insect life, and from a distance comes the 
 fluting of nightingales. The island is at last 
 asleep, and now its two thousand years of tumult 
 are no more than an unhappy, scarcely remem- 
 bered dream. 
 
 150 
 
VII 
 
 SEPULCHRES AND WHITEWASH 
 
 Menorca is cut in two by a carretera which runs 
 for thirty straight, dusty miles between Mahon 
 and Ciudadela. Governor Kane first constructed 
 it, and the country people still call it the carretera 
 d'en Kane, although they pronounce the gover- 
 nor's name as Canny. Twice a day there is con- 
 sternation and confusion all along the route as 
 the motor omnibus thunders by in a cloud of dust. 
 I alighted at Mercadal, the half-way stopping- 
 place, where there is a correspondencia with the 
 port of Fornells in the north and the village of 
 San Cristobal in the south. The correspondencia 
 turned out to be a canvas-hooded coster's cart, 
 the shafts of which supported an effete and dis- 
 consolate donkey. The mayoral, for such is the 
 high-sounding title of the driver of the most 
 humble diligence, told me to mount, and made a 
 courteous pretence of making room for me. Cer- 
 tainly there was little enough room to make, for 
 besides the driver and myself and my luggage, 
 the cart was encumbered with loaves, vegetables, 
 milk-pails, plough-shares, and mail-bags. The 
 
 151 
 
SEPULCHRES AND WHITEWASH 
 
 mayoral, who also combined the offices of post- 
 man, baker, and general carrier, occupied a 
 cushioned seat, while I found an insecure and 
 painful couch among the loaves. As soon as we 
 began to move — and between rest and motion 
 there was scarcely a perceptible difference — ^the 
 driver commenced to deliver a monologue to the 
 donkey, which he cursed, coaxed, threatened, and 
 satirised for three-quarters of an hour without a 
 pause. At the end of that time he turned to me 
 and inquired how many republicans there were 
 in my country. I was unable to give him the 
 figure, whereupon he drew a weekly newspaper 
 out of the mail-bag and fell to reading it. It con- 
 sisted of only a single sheet, two-thirds of which 
 were occupied by a black-edged announcement 
 informing the world at large that the inconsolable 
 spouse of a deceased islander, his sons, sons-in- 
 law, cousins, nephews, aunts, and the rest of his 
 relations (absent and present) requested the at- 
 tendance of his friends at his obsequies, for which 
 service the Bishops of Barcelona, Palma, and 
 Ciudadela had granted indulgences in the usual 
 form. He put the paper away and began to study 
 the post cards addressed to the various inhabi- 
 tants of San Cristobal, which manifestly he found 
 more diverting and informative. 
 
 Having thus whiled away the afternoon in tra- 
 versing the four miles from Mercadal to San 
 Cristobal, we at last arrived at our journey's end. 
 
 152 
 
THE ENTHUSIASTS 
 
 " Caballero, my house is your house ! " exclaimed 
 the mayoral, who never failed in those extrava- 
 gant, unmeaning courtesies of Spain, indicating 
 with a pompous gesture the post-office, bakery, 
 and general carrier's depot. I thanked him, and 
 informed him that my apartments at the Fonda 
 de la Estrella were equally at his disposal ; and so 
 we parted with mutual endearments, each know- 
 ing that we should see the other no more. 
 
 My object in coming to San Cristobal was to 
 visit the prehistoric remains in which the southern 
 part of the island abounds — the talayots, taulas, 
 and sepulchral caves. The information volun- 
 teered by the coffee-drinkers at the Inn of the 
 Star was uncertain and conflicting. Some said 
 they were enchanted, some elaborated details of 
 the construction of a colossal monument by a 
 single man in a single night ; the most prudent 
 referred me to the doctor and the chemist. It 
 was not immediately obvious why San Cristobal 
 should require the services both of a doctor and a 
 chemist, for its air is the very elixir of life, and 
 there appears to be no good reason why its in- 
 habitants are not immortal. I discovered, how- 
 ever, that they had not so much a cure of the 
 bodies of the living as of the spirits of the dead. 
 They were the guardians of the primeval necro- 
 pohs. They lived not in the present age, but in 
 some epoch of the distant past. They were con- 
 temporaries of Pharaoh ; their religion was occult 
 
 153 
 
SEPULCHRES AND WHITEWASH 
 
 and pre-Christian ; their politics a kind of jingo 
 imperialism, but the empire whose affairs they 
 had at heart was the vanished empire of Rome. 
 The chemist described the doctor to me as un 
 medico en dilirio. But the delirium of the chemist 
 himself was so tremendous that the imagination 
 was unable to conceive the divine fury of the 
 doctor. The chemist was a Catalonian, and to 
 see him was to understand why Catalonia is the 
 driving wheel of Spain. His gestures were like a 
 drama, and his voice the brass of the orchestra. 
 To hear him tell of the fiesta of St. John was 
 to see the stallions proudly prancing down 
 the streets of San Cristobal and to choke with 
 the dust and the heat and be deafened with the 
 clangour of the band. 
 
 The night was all too short for these enthusi- 
 asts. At the break of dawn — or, to be precise, 
 just as the watchman was praising God and an- 
 nouncing that it was four o'clock and cloudy — 
 the chemist was calling for me to be up and away 
 to the sepulchral caves of Biniatzem. At the grey 
 of dawn sepulchral graves have no allurement ; 
 I felt no enthusiasm at the prospect of disturbing 
 the slumbers of the dead, and resented their in- 
 trusion upon mine. But the chemist was not to 
 be denied. Already he was tearing strident music 
 out of the heart of a guitar and mixing his 
 praises of profane love with the devout invoca- 
 tions of the sereno. When at length I descended 
 
 154 
 
m 
 o 
 o 
 
 % 
 
 a 
 
 EH 
 
A MYSTERIOUS LANDSCAPE 
 
 into the caf6, he, who had breakfasted at dead of 
 night, allowed me only to wash out the dregs of 
 sleep with a draught of cold water, and seizing 
 me by the arm he hurried me through the streets, 
 whose white walls were faintly rosy with the 
 dawn, and out into the open country. " Open " 
 country, however, it was in no proper sense of the 
 word. It was a tortuous, furtive, ancient country, 
 a country scarred with clefts which gaped like the 
 open wounds of the earth's crust, of immemorial 
 roads worn like the very grooves of time into the 
 eternal rock. It was a country that had suffered 
 petrification, grey with stone — stone of the fields, 
 stone of the interminable walls, stone of the 
 gaunt, secretive pillars. In this unearthly light 
 of the sinking moon and the rising sun it was full 
 of lurking mysteries. The landscape seemed un- 
 easy with the spirits of the dead, and the breezes 
 whispered secrets of abominable things. 
 
 In the midst of a field we came upon a giant 
 column, surrounded by a broken circle, which had 
 once looked down upon the terrible daybreak 
 rites of a dark-minded people. The faint frag- 
 ment of a Roman inscription which was decipher- 
 able upon it inspired the same kind of shock with 
 which one reads the signature of a modern tourist 
 upon a Gothic tomb ; for among monuments of 
 such antiquity the Romans were merely modern 
 interlopers like ourselves. We were in a country 
 in which the perspective of history was indefi- 
 
 155 
 
SEPULCHRES AND WHITEWASH 
 
 nitely prolonged, so that one's fixed conceptions 
 of the relations of epochs were bewildered and un- 
 settled. The Moorish invasion seemed a bizarre 
 impertinence, the Romans only modern imperial- 
 ists ; even the Carthaginian traders drew closer 
 to our own times than to the days with which 
 these stones were contemporary. 
 
 As we penetrated further into the heart of this 
 mysterious land the excitement of the chemist, 
 became supreme. He wrestled with imponder- 
 able stones ; he flung himself upon the ground 
 and scratched with his fingers like a terrier, 
 feverish to tear out the secrets of the soil. But 
 there was a method in his madness, for when he 
 lit upon a fragment of massive pottery he hunted 
 about until he had nosed out many other frag- 
 ments and skilfully pieced together a complete 
 Roman tile. At every step we were treading upon 
 the shards of buried civilisations. Here were bits 
 of pottery glazed with the black, metallic lustre 
 of Etruria, a green fragment of a Greek lucerna, 
 the arm and lip of a Roman amphora, the smooth, 
 white pebbles which the Balearic sUngers drove 
 into the temples of the Roman legionaries. At 
 last we reached the rock necropolis of Biniatzem 
 — low caves cut into the face of the ravine, with 
 small square doorways, with squat, forbidding 
 columns, with shallow graves dug out of the 
 rocky floor. In one cave, more difficult of access 
 than the rest, the chemist burrowed among the 
 
 156 
 
SEPULCHRAL SPORTS 
 
 debris and brought to light a very charnel-house- 
 ful of human bones. He sprang upon them with 
 deUght, fitted thigh-bones into knee-sockets and 
 worked the joints like a clockwork toy. He fitted 
 prehistoric men together as a child fits puzzles, 
 and in his delirium attributed to them the pro- 
 portion of giants. His fever was contagious, and 
 I found myself gathering together skulls which 
 he affirmed were prehistoric and wrapping them 
 up in a copy of the Daily Telegraph — too ex- 
 hilarated with this new sport of plunging into 
 the abyss of time to heed the irony of it. 
 
 The streets were flashing with the hot sun of 
 the forenoon when we returned to San Cristobal, 
 panting and fatigued after this delirious scamper 
 through the ages. " Somos dos intrepidos ! " the 
 chemist exclaimed with a glow of satisfaction as 
 he wiped his streaming forehead — we were two 
 intrepid ones ! And then, as if his brain were not 
 already sufficiently ablaze with I know not what 
 impossible enthusiasms and imaginings, he gulped 
 down the fire and sugar and aniseed that they sell 
 at five centimos a glass, before he dashed off to 
 compound drugs for the neglected sick. 
 
 The carretera d^en Kane terminates in the an- 
 cient city of Ciudadela, lying snugly at the end of 
 a narrow, rocky creek which winds into the land 
 
 157 
 
SEPULCHRES AND WHITEWASH 
 
 like a river. It is the seat of the bishopric and 
 the home of an absentee nobiUty. Although its 
 bishopric is a comparatively modern creation, it 
 has something of the pompous pose which cathe- 
 dral cities invariably acquire. It has escaped the 
 English transformation, and preserves its Spanish 
 character better than any other town in the 
 island. The houses which flank its arcaded streets 
 are more ample and dignified. It takes the air 
 in spacious malls, set with alleys of plane trees 
 and flanked with stone benches, and in wide 
 plazas surrounded by the disconsolate eighteenth- 
 century palaces whose noble masters are away 
 spending their rents in Madrid — ^if, indeed, it be 
 really possible for any rent to be squeezed out of 
 the stony fields of Menorca. On the banks of the 
 little creek sit swarthy fishermen mending their 
 nets, which they twist round toes as brown as the 
 net itself, and singing untuneful Moorish melo- 
 dies with all the vigour of their iron lungs. From 
 the cafes in the harbour comes the busy music of 
 guitars, and in the air is the saucy laughter of 
 girls — for Menorca wears a cheerless aspect but 
 a cheerful heart. 
 
 Although the EngUsh moved the seat of govern- 
 ment to Mahon, Ciudadela still imitates in a petty 
 way the gaiety of capitals. In addition to the 
 Cine there is a Casino Republicano,^here I found 
 la simpatica y artistica Sorianita, a flashing little 
 figure in scarlet and emerald, who darted about 
 
 158 
 
FANDANGO ! 
 
 the stage like a goldfish in a bowl and made 
 fierce grimaces at the citizens. They were en- 
 raptured. They showered caramels upon her, and 
 in token of their homage unloosed a cageful of 
 doves, which unfortunately singed themselves in 
 the jets of acetylene gas and ended their bright 
 career in the dust of the pit. The storm of ap- 
 plause, however, never faltered, and La Sorianita, 
 bending over the footlights and spreading her 
 arms out interrogatively, exclaimed, " Que que- 
 reis ? " " Fandango ! fandango ! " came the an- 
 swering shout as from a single throat. Accord- 
 ingly the music struck up again, and the little 
 figure in scarlet and emerald beat out maddening 
 thunder from the boards with her high-heeled 
 shoes, until the citizens could contain themselves 
 no longer and flung their sombreros in a black 
 shower upon the sympathetic artist. 
 
 Many a despondent city of the peninsula would 
 do well to follow the brave example of Ciudadela. 
 It is unquestionably in a decline. It has been de- 
 prived of its pride of place as capital of the island. 
 Its nobles have deserted it. It has shrunk some- 
 what, so that its wide spaces are a little too large 
 for it. It has suffered all the blows of evil fortune 
 which induce the deadly torpor of the piieblo gris. 
 But it has a gallant heart. Instead of spending 
 itself in unavaihng regrets, it goes nightly to 
 the Casino Republicano to watch la simpatica 
 
 159 
 
SEPULCHRES AND WHITEWASH 
 
 Sorianita, and forgets its lapsed glories in the 
 merry noise of her indefatigable heels. 
 
 ''^ Ily a unefemme 'plus jolie qu'une jolie femme, 
 unefemme laide qui plait," and perhaps the same 
 is true of islands. Menorca has none of the rich 
 beauty of the South. One would say that in some 
 primeval convulsion of the earth it had got 
 shuffled out of its proper place in an archipelago 
 of the Atlantic and happened upon the Mediter- 
 ranean by accident. Its features are harsh, severe, 
 and monotonous. But like a woman who has no 
 natural beauty it has cultivated that friendly 
 charm, not apparent in a passing glance, which 
 often goes deeper and lasts longer than super- 
 ficial beauty. It is so poor that it has never been 
 able to make itself beautiful with churches and 
 palaces as its wealthier sisters in the Mediter- 
 ranean have done, and so it has had to make itself 
 beautiful with whitewash. Or rather, it has done 
 a thing still rarer — ^it has made whitewash itself 
 beautiful. It has discovered its aesthetic value. 
 It has Ufted it up from its lowly place in the 
 hierarchy of beautiful textures and used it to 
 provoke the challenge of marble. The little towns 
 of Mercadal, San Cristobal, and Alayor — ^names 
 which ring in the ear Uke bells — are snow-white 
 from the tip of their steeples to the floor of their 
 cellars, and when the sun at noon stands high 
 
 i6o 
 
THE LIGHT OF FAERY 
 
 above them, their streets become luminous rivers 
 through which vibrating waves of Ught roll visi- 
 bly. It is not the feverish light of the Mediter- 
 ranean, but a crystaUine light that has something 
 of the quality of water — clear, cool, and baptis- 
 mal. The whitewashed walls seem to act in the 
 manner of a prism, breaking up the glare of noon 
 — whose terrible melancholy all sensitive souls 
 know too well — into the tenderest lilac and rose. 
 The surface of the houses becomes translucent, 
 like the glaze of a rare Nankin vase. And in this 
 well of light the men and women walk as if trans- 
 figured, with shining countenances which cannot 
 help but smile. 
 
 But there is one effect of light which, I think, 
 happens nowhere else but in the whitewashed 
 streets of Mercadal, San Cristobal, and Alayor. 
 It comes in those fugitive moments when you 
 cannot say whether it is day or night. It is not 
 sunlight and it is not moonlight ; it is at once 
 both and neither. Overhead the sky darkens to a 
 sullen purple, and towards the horizon, which is 
 no further away than the end of the street, it 
 pales into jade and amber. The moon is faint as 
 a wisp of cloud, but the sky is so thick with stars 
 that it stretches over the roofs like a celestial 
 embroidery work. The light that fills the street 
 is pure silver, but the light that strikes on the 
 walls is a dove's sheen of rose and mauve and opal. 
 A man who has seen it has seen for once and all the 
 L i6i 
 
SEPULCHRES AND WHITEWASH 
 
 light of faery. It has magic in it too, for it brings 
 the children trooping into the streets, and fills 
 their bodies with an ecstatic gaiety which the 
 mere sun can never awaken. They dance like 
 elves in a moonlit glade — ^but like very Spanish 
 elves ; they stamp with their feet and twist their 
 arms and bodies into serpentine curves, and 
 pucker their mouths into amazing grimaces. 
 Heaven knows where they have learnt it all, for 
 surely La Sorianita never flaunted her scarlet and 
 emerald in the virgin streets of San Cristobal. It 
 is the magic of the jewelled light which stirs an- 
 cestral motions in their blood. 
 
 Menorca is barren of flowers, but very fruitful 
 in children. Here they appear to be lighter- 
 limbed and lighter-hearted than the children of 
 Spain or than the children of Mallorca even. 
 There they fall too readily into the habits of 
 grown men and women, and their faces show a 
 sad wisdom, as though their hearts had told them 
 truth too soon. But the children who are drawn 
 from their beds by this enchanted light and fill 
 the streets with a rejoicing noise, know only that 
 divine folly which is the wisdom the world will 
 never learn. Very beautiful they are with their 
 eyes of Moors, their sweeping, mane-like hair, and 
 flashing, copper-coloured legs. But if you wish to 
 see the most beautiful of them all you must go to 
 the fonda in the Calle Ancha at Alayor. You will 
 know her by the way in which the broad, pink 
 
 162 
 
THE ELF-CHILD 
 
 ribbons gather the hair from her forehead and let 
 it fall in massy loops against her oval face, and 
 by the long lashes which rest on her cheeks, and 
 by the innocent coquetry of the poise of her chin. 
 She will stand with her arms folded on the table 
 while you dine and watch you out of half-closed 
 eyes. And when she has taken away the bad, 
 sweet wine they make in Alayor and set before 
 you a glass of the driest wine of Jerez, she will 
 look at you with all the earnestness of ten Aprils, 
 and say in the archaic Menorquin speech, Escolti ! 
 yo li fere una pregunte — listen, and I will ask you 
 a question ! 
 
 But if you want to know what that question is, 
 you must go yourself to Alayor — and I know no 
 better reason for going. 
 
 The sun had set an hour ago when the Monte 
 Toro slipped down between the low shores of 
 Puerto Mahon and underneath the guns of the 
 battery on La Mola. The north wind was driving 
 up a bank of angry cloud across the fading sky. 
 The encroaching night engulfed the island, with 
 all the memories of the undecipherable past locked 
 up in its secretive stones. Obscured were the in- 
 numerable perplexed landscapes which are always 
 on the point of communicating the mysteries that 
 seem to trouble them, but always become inscru- 
 table again in the very moment of disclosure. 
 
 163 
 
SEPULCHRES AND WHITEWASH 
 
 The shore receded until it became a black bar 
 upon the horizon, over which smouldered the 
 last sullen fires of the twilight. A group of Span- 
 ish soldiers were standing round a lantern at the 
 stern, clapping their hands like children and sing- 
 ing couplets in praise of the island which Admiral 
 Byng was shot for losing. 
 
 But, after all, was it not a delinquency which 
 might perhaps have been forgiven ? . . . 
 
 164 
 
IBIZA 
 
VIII 
 
 THE AMOURS OF SANTA EULALIA 
 
 On a Saturday afternoon towards the end of May 
 in front of the fonda of the only town in the 
 island of Ibiza, which is therefore necessarily 
 the capital, stood waiting a burrico and carreton- 
 cito, or in plain English, a little donkey and a 
 little donkey-cart. In this humble conveyance I 
 purposed to make the tour of the island. Bom- 
 bita was a very fragile, Lilliputian donkey, with a 
 tender, mouse-like skin and contemplative eyes. 
 It would have been less surprising to have ob- 
 served him meekly following in the procession of 
 toy animals about to enter a Noah's ark than to 
 see him standing there in the sunlight, seriously 
 proposing to draw the cart, the luggage, and my- 
 self through the plain and over the distant hills. 
 But I reflected that if his needle-like legs were 
 diminutive, a foreseeing providence had adapted 
 the scale of the island to their faltering steps. 
 
 Travelling in a donkey-cart is the most tran- 
 quillising thing in life — at all events, if the donkey 
 is as well-mannered as Bombita was. He was 
 careful always to walk upon the right side of the 
 
 167 
 
THE AMOURS OF SANTA EULALIA 
 
 road, he crossed over to the left on those rare 
 occasions when he wished to take precedence of 
 another donkey, and without any pressure of the 
 reins he stopped at every place where they sell 
 anisado. Indeed, he took upon himself all the 
 direction and responsibilities of the journey, leav- 
 ing his driver infinite peace for dreams. 
 
 On a hot afternoon at the bottom of a donkey- 
 cart dreams have none of their stormy midnight 
 energy. You lie on your back, just a little above 
 the earth, and not so very far from the lazy skies 
 that slide past above your head. If but to think 
 is to be full of sorrow, this is a ciu-e for all the 
 busy mischief of the mind; for thought itself 
 dissolves like the useless fleeces of cloud in the 
 measureless sky. The mind becomes a mirror 
 which reflects nothing but the blue emptiness 
 overhead. And in this middle state of conscious- 
 ness you are just aware of people in other trances 
 and other donkey-carts drifting up and down the 
 smooth high-road, which in the droning afternoon 
 becomes a kind of travelling dormitory. Vacant 
 faces look down upon you out of the void and 
 wish you laconic tardes. Observe, we do not wish 
 each other " good " or any other variety of after- 
 noons, but simply afternoons, afternoons abso- 
 lute, afternoons upon the carretera, slothful, 
 heart-easing, eternal. For if there really be any 
 place where it is always afternoon, it is upon the 
 carreteras of Mediterranean Spain, and though 
 
 i68 
 
AN IBIZAN OASIS 
 
 there is no lotus to eat, there is anisado to drink, 
 which is just as cheap and perhaps- as effective. 
 
 We travelled at first along the circle of the bay, 
 then through a fertile plain, beneath the dripping 
 blossoms of arholes de paraiso. The low hills closed 
 in upon us ; we turned to the east and passed 
 through meagre wheat-fields, the soil growing red- 
 der and more barren as we approached the coast. 
 Towards evening Bombita came to a standstill, 
 and I found that we had halted in a kind of square 
 formed by the meeting of four roads. There was 
 a fountain in the middle of it, and at the end of a 
 tree-shaded avenue I caught a glimpse of the sea, 
 only a stone's throw away. Round the square 
 stood a few detached buildings, some of them like 
 Arab fortresses, white, flat-roofed, and dominated 
 by a single palm. After travelling in the sun over 
 the dry red soil, the coolness and the greenness of 
 the place gave Santa Eulalia the illusion of a 
 desert oasis. Bombita had, of course, stopped in 
 front of the fonda, and already the fondista was 
 searching me over the edge of the cart with the 
 glassy stare of eyes that have almost lost the 
 power of sight. As he said nothing I began to 
 infer that he had also lost the faculty of speech, 
 but he comprehended everything, unharnessed 
 Bombita, and then brought me a glass of anisado. 
 I was about to drink it when I recollected that all 
 the exemplary travellers I had read about always 
 postponed the satisfaction of their own needs 
 
 169 
 
THE AMOURS OF SANTA EULALIA 
 
 until they had cared for the wants of their beast. 
 When I set out on my journey I had no notion 
 as to what sort of food Bombita would consider 
 most palatable, but I trusted to pick up informa- 
 tion by the way. I inquired, therefore, if there 
 were any thistles to be had. It seemed so un- 
 appetising a dish to end the day with that I half 
 suspected the tradition must be derived from 
 some Bestiarium or curious compilation of medi- 
 eval lore, and probably was as near to the 
 truth as the fiction of the shrieking mandrake. 
 They told me that Bombita would prefer the 
 fruit of the algarroba tree, which certainly 
 seemed a more rational choice and confirmed 
 the opinion I had already formed of his intelli- 
 gence. 
 
 I had previously ordered my supper of Con- 
 cepcion, the fondista's daughter, a sad-eyed girl, 
 dressed all in black, whom I recognised at once, 
 for I had seen her many times in Bellini's pictures 
 of the Madonna. She sat in the doorway knitting, 
 her face growing sadder as the twilight deepened 
 into dark. She radiated an almost holy calm, so 
 that it was impossible to allude to the absence of 
 any preparation for supper. Experience, more- 
 over, had taught me that in Spain it is useless to 
 attempt to expedite matters. Padencia and 
 manana are the watchwords, and to-night it 
 seemed as if the morrow would literally arrive 
 sooner than the meal. But towards eleven o'clock 
 
 170 
 
s 
 o 
 
 o 
 
A SMILING CHURCH 
 
 the fondista reappeared. He was not dumb, after 
 all, for he spoke two words, and those, to my 
 astonishment, in English : " Mister — breakfast." 
 I looked into his face steadily, but his glassy eyes 
 were as humourless as those of an owl. 
 
 When I went to Mass the next morning I was 
 aware of an atmosphere which I had never felt 
 in a church before. The church was not dark, as 
 most Spanish churches are, but illuminated by a 
 happy light which streamed in through the open 
 door. It was clean and bare, whitewashed within 
 and without. The gilt retablo was as gaudy as a 
 merry-go-round at a fair. The saints smiled down 
 indulgently, as though they knew all that was in 
 the hearts of men and women, and were not dis- 
 pleased. The Madonna was the prettiest doll that 
 you could ever wish to give to a child. She had 
 dull golden hair and black eyelashes which shaded 
 demure but alluring eyes. Her dress was of silvery 
 silk, embroidered with gold, and she wore many 
 dainty frills of exquisite lace. The church was so 
 crowded that there was scarcely room for the 
 dogs to lie down comfortably. The right half of 
 the nave where the women sat was as gay as a 
 garden in June. Almost all the women had June 
 faces — afresh, sun-warmed, and ripening ; for 
 youth is as supreme in Ibiza as age in the dead 
 cities of the plain. 
 
 The head-dress of the girls was a bright panuelo 
 or handkerchief, orange-colovired for the most 
 
 171 
 
THE AMOURS OF SANTA EULALIA 
 
 part, knotted under the chin. It disclosed in the 
 front a gleaming mass of black hair, scrupulously 
 parted and brushed flat on either side, with a few 
 strands on the forehead twisted into fine ringlets. 
 At the back the hair was plaited into a pigtail as 
 thick as a cable, at the end of which were tied 
 long pink ribbons falling almost to the heels. 
 The breast shone with an array of gold : in the 
 centre a massive crucifix, above it an open crown, 
 and below a large painted medallion of the Ma- 
 donna or patron saint, a chain formed of large 
 gilt lozenges falling in loops from the shoulders, 
 and a number of finer chains arranged crossways. 
 The fingers were almost wholly hidden by broad 
 plated rings, to which delicate little threads of 
 gold were attached, making a fringe about the 
 finger-tips. Twelve large gold buttons were sewn 
 closely together upon the sleeve from the wrist to 
 the elbow. A shawl of yellow or blue fell from 
 the shoulders to the waist, and below it hung a 
 small apron of vivid green or mauve, the Ibicencas 
 being fearless in adding colour to colour. The 
 skirts were hooped in the early Victorian manner. 
 On the other side, where the men sat, the 
 colouring was in a more sober scheme of blue and 
 black. They wore a short loose jacket, cut away 
 at the hips, an open pleated shirt, trousers which 
 fitted closely at the knees and swelled out at 
 the ankles sailor fashion. A red sash was wound 
 twice or thrice round their waists, and round their 
 
 172 
 
THE USES OF MASS 
 
 necks was knotted a handkerchief of red silk or 
 white lace. All carried in their hands a stiff, wide- 
 brimmed sombrero, either black or drab in colour, 
 with a black ribbon edged with yellow or pink. 
 Their figures were short, alert, clean-limbed, 
 moving freely without the unwieldiness of men 
 who labour on the soil. Most of the youths wore 
 a rose behind their ear. They entered the church 
 with a brisk step, dropped for a few moments on 
 the knee, made the three crosses over their brows, 
 eyes, and mouth, kissed their thumbs, and then 
 gave up their attention to the faces behind the 
 fluttering fans on the other side of the nave. 
 
 Then began a fusillade of glances, which was re- 
 turned from the masked batteries of the fans. 
 The fire was no mere feu de joie, but a deadly en- 
 counter ; not a smile that was merely flippant or 
 trivial or coquettish, but regards that were grave, 
 as all ardour is grave. Then I knew that Mass 
 may have other uses than that of devotion. One 
 breathed something more intoxicating than the 
 smoke of incense. The air was also heavy with 
 the smoke of passion. There was an exciting 
 contrast between the tranquil negotiation at the 
 altar and the secret electrical intelligence of 
 youthful bodies. The place was warm with 
 breathing human emotion, life burning at the 
 fever-point. 
 
 Certainly the chief business of Santa Eulalia is 
 loving. It seems to have no other occupation. 
 
 173 
 
THE AMOURS OF SANTA EULALIA 
 
 To be sure, there are two or three corn mills along 
 the river-side, but the river is a willing slave, and 
 toils on feast days and holy days while the miller 
 is away dancing. In one of the cool, obscure mills 
 I spent the lazy hours after the midday comida, 
 listening to the ancient, easeful noises — ^the 
 chuckle of the water as it leapt upon the wheel, 
 the tic-tac of the stick that shook the trickle of 
 yellow grains out of the bin, the whirr of the 
 ponderous mill-stones spinning round like tee- 
 totums. The flour dust danced in the shafts of 
 light that slanted across the gloom. The miller's 
 wife brought in a flask of purple wine that was 
 passed round from mouth to mouth in a kind of 
 loving cup. The guardia civil dropped in, as was 
 his wont on a Sunday afternoon, grave, courte- 
 ous, and handsome, as a giiardia civil should be 
 and almost invariably is. 
 
 " You must have little to do in a place Uke 
 this ? " I asked him. " Little enough," he said, 
 " if it weren't for the young men courting." 
 Happy Santa Eulalia, whose only crime is that 
 of loving too well ! 
 
 When the sun had begun to touch the rim of 
 the western hills a faint tapping sound, like the 
 beating of a tom-tom, came up from the seashore. 
 I went down from the mill towards the sea, and 
 found a company of boys and girls dancing on a 
 level piece of ground just above the water's edge. 
 A youth was beating on a small drum, long and 
 
 174 
 
DANCING BY THE SEA 
 
 narrow in the barrel, at the same time piping a 
 tremulous air on a wooden pipe. It had a very 
 limited range of notes, but it softened the mono- 
 tonous rhythm of the tamboril and made a sooth- 
 ing, not unmelodious noise, full of ancient peace. 
 The girls, with their fluttering silks and encum- 
 bering crinolines, glided round in circles with the 
 minimum of motion, scarcely raising the foot 
 above the ground, rarely swaying their bodies, 
 their elbows bent and their hands lifted up in a 
 prayer-like attitude. The boys leapt round them 
 like young tigers at play, at the same time making 
 a noisy clatter with the castanets. There was not 
 the beauty of grace, but the beauty of strength 
 and agility, in their movements. A shade more 
 violence, and their dancing would have become 
 a romp ; but the fierceness which always seemed 
 to be warming to some dangerous explosion was 
 kept from trespass by a careful restraint. I think 
 that a man who has seen dancing at sunset by 
 the sea and among mountains will never after- 
 wards have much content in a ball-room. The 
 pure air, the unimprisoned space, the trembling 
 light upon the water, unlock a happier and pro- 
 founder fund of emotions. Something elemental 
 and infinitely remote enters into the exhilara- 
 tion of the dancers ; they have recaptured a 
 spirit which seems more proper to the sunlit early 
 days of the world. Their personal life is merged 
 in the universal life of Nature, and their bodies 
 
 175 
 
THE AMOURS OF SANTA EULALIA 
 
 are renewed by the ancient energies of the earth 
 and the sea. And yet the emotion which is thus 
 set free does not lose itself in an animal riot, be- 
 cause there is a traditional mould prepared for it 
 to flow into, a controlling measure and impulse 
 to which the limbs have moved for centuries. 
 
 Soon after night had fallen, the lads came up 
 to the fonda to court Concepcion. Now I began 
 to understand 'why the guardia civil had some 
 occupation after all, for courtship in Ibiza is a 
 delicate and dangerous negotiation. The girl is 
 not hasty to attach herself to a single lover. Why 
 should she be when she has the hearts of half a 
 dozen suitors and more to play with ? But the 
 game is full of dangers, and it requires a firm and 
 adroit hand to play it without disaster. No doubt 
 the zest is in the danger, and no doubt that was 
 why a darker colour flashed under Concepcion's 
 skin when the group of figtires came up to the 
 door. She knew, and the guardia civil knew, that 
 each of the broad red sashes hid an uneasy knife 
 which could gleam so prettily in the moonlight 
 if a look were a moment too long or a pressure 
 of the hand something too intent. All passed in- 
 side with scarcely a greeting, except one youth 
 who took the vacant seat next to, Concepcion in 
 the doorway. The others sat astride of benches 
 in the interior with a glass of anisado and a pack 
 of worn cards between their legs. But the play 
 was not very animated, for they had a preoccu- 
 
 176 
 
THE QUARREL 
 
 pation. Neither was there much heartiness in 
 their comradeship. Their hvely playfulness was 
 like that of young animals, half gambol and half 
 quarrel. A jest was met with a quick, interro- 
 gatory look ; a laughing blow was followed by a 
 difficult pause, during which peace and war hung 
 in the scales of the balance. There was plenty of 
 naked gunpowder lying about, and the sparks 
 were dropping freely. 
 
 Every quarter of an hour or so the youth who 
 was sitting next Concepcion in the doorway gave 
 up his seat to a rival, and Concepcion measured 
 out her smiles and glances with careful impar- 
 tiality to each in turn. The rules of the game 
 were clearly fixed, and so long as they were fol- 
 lowed there was little danger of the powder catch- 
 ing fire. An hour or so had lapsed when the turn 
 came to a handsome boy with fine eyes set under 
 dark, bushy eyebrows, a straight nose, and a 
 mouth that would have been perfect if the under 
 lip had been a little less full. I suppose he must 
 have played foul, although I am uncertain what 
 rule he broke. Perhaps he was encroaching upon 
 the time of the next comer, or perhaps — ^but the 
 candle gave so little light that it was not easy to 
 see distinctly. At all events, there were signs 
 of discontent, angry exclamations, upsetting of 
 benches, and general uproar. One whose turn 
 had not yet arrived strode across to the offender 
 and flung him out of his seat. The two faced one 
 
 M 177 
 
THE AMOURS OF SANTA EULALIA 
 
 another in the porch like game-cocks about to 
 fight. Concepcion interposed. She laid her hand 
 on the arm of the assailant and drew him into the 
 seat beside her. The storm blew over for the 
 moment, but there was thunder in the air, and 
 the remainder of the evening passed uneasily. 
 
 Towards midnight the youths went away in a 
 body, taking the road that led down to the sea. 
 Under the shadow of the trees the tumult began 
 again. They stopped at every half-dozen paces 
 to emphasise their threats and recriminations. 
 Each voice was lost in the general clamour. At 
 every halt the altercation grew fiercer. At last 
 they came to the edge of the sea. There they 
 stood in a little excited knot, gesticulating, men- 
 acing, shouting shrilly and passionately. Then 
 there was a sudden movement in the midst of the 
 circle, as if one had lurched forward. Something 
 shone in the moonlight, a cry went up sharper 
 than any that had gone before, and one of the 
 group staggered away a few paces with his hand 
 over his face. When he put his hand down, I saw 
 that his cheek was black with blood. The ag- 
 gressor walked away quickly with a companion. 
 The others gathered round the wounded boy and 
 went off with him along the shore. 
 
 During the evening the sky had been dark and 
 echoing with peals of thunder, but now the moon 
 had risen with a brightness like that of dawn. 
 The air was sultry. The scent of the sea mixed 
 
 178 
 
THE UNBEATEN TRACK 
 
 with sickly perfumes from the land. The earth 
 seemed to be breathing warmly and pantingly. 
 The shore was thick with dried seaweed, which 
 silenced the footsteps of the retreating figures. 
 When the voices passed out of earshot there was 
 no sound but the lapping of the waves of the tide- 
 less sea and the discord of the frogs trilling their 
 ardent loves. A soft rain began to fall. . . . 
 
 As soon as you leave the level carretera, of 
 which there is very little in Ibiza, travelling in a 
 donkey-cart ceases to be the most tranquillising 
 thing in life, and becomes the most exhausting. 
 The side roads here are the worst of the three 
 islands. Some of the hamlets are practically iso- 
 lated as far as wheeled traffic is concerned. It 
 had rained heavily during the night, and when I 
 started soon after dawn the wheels of the cart 
 sank deep into the soft red earth. We climbed up 
 painfully from Santa Eulalia to the centre of the 
 island, and then, after a few smooth miles on 
 the high-road to San Juan Bantista, we plunged 
 into a labyrinth of stony tracks through the hills 
 to San Miguel. The guardia civil had told me 
 that it was impossible to reach San Miguel with 
 a cart, and it is always wise to. take a guardia 
 civiVs word as the final truth. It is true that I 
 reached San Miguel, but not until my nerves and 
 the wheels of the donkey-cart were shattered to 
 
 179 
 
THE AMOURS OF SANTA EULALIA 
 
 pieces. The track descended in sudden, precipi- 
 tous slopes, strewn with boulders, and at times, 
 when a particularly deep cleft cut across the 
 track, Bombita put his feet together and leaped 
 from one rock to another like a mountain goat. 
 Occasionally I took a peasant boy into the cart 
 to act as pilot and direct me when it was prefer- 
 able to leave the road and steer a line across the 
 open country. At San Miguel I abandoned Bom- 
 bita and the cart as useless encumbrances, and 
 went forward on foot. 
 
 The scenery on the western side between 
 St. Miguel and St. Antonio is perhaps the finest 
 in the island. Ibiza, though it is smaller than 
 Menorca, plays at being a continent. Bare brown 
 hills, thinly covered with pines, rise one behind 
 another in miniature ranges, giving an illusion of 
 great extent. The more fertile slopes are banked 
 up with stone terraces, on which are grown wheat, 
 potatoes, tobacco, or sometimes vines. Here and 
 there a white, windowless, flat-roofed house 
 gleams among a luxuriant growth of cactus, with 
 a single palm waving over it — for in Ibiza there 
 are many little vignettes of Africa. The soil is 
 not fruitful, but it has a wayward air of pro- 
 ducing just what it will, more or less indepen- 
 dently of man's cultivation. There is less of the 
 suggestion of painful human effort than in the 
 Mallorquin plain. The roads are deserted. Occa- 
 sionally you see a bare-legged peasant woman in 
 
 i8o 
 
THE FORGOTTEN ISLE 
 
 a field, her skin the colour of the soil she bends 
 over, her head wrapped up in a coloured hand- 
 kerchief, wearing a wide white straw hat, edged 
 with black and with long black ribbons streaming 
 behind ; and occasionally on the roads you meet 
 one of that small, alert race of men, with their 
 sharply cut features, whose ancestry derives from 
 some more mysterious and possibly more eastern 
 stock than the Moors. When you travel at night- 
 fall among the little dark valleys that dip between 
 the hills, the country has so deserted and forlorn 
 an aspect that it gives the impression of having 
 been lost to human ken for centuries, and it is 
 only when you catch the distant echo of a song 
 that you remember the passionate race which 
 inhabits it. 
 
 i8i 
 
IX 
 
 THE IMPROVISERS 
 
 Perhaps it was because the daylight was show- 
 ing through the brim of my hat, perhaps because 
 we all tramped into San Antonio together, but 
 certainly the little port took it for granted that I 
 was in partnership with Juan and Jaime. Juan 
 and Jaime were two blind ballad-singers. Juan 
 was totally blind, and had the resigned, attentive 
 expression of a man who only overhears life. His 
 face was not really cast in an intellectual mould, 
 as you might at first have supposed, but merely 
 showed how despair had finally worn down into 
 asquiescence. He was scarcely past middle age, 
 but a life of guitar playing had bent his head over 
 his left breast. His guitar was always hanging at 
 his side — I never saw him without it — and his 
 delicate fingers kept straying among the strings. 
 Juan was younger, and had not yet arrived at 
 the total eclipse of blindness ; but the painful, 
 vertical hne, between his eyes told with what per- 
 plexity he groped his way in a twilight world, 
 leading Jaime by the hand. 
 
 The fonda at San Antonio is without a caf6, a 
 
 182 
 
BLIND BALLAD-SINGERS 
 
 silent house, little frequented and kept by an 
 ancient widow. She did not welcome us, but, on 
 the other hand, she did not repel us. She allowed 
 us to sit down on three chairs arranged in a row 
 in the midst of an empty stone-floored room. I 
 watched the grey light on the other side of the 
 window-pane rapidly disappear, until at last my 
 world became as obscure as that of Juan and 
 Jaime, and then we all sat in equal silence and 
 sightlessness. I don't know how long it was be- 
 fore the widow brought us a tallow candle and a 
 little cold fish. There were no knives or forks — 
 I suppose we were either too poor to pay for them 
 or too blind to use them. The fish was for us all, 
 the candle specially for me ; but I was the worse 
 off, for Juan and Jaime used their fingers with 
 more dexterity in their darkness than I in the 
 flickering candle-light. The meal over, the ballad- 
 singers had to go out to sing for money to pay 
 for it, and I had to go out with them ; for as we 
 were to sleep in an adjoining house and Juan was 
 entrusted with the key, wherever Juan went I 
 was obliged to follow. 
 
 I entered the cafe where we were to sing with 
 the feeling of humility and self-effacement proper 
 to a vagrant intruding upon a company of men 
 who are established and respected, who are as 
 easy in a cafe as if it were their own home, who can 
 gamble away their ten or twenty centimes in an 
 evening and never feel the loss. They were seated 
 
 183 
 
THE IMPROVISERS 
 
 round the tables in three or four groups, playing 
 with cards which were printed with strange de- 
 vices of suns, wine-cups, and blossoming boughs. 
 They ttirned and glanced at us from beneath 
 their sombreros as we entered, and I noticed them 
 settle down a little more comfortably in their 
 chairs when they saw us three purblind vagabonds 
 come in sneakingly out of the night. Whether our 
 singing would please them or not, at any rate, we 
 had given them a few centimos' worth of added 
 complacency. They felt the world a little more 
 stable underneath them, the heart within them a 
 little more at ease, the comfort of the anisado 
 a point or two more emphatic. Such is the 
 the use of beggars. There is a harshness in the 
 commiseration of the poor for the very poor ; 
 the dividing-line is so narrow and the satisfaction 
 of being on the right side so great. It seemed a 
 chilly atmosphere to sing into, and it would take 
 a merry song to warm it. But Juan and Jaime 
 had taken the precaution to warm themselves 
 with a glass of cana, a villainous kind of rum that 
 stabs the heart like a knife. I guided their hands 
 to the little glasses, and they raised the brimming 
 liquor very steadily to their lips and tossed it 
 down to their hearts in a single gulp. I was glad 
 that they could not see the smiling pity with 
 which they were watched, but I beheve they felt 
 it, for the perceptions of the blind are very fine 
 and faithful. They broke the silence with a few 
 
 184 
 
THE AGES OF WOMEN 
 
 valiant c|iords, and then we began a caustic 
 ballad about the ages of women. It went to a 
 lively air which I have now forgotten, but I re- 
 member that we came down sharply on the last 
 word of every couplet — 
 
 Las mugeres a Ics quince 
 
 Son espuma de Champan, 
 
 A los veinte son solera, 
 
 y los treinta son cognac ; 
 
 a los treinta y cinco, ajenjo 
 
 que nos hace desbarrar, 
 
 y en pasando de cuarenta. . . . 
 
 Here we paused, and then in the next line de- 
 scended the scale in thirds, so as to get on to a 
 sound bass foundation for firing off the final 
 epigram — 
 
 Va — ya ca — lor, — 
 Son vinagre nada mas ! 
 
 The epigram must have missed fire, for no one 
 uttered a word except a player who was counting 
 the tricks. We tried them again with something 
 a trifle less cynical, with just an inflection of ro- 
 mance in the voice and the music — 
 
 Siempre la muger se vende 
 Y siempre el hombre la compra, 
 Si es buena, toda la vida, 
 Si es mala, por una bora. 
 Solamente en los amores 
 Que llama la gente malos 
 Es donde nunca se pagan 
 Los besos ni los abrazos. 
 185 
 
THE IMPROVISERS 
 
 I suppose the company did not approve the 
 sentiment. Nobody appeared to be at all moved 
 except Jaime, whose voice quavered with emo- 
 tion, or it might have been with cana. He bent 
 close over his guitar, and it seemed to be telling 
 him things in an undertone which we could not 
 hear. Perhaps it was telling him of the days be- 
 fore his head had sunk upon his breast and his 
 eyes were sealed up, when the world had still a 
 sun in it, and he took the joys of a man between 
 Catalunian earth and sky. 
 
 As a last attempt we tried them with a few 
 couplets sung to the well-known tune of the 
 Garrotin — ^a,ll about the war against the Riffs and 
 the taking of Mount Gurugu, with the spirited 
 refrain — 
 
 Que te quieres apostar^ 
 Que te quieres apostar. 
 Que vengo del Gurugu ? 
 
 " What do you bet, what do you bet, that I come 
 from the Gurugu ? " The company did not seem 
 disposed to bet very much, but when Juan groped 
 round with the little tray, the centimos that 
 dropped in would certainly have bought a better 
 supper than the cold fish and the tallow candle. 
 I was about to pay for the cana that we had drunk, 
 but the landlord's" wife shook her head kindly. 
 
 " You're welcome to it," she said ; " it won't 
 be many nights of the year that you get a taste 
 of it." And I answered, " No." 
 
 i86 
 
CORPUS CHRISTI 
 
 The next morning I was waked by Juan, say- 
 ing, " Companero, se hace tarde, llega a las sets " — 
 " Comrade, it's late, nearly six o'clock." I found 
 it was very late indeed, for when I went out to 
 the cafe for breakfast the room was crowded and 
 the card-players had already finished their third 
 rubber. They were sitting in identically the same 
 places as on the evening before, and I should have 
 supposed that they had been sitting there all 
 through the night but for the fact that now they 
 were all in gala dress. For to-day was the feast 
 of Corpus Christi. 
 
 I don't know whether the little port of San 
 Antonio was aware that it was a feast day, al- 
 though I half believe that towns listen to what 
 is going on in the midst of them and that the 
 long-lived inhabitants of brick and stone respond 
 to the moods of their mortal companions. But 
 certainly it must have felt that there was a 
 special brightness in the air, for the little houses 
 looked down and smiled at their white reflections 
 in the water. Presently some boys climbed up on 
 to the roof of the church and, fastening cords to 
 the tongues of the two bells, began to ring them 
 in a fashion of their own — striking the deep bell 
 slowly and the shriller bell more quickly, so that 
 the one seemed to be overtaking the other ; then 
 reversing their relations, the little bell slackened 
 to a foot-pace, and the deeper one began to gallop 
 after it. The fisher-boys carried the saints out of 
 
 187 
 
THE IMPROVISERS 
 
 the church on their shoulders, and the girls, 
 shining with gold and orange-coloured silks, car- 
 ried the Virgin. The priests appeared bearing 
 the Host beneath its canopy. The port kneeled 
 before it. The rose leaves showered from the 
 balconies. The streets were full of a tranquil and 
 happy sanctity. 
 
 The morning had been fresh, but the afternoon 
 was threatening and oppressive. We were ga- 
 thered round a wooden table in an inner room in 
 the fonda, a company of fishermen and peasants 
 and girls. A famous copletista had come in from 
 the country, and we had assembled to hear him 
 make poetry. He was a man of about five-and- 
 thirty, with a face that an actor might have en- 
 vied. All his expression was concentrated in his 
 eyes. They were bright and beady. When he 
 laughed, the laugh kindled in the eyes, travelUng 
 outwards through a hundred wrinkles at their 
 corners and touching the mouth last of all ; when 
 he was troubled, the trouble distilled into mois- 
 ture ; and when he became passionate, the pas- 
 sion seemed to set the iris on fire. 
 
 We had no instrument, for the Ibicencos 
 have never naturaUsed the guitar, and there was 
 no tamboril at hand. Someone fetched a wooden 
 measure, such as they use to measure out wheat, 
 like a small bucket hooped with iron bands, nar- 
 rower at the mouth than at the base. This and a 
 small stick were given to the copletista. But he 
 
 i88 
 
THE COPLETISTA 
 
 shook his head, said that he had no voice, that 
 the mood was not upon him, that he was nervous, 
 that to-day he would be a Ustener. I had learnt 
 the value of Spanish refusals, and therefore I 
 knew that he would sing when he had almost 
 wearied our patience. But to-day more than the 
 customary patience was needed — ^the greater the 
 singer, the longer, I suppose, he was able to tease 
 the importunity of his hearers. At length, having 
 thoroughly felt the edge of the keenness of their 
 desire, he rested his elbow upon the barrel and 
 the barrel upon his knee ; and pulling out a white 
 handkerchief, which had not yet been used that 
 day — for it was still folded up into a neat square 
 — ^he pressed it over his eyes with his right hand. 
 Taking the stick in the other hand, he began to 
 tap upon the bottom of the barrel. The tapping 
 lasted many minutes, being a kind of invocation 
 of the muse. At last he burst into a long, harsh, 
 monotonous cry. The song was different from 
 any that I had heard before. It came more 
 closely to the bare monotone than the music 
 which Spain has borrowed from the Moors. It 
 was less passionate and less melancholy. It had 
 just a tremor of laughter in it, a laughter that 
 was not altogether wholesome, something be- 
 tween a sob and a sneer. But the most remark- 
 able feature of it was a meaningless refrain at the 
 end of every couplet, the use of which, I suppose, 
 was to give the singer pause to improvise the 
 
 189 
 
THE IMPROVISERS 
 
 next lines. It is possible to write the syllables 
 yug — yug — yug — yug — and they should be ex- 
 tended over half a dozen lines or so — ^but it is 
 impossible to convey any idea of their strange 
 hiccoughing intonation. Whether this incanta- 
 tion is also an inheritance from the Moors, or 
 whether from one of the more ancient, eastern 
 peoples who have inhabited Ibiza, I am not 
 learned enough in folk-music to say. Neither 
 could I understand the burden of the song, for 
 the words were in Ibicenco. They told me it was 
 a song about love, but it must have been whetted 
 with satire, for at times it shook the company 
 with laughter. 
 
 When he had ended, the stick and the wooden 
 measure were passed to a girl, who blinded her 
 eyes in a similar fashion and began to improvise 
 a song in the same unmelodious chant, only 
 giving the refrain with a softer tremolo, more 
 like the whinnying of a horse. Her voice in its 
 ordinary tone had a certain natural beauty, but 
 in her singing she seemed deliberately to suppress 
 it and to conform to an inflection as traditional 
 and impersonal as the melody itself. The impro- 
 vised tamboril was handed round from one to 
 another until almost all had sung. Some of the 
 songs were of an interminable length, so that 
 when the last was finished the hour of the evening 
 meal had arrived. 
 
 The company went out. Juan and Jaime and I 
 
 190 
 
DECEITFUL BEAUTY 
 
 sat in our three chairs in the middle of the empty 
 stone parlour. Darkness came in at the door. 
 The streets were emptied of the gaily dressed 
 throngs which had filled them all day. The feast 
 of Corpus, which had begun with the noise of 
 bells and of singing and of many voices, ended 
 in a sudden hush. The burden of sadness which 
 the blind ballad-singers carried upon them now 
 seemed to be unloosed and to fill the darkness. I 
 could hear Jaime's fingers tapping on the guitar. 
 Occasionally he struck a single mournful note, and 
 its vibrations shook the very citadel of the heart. 
 
 The city of Ibiza, like many towns upon the 
 Mediterranean, has a deceitful, mirage - like 
 beauty. At a distance it shines like a mount of 
 crystal, but as you approach it the wonder van- 
 ishes, and when you enter it you find it disorderly, 
 rather squalid, with the features of a fishing vil- 
 lage rather than of a capital. The streets are wide 
 or narrow as chance has left them, but always 
 steep and irregular. Every house has its balcony, 
 with a fluttering array of clothes hung out ; fowls 
 pick about hopefully in the gutters ; lambs and 
 goats are tethered to the doorposts, treading a 
 few wisps of dusty herbage under their feet. The 
 crown of the hill is occupied by La Ciudad, the 
 city proper, straitly confined within the massive 
 fortification which was constructed in the fif- 
 
 191 
 
THE IMPROVISERS 
 
 teenth and sixteenth centuries to give it security 
 from the Corsairs. When at last peace came to 
 the Mediterranean shores, houses sprang up all 
 round the harbour, forming the lower town known 
 as La Marina. Here live the fishermen, the 
 sailors, the day labourers, and here the life of 
 the town is at its busiest. 
 
 Up above, the streets are empty and quiet, 
 without a shop or a tavern or a cafe. The Ciudad 
 is dominated by the grey, weather-worn cathe- 
 dral. The structure is less than three hundred 
 years old, but where it now stands there once 
 stood the Moorish mosque, and before that the 
 Greek temple of Minerva, and before that the 
 Phoenician temple of Baal. For in Ibiza civilisa- 
 tion is buried beneath civilisation, but buried so 
 deeply that the memory of them is forgotten. In 
 the heart of a rocky slope outside the city walls 
 is a still more ancient city, the necropolis of the 
 Carthaginians, with its labyrinth of corridors and 
 infinite multitude of chambers and tombs. But 
 in the town itself almost all trace of the earlier 
 occupations has perished. On either side of the 
 Portal de las Tobias still stand the headless 
 Roman statues ; and here and there among the 
 gleaming whitewashed houses of the Ciudad is a 
 half-hidden Gothic arch or window of singularly 
 delicate beauty ; but these are all that remains 
 of ancient grandeur. Once Ibiza lay close to the 
 heart of the world. In return for its salt, the ore 
 
 192 
 
o 
 
 o 
 
 Ixl 
 
 K 
 
 H 
 
SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI 
 
 of its mines, its rich purple dye, which rejoiced 
 the daughters of Tyre, its terra-cotta figures, its 
 earthenware vessels, with their miraculous pro- 
 perty of healing those who suffered from the bite 
 of serpents, the wealth of the Mediterranean 
 flowed into it and exposed it to the covetousness 
 of all the lawless rovers of the sea. Now it lies in 
 a backwater, and its useless fortifications enclose 
 nothing that any people covets. With its wealth, 
 its magnificence has fallen from it. It has become 
 shabby and neglected, like a woman who, having 
 suffered a great misfortune, ceases to care for her 
 beauty. But neglect can never rob it of the 
 beauty of its site. It sits upon its lonely heights 
 above the sea, and from whatever side and at 
 whatever time you approach it, it shines with a 
 kind of enchantment. But it is most enchanted 
 when the skirts of sunset are trailing on the hills, 
 when it is starred with lights, and when its re- 
 flection strikes upon the golden floor of the bay 
 like a single palace, and that a fairy one. 
 
 La Marina certainly never wastes its regret 
 upon the past. It lives its own life busily and 
 noisily, chaffering all the morning under the mock 
 Parthenon which it has built for a market, and 
 in the evening strolling beneath the immature 
 trees of the Paseo de Vara de Bey, which it has 
 constructed to remind itself that it is a capital. 
 But it is busiest and noisiest on the Sunday after 
 Corpus Christi, when it celebrates a second Corpus 
 K 193 
 
THE IMPROVISERS 
 
 Christi feast all of its own. The clothes are re- 
 moved from the balconies, and their place is taken 
 by gay brocades, antimacassars, quilts, anything 
 that is rich enough in the primary colours ,' flags 
 are stretched across the streets ; gaudy little 
 shrines are erected against the houses ; every 
 vacant space is covered with yellow and red, the 
 national colours of Spain. Early in the morning 
 the long, narrow mule-carts begin to arrive from 
 San Juan, San Antonio, and Santa Eulalia, and 
 soon it is scarcely possible to pass along the 
 streets for the crowd of girls in hooped skirts, and 
 men with black, overshadowing sombreros. All 
 day long the children flock into the Arab-like 
 church of the Saviour, stroking the cheek, the 
 hand, and the dress of the Virgin, and then kiss- 
 ing the fingers that have dared to be so pre- 
 sumptuously intimate. 
 
 On the stroke of five, when the upper half of 
 the houses is still bathed in sunlight and the 
 lower half full of illuminated shadow, the saints 
 begin to emerge from the church. This is their 
 one annual holiday, the day on which they escape 
 from their stuffy glass shrines and for a few brief 
 hours take the air'and feel the sun. St. Roche 
 comes first, diffidently holding up his brown robe 
 with his thumb and forefinger so as to expose to 
 the inhabitants of the port the honomrable scar 
 upon his thigh, his head modestly averted to the 
 left. He is followed by St. Sebastian, who even 
 
 194 
 
g 
 o 
 
 B 
 
 H 
 
PROCESSIONAL 
 
 to-day has no respite from the agony of the 
 arrows which lodge in his naked body. The lower 
 branches of the tree to which he is bound support 
 the black felt hats of his bearers. St. Francis 
 points smilingly upwards to the strip of blue be- 
 tween the whitewashed walls with all that re- 
 mains of his broken forefinger. It is decorated 
 with a ring of pink ribbon, which perhaps serves 
 as a bandage. St. Peter shows no sign of pleasure 
 in his annual excursion, and St. Nicholas appears 
 to be incommoded in his task of reading the 
 volume which he holds in his hands by the dust 
 and heat and the tumult of the crowd. Lastly 
 comes the Virgin, all radiant in gold, smiling 
 benedictions. The procession jostles its way 
 slowly and painfully among the crowds, with all 
 those manifestations of devotion, irritation, awe, 
 hilarity, and tedium which accompany a religious 
 festival in countries where the Church is humble 
 and friendly and humane : the agitated efforts 
 of the euros to smack the children into line ; the 
 blowing out and relighting of candles ; the an- 
 noyance of the corporation at the dripping wax ; 
 the baffled attempt of the soldiers to preserve a 
 formal goose-step in the midst of the pushing of 
 the crowd ; the concern when the canopy above 
 the priests strikes against an overspreading tree 
 and imperils the safety of the monstrance ; the 
 sulking of the bandsmen, who cannot play be- 
 cause of the irruption of people among the band 
 
 195 , 
 
THE IMPROVISERS 
 
 and the dislodgment of the music pinned upon 
 the backs of the players in front ; the whistling 
 and signalling when the van of the procession 
 goes marching on unaware that the rear has 
 halted to pray at a shrine ; the welcome rests at 
 the shrines, when the priest kneels before the 
 artificial flowers and glass shades, and the bands- 
 men reUght their cigarettes ; the devout sinking 
 of the women upon their knees when the Host 
 passes, and their voluble indignation when the 
 men tread upon their skirts ; and then, when the 
 last bareheaded guardia civil has passed, the 
 plunge through the side streets to witness the 
 whole performance over again. 
 
 At last the procession emerges from the stifling 
 narrow streets into the cool, broad spaces along 
 the quay. The water is a serene expanse of tur- 
 quoise, with long tracts of silver where it is 
 ruffled by the wind. St. Francis smiles kindly 
 upon his little sister the sea, but St. Peter regards 
 it with stern malevolence, because he remembers 
 the weeping women who have implored his pro- 
 tection for their sons in vain, and because he 
 knows that there is an evil laughter in its heart 
 and because it is stronger than he. St. Roche 
 cannot see it, as unfortunately he is obliged to 
 look towards the left ; and St. Nicholas will not, 
 because he refuses to cease his pretence of reading 
 the blank page of his wooden book. Presently the 
 procession reaches the little Arab church. The 
 
 196 
 
FORMENTERA 
 
 guardia civiles kneel at the entrance. Sorrowfully 
 the saints return to their prison-house. One by 
 one they are locked in behind the glass doors of 
 their little shrines in the dark side-chapels, there 
 to stand with their fixed attitudes, engrossed in 
 their tedious occupations, until the next festival 
 of Corpus will permit them once again to rejoice 
 in the crowds and the flags and the sun and the 
 
 sea. 
 
 ■* * 
 
 * 
 
 On a day of brilliant sunshine, when the eye was 
 
 so dazzled with light that the sea appeared to be 
 
 a sombre indigo and the bare hills of Ibiza as white 
 
 as if they had been covered with hoar-frost, I 
 
 sailed across to Eormentera, the lesser of the 
 
 Pythiusae, in a falucha. Less than five miles of 
 
 water separate the two islands ; from the city of 
 
 Ibiza to the port of Formentera the distance is 
 
 about twice as great, but we made the crossing in 
 
 less than two hours. Formentera has little of the 
 
 beauty of the sister island. It is a flat, arid, 
 
 monotonous tract of land, rising into sudden 
 
 cliffs at its eastern and western extremities. The 
 
 soil is poor and thinly covered with stunted pines ; 
 
 the houses meagre and scattered. A road as 
 
 straight as an arrow runs inland for two miles 
 
 from the Salinas near the seashore, where the salt 
 
 is evaporated in low-lying reservoirs, to the little 
 
 hamlet of St. Francisco Javier, with its fortified, 
 
 whitewashed church. 
 
 197 
 
THE IMPROVISERS 
 
 - "When I returned in the afternoon to the har- 
 bour where we had landed, I found that the three 
 or four faluchas which had brought over passen- 
 gers in the morning had already left. It appeared 
 that I was marooned on this desolate island. I 
 saw, however, underneath a high wooden staging 
 a large two-masted /aiwc^a being loaded with salt; 
 It was due to sail as soon as the cargo was got on 
 board, and the captain agreed to take me as well 
 for a couple of reales. The fresh breeze which had 
 been blowing in the morning had dropped. As 
 soon as we were well out of the harbour the small 
 lateen sail under which we had started was 
 lowered and a larger one of enormous propor- 
 tions was hoisted. The yardf which was formed 
 of three light beams lashed together, was of pro- 
 digious length, and seemed to slant down in a 
 fine arch from the very depth of the sky itself. 
 But, in spite of the great expanse of canvas, we 
 glided scarcely perceptibly through the water. 
 The hatches were opened, and the sailors began 
 to shovel the salt prodigally into the sea, until 
 almost half the cargo was thrown overboard. 
 ''No vale nada," they laughed — it's worth 
 nothing ! 
 
 The sun was now setting, and Juanito, a beau- 
 tiful brown-skinned boy with laughing eyes, be- 
 gan to make preparations for supper. He fanned 
 a fire in a little brasier into a blaze, and set upon 
 it a bowl full of chipped potatoes and bleeding 
 
 198 
 
BECALMED 
 
 fragments of meat, the whole soaked in water and 
 oil. When it was cooked, we all gathered round 
 and dipped into the dish with wooden forks. 
 There was also a dish of lettuce, damped with 
 wine. Wine was handed round in a long-necked 
 bottle which had a tapering spout in its side. 
 Out of this the sailors drank dexterously, holding 
 it high above their heads and letting the wine 
 spurt into their mouths in a thin red thread. 
 They were hearty, kindly fellows, larger limbed 
 than the peasants of Ibiza, with a more distinc- 
 tively Spanish cast of features. After supper, 
 they rolled cigarettes of the rank-smelling fota, 
 a coarse tobacco which is grown in the island. 
 The wind had dropped down to a few fitful gusts ; 
 now and again the sail tugged uselessly at the 
 ropes, and finally hung idle against the mast. 
 The hills of Ibiza, not three miles away, glowed 
 with the dark, luminous colours which objects 
 take when the sun goes down in a bed of pure 
 gold. The lights of the city shone very faintly in 
 the further distance. The sailors began to sing. 
 The Spaniard cannot sing without some rhythmic 
 accompaniment, and as we had no instrument on 
 board, Juanito produced an old saw and a copper 
 coin, which served as a primitive guitar. They 
 sang chiefly in Castilian, and the song had a 
 different character from that of the Ibicenco pea- 
 sants. The last word of the couplet was drawn 
 out in long, falling cadences which rose again like 
 
 199 
 
THE IMPROVISERS 
 
 dying echoes. The music was melancholy, and 
 the words often full of the heart's sadness. 
 
 Mas me valiera 
 no haher nacido 
 que kaber siifrido 
 tanto penar. 
 
 " Better for me never to have been born than to 
 have suffered so great trouble.^' 
 
 When the turn came to Juanito, he was silent 
 for a few moments and looked away from us to 
 where the last smoky clouds of sunset burned 
 over the hills, and to where the moon rose with 
 a tremulous splendour in the dark velvet violet of 
 the east. I am not sure whether the couplets 
 were remembered or whether they were impro- 
 vised, but I rather think that he made them as 
 he sang. They were in CastiUan and unrhymed, 
 but they fall inevitably into rhyme in a literal 
 English translation. 
 
 The day has its sun 
 And the night has its moon, 
 And I have my love — 
 I shall cherish her soon. 
 More dark than the night. 
 She is dearer to me 
 Than the moon and the sun 
 And the stars on the sea. 
 
 His boyish voice rang out as clear as a bell over 
 the still waters, and ended in a long, trembling 
 note into which the heart seemed to wring the 
 
 200 
 
JUANITO'S LOVE-SONG 
 
 very dregs of its desire. After that he sang of the 
 way the Spaniards died in the war in Cuba, and 
 how they would have won if their generals had 
 not sold them, and then he invented a sanguinary 
 war in which England and Spain were to drive 
 the North Americans off the sea. Juanito had no 
 cosmopolitan sentiments. 
 
 At last darkness fell over us, and the stars 
 shone out between the sails. It was a dead calm, 
 and we could not hope to reach Ibiza until the 
 dawn brought us a breeze. The sailors lay 
 down on the deck to sleep. The spectral figure 
 of the steersman stood at the helm, muffled in a 
 great black coat with a hood that covered his 
 head and half his face. A sticky sea dew settled 
 down on us and soaked our clothes. The water 
 washed about on the deck, for the falucha was an 
 old one and heavily loaded. The night was bit- 
 terly chill. Juanito wrapped his blanket more 
 closely round him. The boat rocked very gently, 
 and as I lay awake, looking up at the tall yard 
 which seemed to knock against the stars, I heard 
 him chanting himself to sleep — 
 
 dearer to me 
 Than the moon and the sun 
 And the stars on the sea. 
 
 301 
 
SARDINIA 
 
X 
 
 CAGLIARI 
 
 In each of the islands of the Western Mediter- 
 ranean Nature appears to have prepared a seat 
 for the capital city. Undoubtedly she has done 
 most handsomely by Cagliari. The southern 
 coast of Sardinia follows the curve of an ample 
 bay, the Golfo degli Angeli, a blue-carpeted pre- 
 sence-chamber which conducts to the rocky 
 throne carefully placed at a point midway upon 
 the sweeping arc. Thereupon Cagliari reclines 
 with a regal, if somewhat careless, ease. 
 
 These capital cities are ideally designed. Nei- 
 ther Mahon nor Ibiza nor Cagliari has a single 
 building of exceptional beauty, but all of them 
 have the knack of making the best of themselves. 
 They are so disposed upon the terraces of the hill- 
 side that the eye comprehends them in a single 
 glance. They give the effect of a single structure. 
 They are broadly based upon the shore, they 
 climb upwards in narrowing tiers, and they are 
 crowned by a cathedral and a citadel. Cagliari 
 wears the noblest crown. The hill rises to a height 
 of iour hundred feet, and falls sheer on every side 
 
 205 
 
CAGLIARI 
 
 but one. Its summit is ringed round by a massive 
 wall which the Pisans constructed in the thir- 
 teenth century. The towers of the Lion and the 
 Elephant stand like sentries at two of the angles 
 of the fortifications. Of the third, the Eagle, 
 which completed the triangle, only the base now 
 remains. In the centre rise the tower and dome 
 of the cathedral. 
 
 The cities are also alike in that they disappoint 
 you when you enter them. They promise more 
 than they can fulfil. Mahon is comfortable but 
 mean ; Ibiza is content to be merely a glorified 
 fishing village ; Cagliari, which is larger than 
 either of them by forty thousand inhabitants, is 
 also the most ambitious. It aspires to be a little 
 Paris. Happily, it will never succeed, for not the 
 combined energy and genius of a Haussmann and 
 a Napoleon III could convert the lanes and stair- 
 cases that climb up to the Castello into boule- 
 vards. It has, it is true, in its lower levels avenues 
 of the approved cosmopolitan type, replete with 
 tram-lines, rows of poplars and cast-iron seats, 
 steel-framed buildings which only look the more 
 bourgeois the more they pretend to the aristo- 
 cratic manner, monuments of defunct public men 
 faithfully perpetuating in marble the uninspired 
 rhetoric of their pubUc speeches. But these the 
 discriminating observer perceives to be no part 
 or parcel of the true Caghari. He will mount the 
 steep scalette and pass under the dark archways 
 
 206 
 
ITALIAN STREETS 
 
 that lead to the quarter of the Castle. Here the 
 streets are cleft like ravines through solid blocks 
 of buildings, malodorous, narrow, and gloomy 
 even in the light of an August noon. The houses 
 are piled up story upon story, so that when you 
 peer upwards from the pavement their tops ap- 
 pear but a span's length beneath the blue. Yet 
 in spite of their great height they are mean and 
 poverty-stricken. 
 
 Into these long, sunless alleys Cagliari pours 
 out its teeming life. Here, as in all Italian towns, 
 the poor defeat the tedium vitce by an interested 
 contemplation of each other's privacy. Here the 
 age of innocence is still uncorrupted by any 
 modern notions of propriety. It is not felt that 
 there are any details of person or toilette which 
 it is necessary to conceal. The rooms of the 
 ground-floor, whether bedrooms or sitting-rooms 
 — and commonly they are both in one — gape 
 upon the street, and the street gapes back upon 
 them. You are invited to scrutinise the bed that 
 is never made and the meal that is never cleared 
 away. All the businesses of the household — the 
 cookingj washing, scrubbing, the paring of pota- 
 toes, the suckling of infants, the sewing of under- 
 garments — are conducted in public. The children 
 crawl about the threshold with a strict economy 
 of clothing. The men sleep upon the floor, and in 
 their waking intervals approve or criticise the 
 activities of the women. Family concerns of 
 
 207 
 
CAGLIARI 
 
 great delicacy are disputed with eloquence and 
 anger. Every household appears to be in the 
 throes of a domestic crisis. Every child is appa- 
 rently only prevented from the committal of some 
 high misdemeanour by piercing expostulations. 
 Above all this scene of superabundant vitality 
 flutters an array of brilliant and tattered linen, 
 which gives the street the air of being perpetually 
 en fite. Washing clothes is a kind of passion in 
 Cagliari, yet nobody ever wears clean ones. 
 Everybody is in undress. Perhaps there is no 
 time to dress — perhaps everybody is too excited 
 about his own or his neighbour's business to think 
 of it. Certainly the streets are the chief enter- 
 tainment that Cagliari has to offer. 
 
 To the stranger all this sordidness and shame- 
 lessness of living is at first disconcerting, even 
 shocking. When the first fit of disgust is over, it 
 becomes almost endearing. How is it that walk- 
 ing through the streets is so much more exciting 
 and exhilarating a business in a town of Southern 
 Europe than in an English town ? The strange- 
 ness of accent and colour and gesture do not alto- 
 gether account for the fascination. There is some- 
 thing in the atmosphere which eludes the inquiry 
 of the five senses and touches an inward nerve 
 with the thrill of an electric ciirrent. It is the 
 shock of impact with a life that is no longer care- 
 fully clothed as in the north, nor yet merely in 
 dishabille, but frankly naked and unashamed. It 
 
 ao8 
 
THE MAN IN THE STREET 
 
 is the sudden surprising vision of the animal basis 
 of life, upon which every civilisation stands, but 
 which most civilisations have more or less 
 covered up. In an English town I have the feel- 
 ing that there is a silent conspiracy to deny the 
 existence of one-half of the facts of life. And, 
 indeed, they are so skilfully concealed that their 
 existence almost begins to be a matter of doubt. 
 In the streets I see a crowd of individuals, or 
 rather of uniforms, beneath which individuality 
 is hidden, directed by policemen, moving with a 
 swift and single purpose, accomplishing the ob- 
 jects of their business and pleasure with a mar- 
 vellous orderliness and precision, but without 
 zest or delight or anger. I feel that they neither 
 desire nor hate anything very strongly. In the 
 working of this smooth machine I see no play of 
 passion or emotion. Nature is so much overlaid 
 that I come to believe that this race of city- 
 dwellers is indeed some new order of being, not 
 sprung from Adam, owning no ancestry that 
 fought upon bleak hill-sides and lit fires in the 
 shadowy woods at night and worshipped on a 
 great plain at dawn, having no memory even of 
 the scent of the earth newly upturned by the 
 plough or of cattle in the byre, nor deriving any- 
 thing from the influence of mountains or the sea. 
 They liave a contempt for the laborious and un- 
 methodical processes of Nature's teaching, and 
 have put such faith as they possess in book edu- 
 209 
 
CAGLIARI 
 
 Cation, with its quick methods and positive re- 
 sults. They have learned to be logical, and so 
 have secured themselves against molestation by 
 the great disturbing emotions. 
 
 In the streets of Cagliari I found myself caught 
 in a fiercer current of human life, the source 
 of which is indefinitely far back in time. Their 
 inhabitants appeared to have escaped the tem- 
 perate influence of the nineteenth century, which 
 did more to tidy and tame humanity than all 
 the other centuries put together. They have the 
 bearing of an earlier age, when the human spirit 
 was still capable of any divine frenzy and any 
 brutal extravagance. They have not yet emerged 
 out of the Middle Ages — perhaps not even entered 
 into them. These half -clad men and women who 
 encamped upon the pavement, squatted round 
 glowing braziers, tore the roasted fish and meat 
 with their fingers, caressed and struck one another, 
 laughed, quarrelled, and gesticulated, were the 
 same with those who had marched and counter- 
 marched across Europe, dispossessed feebler peo- 
 ples of their valleys and islands, fought, conquered 
 and been defeated, created revolutions, lived the 
 whole uneasy, violent life of our race. They were 
 ready to live it again — were, in fact, living it 
 now. They had lived close to the soil for 
 innumerable generations. Though now they in- 
 habited a city, the city had not entered into 
 their soul. They had the air of caged animals 
 
 210 
 
THE IMMORTAL BODY 
 
 who never forget the ways of the wild. Even 
 the accessories of their Ufe seemed, hke them- 
 selves, to have escaped the deforming touch of 
 modern civilisation. Their household utensils 
 and the implements of their trade were those 
 clever yet elementary and always beautiful con- 
 trivances which came in happy moments to pri- 
 mitive craftsmen in the infancy of the arts, and 
 have served the uses of a hundred generations 
 without losing anything of their simple grace. 
 The very material of clay and wood seemed not 
 yet to have forgotten its origin in the forest and 
 the field. Their food, too, was of the kind proper 
 to a primitive life — bread and wine and fruit and 
 flesh — ^nothing that had passed through many 
 processes of manufacture, or was far removed 
 from its sources. In these streets one feels oneself 
 nearer to elemental things, nearer to the human 
 body, whose exigencies have, after all, determined 
 the whole course of history from the parting of 
 Abraham and Lot to the clauses of the last 
 Finance Bill. These people live more with their 
 bodies than with their brains. They satisfy their 
 instincts without any oblique glances at a moral 
 code, not doubting that an instinct exists for any 
 purpose other than that of its immediate satis- 
 faction. They are frankly glad to see an over- 
 burdened horse suffer or a dog die in the gutter 
 or anger burst out between man and man. They 
 are unabashed at their own emotions. They ex- 
 
 211 
 
CAGLIARI 
 
 press naked truths in naked language. There is 
 nothing in human hfe that they shrink from. 
 Their sensations are so simple and vivid, their 
 expression of them so swift and direct, that on 
 looking at this crowd I felt myself in some un- 
 accountable way nearer to the men and women of 
 Shakespeare and Dante and the Bible, nearer to 
 the endless tragedy of humanity. 
 
 The charm of Cagliari is that you are always 
 forgetting it. Every town has the nature of a 
 prison, but none has so many loopholes as Cag- 
 liari. With a fine air of modesty it denies its own 
 allurements and continually invites you to look 
 away from it. If the town were German, every 
 other square and avenue would be placarded 
 " Schone Aussicht." The dark, viewless streets 
 end abruptly in piazzas and terraces, airy plat- 
 forms buttressed by the city walls, from whence 
 you look down upon such a semicircle of land and 
 sea that you appear to be peeping over the edge 
 of the world. I know no town which allows itself 
 to be so much invaded by the spirit of the coun- 
 try. To live in it is to live upon a mountain-side, 
 perpetually refreshed by the exhilarating en- 
 vironment of space. Its southern base is washed 
 by the sea ; on either side stretch the shining 
 levels of lagoons ; from the north the green plain 
 of the Campidano sweeps round it like an ample 
 
 212 
 
pi 
 
 3 
 
 -=! 
 
 o 
 
 3 
 m 
 
 m 
 
THE HANGING GARDEN 
 
 lawn ; for background is the distant amphi- 
 theatre of hills beyond whose peaks lies the true 
 untamed Sardinia. 
 
 The most felicitous of all these fascinating 
 view-places is the Bastione San Remy. The old 
 fortifications have been remodelled, so as to form 
 a kind of piazza upon the very roof of the city. 
 The steep wall has been refaced at this southern 
 angle with pillars and colonnades, which give it 
 something of the appearance of the fagade of a 
 Renaissance palace. A double staircase leads up- 
 wards beneath a triumphal arch on to a spacious 
 terrace, with a floor as smooth and shining as 
 that of a ball-room. A few rugged stone pines, 
 throwing dark blots of shadow upon the pave- 
 ment, transform the piazza into a garden ; but 
 no garden, except perhaps the hanging gardens 
 of Babylon, was ever so pleasantly suspended be- 
 tween earth and heaven. It is a wonderful aerial 
 arbour, where you can sit and, with a kind of 
 divine detachment, look down and contemplate 
 upon the world. Seen from this dizzy height, the 
 world becomes unreal. At sunset, when the 
 stagni lie at your feet like pools of blood, and the 
 purple mountains of Iglesias cut out a ragged 
 sky-line against a sheet of flame, the view con- 
 fronts you with the reckless exaggeration of the 
 drop-scene of a theatre. 
 
 On the Bastione San Remy the life of Cagliari 
 is at its gayest. Throughout the days of summer 
 
 213 
 
CAGLIARI 
 
 it flashes and burns like a lake of fire ; it is in- 
 tolerable and deserted. But as soon as the cool 
 evening breezes begin to play, it becomes 
 thronged with people. The children come first, 
 troops of them, for it is their playground. They 
 play their serious games with that arch gravity 
 which is a second nature in children of the Latin 
 race. Their childhood has not quite the same 
 freedom and simphcity as that of the children of 
 other races. With a grace that is not altogether 
 artless they play at the diverting game of being 
 grown up. The little brightly-f rocked girls, with 
 their short socks and long, brown legs, seem to 
 find in this evening promenade the gaiety and 
 excitement of a dance. They link their arms 
 amorously, flutter their fans, dart at the passer- 
 by a single alluring glance, stop to whisper their 
 improbable secrets, then burst into low peals of 
 laughter, brimful of consequence, intrigue, and 
 mirth, inhabiting a world that is far more ex- 
 citing and mysterious than that of their elders. 
 Their gestures are carried out with a finish and 
 precision that are in ludicrous contrast with the 
 nothings of their dialogue. They have acquired 
 by unconscious imitation all the artifice and 
 stratagem that have been brought to delicate 
 perfection in the truceless social warfare of men 
 and women, and they apply them with delightful 
 inconsequence to their own infinitesimal con- 
 cerns. There is no more agreeable occupation in 
 
 214 
 
LATIN CHILDREN 
 
 Cagliari than to watch this lovablte world in 
 little, so sagely foolish and so gravely irrespon- 
 sible, innocently echoing and mimicking the vani- 
 ties of the other, older world, less innocent and 
 surely less serious. They have the droUness of 
 troupes of dogs going through elaborate tricks 
 which they only half understand, but with per- 
 fect spontaneity and pure delight in the game of 
 make-believe — a game which very suddenly, al- 
 most before they are aware of it, they find they 
 are playing in earnest. There is one moment, 
 however, when they forget their naive coquetry, 
 and their transparent disingenuity deserts them. 
 It is just at the end of that swift Mediterranean 
 twilight when night rushes up over the rim of the 
 bay. The arc lamps, almost as high over their 
 heads as the moon, begin to glow, flutter a little 
 in the throes of birth, then at last fill all the 
 piazza with a cold and steady radiance. At once a 
 clear shout of joy goes up from a hundred throats 
 — ^the very voice of childhood speaking in its own 
 uncorrupted accent. And, since speech is never 
 adequate for the expression of the delight of child- 
 hood, a hundred light bodies begin to dance and 
 leap and dart like fire-flies among the crowd until 
 the whole piazza rocks in a momentary fairy riot. 
 There is a discreet restaurant on the Bastione 
 San Remy, hidden out of sight during the day- 
 time, but in the evening overflowing in little 
 white tables on to the piazza. The food is in- 
 
 215 
 
CAGLIARI 
 
 different, and the wine, which is grown on the 
 plain below, sound, though uninteresting. The 
 waiter leaves you very much to your own medi- 
 tations, but it is the one restaurant in the world 
 where you are grateful for inattention. 
 
 It is also one of the few restaurants in the world 
 where the meal is an afterthought which it would 
 be indelicate to take seriously. You go there for 
 finer sensations than those of the palate — ^to sit 
 beneath the stars, to breathe the scent of gardens 
 and the sea, to survey the miniature stage of 
 human life, and to catch and lose the threads of 
 half a hundred plots as the actors pass and re- 
 pass on the other side of the white tablecloth. 
 The bourgeoisie of Cagliari are so distinguished 
 that they almost persuade you that the middling 
 class of society may yet bring some fine flower of 
 civilisation to bloom. Their dress is gay without 
 pretension ; their talk quiet, but animated ; 
 something of the dignity and serenity of the even- 
 ing has entered into their manner. They have 
 attained that mode or habit of the spirit by which 
 alone, it seems to me, you may judge whether a 
 people be truly civilised or not — a calm and de- 
 lighted possession of the moment as it passes, a 
 content of the body and the mind which can sus- 
 tain itself without the gratification of the senses 
 or the excitement of extraneous entertainment. 
 
 It was one evening when I was sitting outside 
 this restaurant that I was surprised by one of 
 
 216 
 
A RED-LETTER MOMENT 
 
 those moments of which I have said that every 
 traveller is in search. Do not think that I have 
 so soon forgotten that it is presumptuous, as well 
 as useless, for any traveller to attempt to direct 
 any other to one of those oases where he found 
 the deep well of contentment, I am holding out 
 no assurance, offering not the most tentative re- 
 commendation. If I erect a finger-post pointing 
 to the Bastione San Remy, I undertake no re- 
 sponsibility for your journey or guarantee that 
 you will find any oasis at the end of it. For 
 although, if I am to believe the evidence of my 
 senses, which is never the least of the acts of 
 faith, I was sitting that night outside the restau- 
 rant at the table nearest to the parapet, I must 
 add, like the apostle, that whether I was in the 
 body or out of the body I cannot tell, I think it 
 must have been rather late. The arc lamps had 
 been put out. The children and the waiter had 
 long been asleep. Distance calmed the fever of 
 the fretful Italian music that a band was playing 
 at the other end of the piazza. The promenaders 
 had grown silent — only the shuffling of their feet 
 over the smooth stones was heard, like the sound 
 of dancers dancing to inaudible measures. The 
 crest of the hills traced a faint line against a sky 
 that was soft and lustrous as a black pearl. One 
 or two red lights starred the sea. The moon slid 
 her fairy fingers over the earth. Everything 
 conspired to create that moment of sublime 
 
 217 
 
CAGLIARI 
 
 content when "to do naught is in itself almost 
 an act." 
 
 Cagliari has no great monuments. It has some 
 fifty churches, but not one of them is remarkable. 
 Most of them had the misfortune to be built or 
 restored at a period when that element of vul- 
 garity, which perhaps is latent in almost all Re- 
 naissance work, had thrown off all the moderating 
 restraint of classical models. The period syn- 
 chronised with the political predominance of the 
 Jesuits, who, however numerous their virtues, 
 certainly very nearly monopolised the bad taste 
 of Europe for the time being. Their somewhat 
 nervous anxiety to be as up-to-date in their 
 system of architecture as in their system of edu- 
 cation led to the most unconscionalDle bedevil- 
 ment of the traditions of the Renaissance. I am 
 not sure that if the architectural pedigree of the 
 modern music-hall were traced back far enough 
 it would be found to derive from the Jesuit 
 Church. The Jesuits have left their mark upon 
 CagUari in sinuous frontages, broken pediments, 
 Egyptian obelisks, twisted columns, and all the 
 feverish straining after originality which always 
 accompanies the last struggle for hfe of a mori- 
 bund style. But ItaUan vulgarity is peculiar in 
 the fact that it is never entirely displeasing. It is 
 vulgarity in the grand manner. It has always 
 
 218 
 
MAGNIFICENT VULGARITY 
 
 some gesture of magnificence. Unlike English 
 vulgarity of style, it does not arise merely out of 
 a misapprehension of the true models. It has the 
 unabashed confidence to attempt to better the 
 best. It has the same colossal self-assurance as 
 those marionette shows which seek not so much 
 to mimic as to transcend drama. At first you are 
 amused at their grandiloquence and rhetorical 
 arabesque, but there is such a noble exaggeration 
 in the manner of it, such a spirited attempt to 
 outdo the real thing, such vitality, such gusto, 
 that in the end you are swept out of your critical 
 moorings and enthusiastically applaud the tri- 
 umph of the sublime over the ridiculous. There 
 is the same convincing bombast in the vulgarity 
 of Italian architecture. It takes the judgment by 
 storm. It is never dull or pompous, and therefore 
 can always stifle protest by arousing laughter. 
 The Baroco style is never sufficiently serious to 
 be taken seriously. And who but the Italians 
 could have lifted their vulgarity to the dignity of 
 a style ? 
 
 Even the cathedral of Cagliari has not escaped 
 the fate of the other churches. Perhaps it is well 
 that it has not. Judging by the excellent severity 
 of the fragments that remain — ^the doors, the 
 amboni or pulpits, the lions which support the 
 altar steps — the Gothic cathedral which the 
 Pisans in the thirteenth century built to the 
 honour of la gran Madre di Dio would have been 
 
 219 
 
CAGLIARI 
 
 out of sympathy with the spirit of modern Cag- 
 liari. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 
 turies it was modernised, embeUished, and gene- 
 rally debased to the level of a later taste. Its 
 side-chapels were decorated with massy marble 
 columns, twisted like the posts that support a bed- 
 tester. Rebellious marble angels were suspended 
 head downwards over the altars in the act of fall- 
 ing headlong from heaven. Its mural decoration, 
 like that of almost all the churches of Cagliari, is 
 in the weak and secular manner of a second-rate 
 restaurant. But it was impossible for the most 
 degenerate taste to degrade the finely coloured 
 Sardinian marbles, which in any disposition 
 achieve grave but cheerful harmonies of yellow, 
 dull red, and black. The windows admit a flood 
 of untempered light. The cathedral has none of 
 the sombreness of the Spanish churches. It ap- 
 pears that the Sardinian spirit of devotion is un- 
 mixed with mystery. The music ripples in cas- 
 cades from the organ with the gaiety of a gavotte. 
 The choristers render the chants in the spirit of 
 glees. The worshippers kneel elegantly upon fald- 
 stools and display their elaborate fans with self- 
 conscious grace. There is something of indolence, 
 one might almost say of sensuousness, in their 
 devotion. The whole function goes off with a 
 kind of elegance and ease proper to the life of the 
 place. 
 
 * 
 
 220 
 
THE FOUR QUARTERS 
 
 Aristocratic Cagliari lives loftily apart en- 
 trenched behind the Pisan wall. In the Quartiere 
 di Castello stand the ancient and official edifices — 
 the Castle, the prefectoral and the municipal 
 palaces, the palaces, such as they are, of the 
 nobility, the Cathedral, the University, the Court 
 of Appeal. The towers of the Lion and the Ele- 
 phant are the immortal sentries which guard its 
 dignity. A town of quite another character has 
 sprung up in the mercantile and industrial quar- 
 ters of the Marina, Stampace, and Villanuova, at 
 the foot of the hill. They are occupied with some 
 business which seems to demand a certain bust; 
 ling activity, although I never quite discovered 
 the nature of the occupation. There are situated 
 the coal wharves, warehouses, factories, gaso- 
 meters, and other unsightly objects which do not 
 comport with the character that one's prejudices 
 have attributed to the shores of the Mediter- 
 ranean. Truly Cagliari has been careless of ap- 
 pearances. It has been at no pains to adjust itself 
 to a harmony with the theatrical nature of the 
 landscape. Yet when you draw away from the 
 city, and from across the water view the lines of 
 white buildings gleaming upon the flanks of the 
 white rock, you cannot deny that its progressive- 
 ness has robbed it of nothing of its wonderful 
 pose and charm. 
 
 It seems to me that the beauty of southern life 
 is pretty nearly all luck. We allow the Mediter- 
 
 221 
 
CAGLIARI 
 
 ranean peoples a genius for beauty and a certain 
 elegance in their mode of life which, if it really 
 has a foundation in fact, belongs to them merely 
 by the accident of geography. Our notions of the 
 Mediterranean of to-day are still biassed by the 
 traditions of Greece and Rome. But the race has 
 changed and the traditions have been forgotten. 
 We are at once too magnanimous and too self- 
 depreciatory. We are accustomed to think of our- 
 selves as Philistines who have sacrificed aesthetic 
 sensibility to commercial success. I suspect that 
 our only crime is our climate. If we had only 
 had the southern sky, we should also have had 
 the southern gaiety and grace of living. Given 
 the light and mildness of the southern day, we 
 too should have inhabited the street and the 
 piazza, acquired the largeness and amiability of 
 public life, escaped the angularity and reserve 
 which our habits of privacy have bred in us. 
 With a different soil our buildings also would 
 have been of marble, and they could not have 
 been worse than those of modern Italy. On those 
 rocky thrones of the Mediterranean shore it 
 scarcely matters what you build. Atmosphere 
 comes to the architect's aid and informs his design 
 with a beauty which was surely never conceived 
 in his brain. The sun is generous and pardoning. 
 It ennobles the scheme, fuses it together in a 
 jewel-like mass for which the mountains and the 
 sea provide the incomparable setting. The mod- 
 
 222 
 
THE LUCK OF LATITUDE 
 
 ern Italian contributes little to the beauty of his 
 environnient. In so far as it attracts foreign gold, 
 he values it as a commercial asset. But he is not 
 enthusiastic about it. He shrewdly suspects that 
 picturesqueness and poverty go hand in hand, 
 and he would willingly sacrifice the one in order 
 to get rid of the other. Beauty has no cult in 
 Italy nowadays. She is shamefully cold-shoul- 
 dered, like a poor relation who has seen better 
 days, but now is scarcely a creditable person to 
 be seen in company with. And yet she forgives 
 all ingratitude, clings to her ancient haunts, and 
 refuses to be driven out. 
 
 I don't believe that Cagliari has a more gra- 
 cious conception of life than Manchester. But it 
 has a more gracious mien. It is more amply fur- 
 nished with the natural amenities of life. If here 
 the refinements of civilisation — sewing-machines, 
 typewriters, photographic apparatus, and the 
 like — are more costly, the commoner comforts of 
 fruit and wine are cheap enough. To realise en- 
 joyment you have only to look over the walls 
 upon that design of lagoon and mountain and sea 
 which surrounds the city like a painted panorama. 
 The demands of comfort are satisfied with no 
 greater exertion than that of stepping across the 
 street from the sun into the shade or from the 
 shade into the sun, according to the time of day. 
 You can never walk far without seeing children 
 playing and hearing laughter. At noon naked 
 
 223 
 
CAGLIARI 
 
 urchins, whose bodies have the mould of statues 
 and the golden glow of a Giorgione, play in the 
 waters of the harbour. In the evening the young 
 moon over the sea, and the red glow upon 
 the stagni provide a sufficient entertainment for 
 the uneager throngs that fill the piazza. Midnight 
 has long passed before the last of the serenaders 
 is silent. . . . 
 
 It is the luck of latitude. 
 
 324 
 
XI 
 
 THE GATE OF SILVER 
 
 Travel win^ its end, which is the Uberation of 
 the mind from the tyranny of a particular en- 
 vironment, when it takes you not merely to a 
 different degree of latitude, but also into a dif- 
 ferent year of Grace, or even into an age before 
 the years of Grace began. Civilisation takes its 
 time from one or two great cities. The clocks of 
 the rest of the world are slow — by a decade, by a 
 century, or even by a thousand years and more. 
 Only a fraction of the world has yet entered into 
 the twentieth century. Most of Europe even is 
 in the eighteenth. In some parts the Renaissance 
 is long overdue, and there are others from which 
 the dim old pagan gods have never yet been 
 hunted out. It is not easy to say precisely what 
 o'clock it is in Barbagia, which is the heart of 
 Sardinia. When at a turn of the road you en- 
 counter a cavalcade of horsemen in scarlet tunics 
 with white-slashed sleeves, the period appears to 
 be that of the sixteenth or seventeenth century ; 
 when you overhear a sorrowful dirge and see a 
 procession of hooded figures passing through the 
 tortuous streets of an age-blackened town, you 
 are in the middle of the Middle Ages ; when a 
 p 225 
 
THE GATE OF SILVER 
 
 woman with a pitcher on her head and all Assyria 
 in her face greets you with the salutation, "May 
 Jesus Christ be praised," you are not far from 
 the beginning of our era ; when in a glade of the 
 forest you surprise a group of herdsmen gathered 
 round a wineskin, some drinking, some dancing 
 an ancient, almost forgotten measure to the ac- 
 companiment of Pan's pipes, you know that 
 you have passed down the labyrinth of all the 
 Christian centuries and come out into the spa- 
 cious sunlight of the pagan world. 
 
 The feast of Saint John — ^Midsummer Day — 
 dawned with unusual triumph. A saffron-col- 
 oured moon rode low over the mountain-tops in 
 a rosy mist, paUng to silver as the sky changed 
 from rose to a watery ocean-green and from green 
 to a milky blue. The little town of Aritzo was 
 limned in half a dozen tones of sepia against the 
 eastern slope of a wooded valley. The streets 
 were still full of luminous shadow. There was the 
 smell of dawn in the air — ^that indefinable, pun- 
 gent freshness compounded of the scent of dew- 
 wet fields, the breath of cattle, and the smoke 
 of kindling wood fires. 
 
 In the shadow of the Albergo Simoncini four 
 rough-coated mountain horses stood with lazily 
 drooping heads. The two mares had brought 
 their fillies with them, and were nosing them con- 
 
 226 
 

 BARBAGIAN HOESEMEN 
 
SIGNORE DEMONTI 
 
 tentedly as they took their morning fill of milk. 
 Signore Demonti had already got himself 
 mounted — a feat which his too solid flesh com- 
 pelled him to perform in secret. Signore Demonti 
 was a Guard of the Royal Forests. A generation 
 ago King Umberto had clothed him in a uniform 
 of blue with green facings and a postman's cap ; 
 but the suns and dripping forests of Sardinia had 
 modified the royal design, substituting facings of 
 sered yellow upon a sober grey. He had the face 
 which is proper to officials all the world over — 
 the broad, fat nose, drooping, grizzled moustache, 
 pouched cheeks, heavy, unshaved chins, and that 
 uneasy expression of a man who is a tyrant to 
 the world beneath him and a sycophant to the 
 world above. This morning, perched aloft, god- 
 like, with the sword and pistol with which he 
 guarded the royal forests lying menacingly along- 
 side his tight, thick thighs, he had all the world 
 beneath him and surveyed it with an air of 
 gloomy distrust. 
 
 Felipe was slow in appearing. He was the sur- 
 veyor of the royal forests. To-day we were to 
 perambulate the bounds and settle a disputed 
 frontier with some aggrieved peasants. When at 
 length we were all comfortably seated in the 
 high-peaked Sardinian saddles, Grazia, always 
 barefooted and always smiling, brought us a 
 stirrup-cup of steaming black coffee. Her head 
 was wrapped up in a quantity of coloured hand- 
 
 227 
 
THE GATE OF SILVER 
 
 kerchiefs, as is the maimer of Sardinian peasant 
 women. When we rode away I turned and saw 
 her balancing an empty pitcher on her head, 
 walking down the village street to the well with 
 the brave carriage of a bride. 
 
 We were soon deep in a forest of young chest- 
 nut trees. Although it was midsummer, the 
 leaves stUl kept the exquisite virginal green of 
 early spring, and again I marvelled at the sur- 
 prising symbolism of that colour, which is at once 
 the most innocent and the most vicious of all the 
 001010*5 — so vicious, indeed, that there is a certain 
 shade of it which no woman could wear without 
 hazarding her reputation! Fragments of lilac- 
 hued sky gleamed between the branches. The 
 blue campamde which carpeted the ground shone 
 like a reflection. In the woods the wakening day 
 spoke with a myriad voices — ^the salutation of 
 birds, the stir of insects, the noise of unseen water. 
 It is a wholesome thing to be present at the daily 
 renewal of life. It composes the spirit like a Mass. 
 It assures the mind of the perpetuity and the 
 hidden energies of the earthly order. It restores 
 courage, and also it touches the nerve of adven- 
 ture. In a forest at dawn there is no telling what 
 the day may bring forth. The sense of wonder is 
 re-bom; scales fall from the eyes; familiar 
 things drop their veils and stand in the strange- 
 ness of their naked glory. Our present civilisa- 
 tion, which is the civilisation of cities, orders it that 
 
 228 
 
PEASANT GIRLS OF ARITZO 
 
THE SALUTATION 
 
 we shall not wake until the day has become com- 
 monplace. But some day, when they have tired 
 of reversing so many natural customs, I think 
 men will again be eager to hear the heart of 
 nature beating at daybreak. 
 
 We came out upon a high road, and as we 
 crossed it we met some women, barefooted and 
 scarlet-skirted, carrying large open baskets on 
 their heads. Loaves of bread were in the baskets, 
 and their boots on top of the loaves. They were 
 taking the bread to sell at Desulo, against the 
 feast of St. Petef. " Baidindi cum Deus," they 
 cried in their archaic, dog-Latin dialect — Go with 
 God ; but when I answered that we had already 
 been with Him all the morning and had seen Him 
 recreate the world, they did not understand. 
 
 Passing through Desulo and still climbing up- 
 wards, we left the road and the chestnut woods 
 and followed a track that first led us beneath 
 scattered oaks, and finally brought us out on to 
 the great flanks of the mountains. We halted 
 upon a naked summit called Arcu Bittase. " Ecco 
 Gennargentu ! " exclaimed Signore Demonti, sud- 
 denly removing from his mouth the long pipe 
 which he had been sucking silently for the last 
 hour. I had always suspected that officialdom 
 slew the soul like a slow poison. The theory 
 seemed to be confirmed by the recollection of 
 many curators and doorkeepers of palaces of art 
 sitting in the midst of so many embodied ecsta- 
 
 229 
 
THE GATE OF SILVER 
 
 sies, soured, unenlightened, all silent and, pre- 
 sumably, all damned. But Signore Demonti must 
 have kept his soul alive. His pipe went out while 
 he gazed with visible rapture upon the Gate of 
 Silver. Perhaps his enthusiasm was inflamed by 
 the pride of ownership, for the valley beneath us 
 was dark with the royal forest of oaks which it 
 was his office to guard — from what perils I have 
 never discovered. 
 
 The forest covered only the lower slopes of the 
 valley ; above it stretched the bare ribs of the 
 Gennargentu— the principal mountain range of 
 Sardinia. Although they rise to upwards of six 
 thousand feet, the Gennargentu are imposing by 
 their mass rather than by their height. They 
 have less of the energetic character of the Alps 
 than of the broad-bosomed amplitude of giant 
 downs. The sky-line flows with a billowy undu- 
 lation, the highest point. La Marmora, being 
 scarcely distinguishable from half a dozen other 
 crests. In the dry morning air the detail of every 
 swelling and gully was as clear as on a relief map. 
 If we had arrived at the beginning of June,, we 
 should have seen the snow still streaking the 
 furrows of the hills with silver; but on Mid- 
 summer Day the Gate of Silver is an expanse of 
 grey and green and amber. 
 
 There are moments when Sardinia seems to re- 
 semble the mise en scene of an opera. There nature 
 still preserves that emotional quality which went 
 
 230 
 
MELODRAMATIC LANDSCAPE 
 
 out of fashion with the exhaustion of the ro- 
 mantic movement — a geological disorder that is 
 arresting, but not, like the unromantic Alps, 
 terrific. The landscape of the modern painter is 
 placid and habitable — it shrinks from any un- 
 usual energy of the elements, and finds even so 
 unexciting an incident as a rainbow too strained. 
 Our forefathers had a robuster appetite for pic- 
 torial sensations. Nature, as they admired it, 
 called out for action of a dramatic, if not of a 
 melodramatic, character. Similarly Sardinia, or 
 rather Barbagia, which is the heart of it, appears 
 to be incomplete without the operatic libretto. 
 The landscape suggests the forced note of the 
 scene-painter's art. The colouring of the sky and 
 the grass and the gloom of the forest are a point 
 too emphatic. All the incidents are a trifle ex- 
 aggerated. Even in the grouping of the secular 
 oaks there is a hint of the artificiality of the stage 
 decor. One finds oneself listening for the opening 
 strains of the overture and attentively watching 
 a studied arrangement of foliage for the entrance 
 of the prima donna. Certainly, when we halted 
 in a clearing of the forest, and in response to three 
 blasts of Signore Demonti's horn half a dozen 
 peasants in fancy dress started up out of the 
 ground as if precipitated through a trap-door, the 
 sense of real life grew astonishingly faint. I rapidly 
 arrived at that mood of detached expectancy in 
 which one settles down to witness a play. 
 
 231 
 
THE GATE OF SILVER 
 
 The peasants were ruffianly-looking fellows, 
 with a shaggy growth of hair on their faces, and 
 small, fiery eyes. They were all clad in the 
 mastruca, a sleeveless jacket of sheqpskiji with 
 the wool turned outwards, beneath which was a 
 scarlet tunic, cut open at the breast and the 
 sleeves to display a snowy white shirt. Their 
 Arab-like, white cotton breeches hung loosely 
 about the ankles or were tucked into black cloth 
 leggings. Their headgear was a kind of black 
 Phrygian bonnet, falling like a stocking almost 
 as low as the waist.* All of them were armed 
 either with axes or guns. They had a curious 
 fashion of carrying the axe, thrusting it under- 
 neath the mastruca at the back, so that the head 
 protruded just above the collar. 
 
 The business of the boimdary was broached. 
 Plans were unrolled, and earthy thumbs followed 
 doubtfully the blue and red outlines of the chart. 
 All the gestures were intensely dramatic. Not 
 only the face, but the whole body, took part in 
 the dialogue. The body and the mind appeared 
 to work in unison, emotion passing straight into 
 action, as with children and animals. The panto- 
 mime was so explicit that it was possible to follow 
 
 * At first this strange headgear appeared to me to be the 
 one feature of the Barbagian costume that was not designed to 
 meet the practical requirements of a pastoral life ; but I was 
 told that its use was to be folded so as to form a pillow at 
 night. 
 
 232 
 
Pi 
 
 g 
 
 SI 
 
 U 
 in 
 b' 
 O 
 
 < 
 
 Q 
 
 & 
 O 
 
 B 
 
 a 
 
GRAND OPERA 
 
 every turn of the dispute without understanding 
 a word of the dialect in which it was carried on. 
 " Well, I consider I'm being hardly dealt with " 
 — a prodigious shooting out of the lower lip. 
 " No, I don't remember what was settled at the 
 last survey " — a finger laid to the corner of the 
 mouth. " Signore, I speak the truth " — both 
 hands spread out upon the breast. " Ah, young 
 man, you're much mistaken " — a friendly wag- 
 ging of the forefinger. " Well, since it must be " 
 —the shoulders sUd up to the ears. And so we 
 arrived at the business of the signature. Letter 
 by letter the name was scratched out on the 
 parchment, with frequent pauses and sideward 
 glances, as a painter stands back and regards the 
 canvas to assure himself that the work of art is 
 shaping itself in proper form. So unlike was this 
 to the lightning signatures of the stage that the 
 spell of illusion was for a moment broken ; but 
 when the ink was dried, not with blotting-paper, 
 but with a sprinkling of sand, I felt reassured that 
 it was not real life, but the opera, after all. 
 
 The business of the day being satisfactorily ad- 
 justed, preparations were made for the repast. 
 From his capacious saddle-bags Signore Demonti 
 produced a part of the carcase of a sheep. The 
 peasants collected some dry brushwood and 
 kindled a fire. The sheep was spitted upon a long 
 stake and held close alongside the roaring flames. 
 The bottle-shaped wooden casks, which contained 
 
 233 
 
THE GATE OF SILVER 
 
 the sharp wine of Aritzo, were brought from an 
 ice-cold stream where they had been laid to cool. 
 Further searches in the saddle-bags revealed peas 
 and artichokes, goats' milk cheese in bladders, 
 and an uncommon kind of bread, baked in fiat, 
 round loaves which contained nothing but air. 
 Soon we were rudely devouring the charred 
 mutton with hasty fingers, for we had tasted 
 nothing all day except Grazia's black coffee at 
 dawn, and it was now past midday. When they 
 were comfortably filled with meat and drink, the 
 peasants and guards stretched themselves upon 
 the greensward. The sun burned fiercely in a sky 
 of pale, glassy blue. The air was still and heavy 
 with the perfume of wild thyme. The only noise 
 was the soothing drone of insects and the munch- 
 ing of the horses as they cropped the rich virgin 
 pasture. The very mountains that rested their 
 giant limbs upon the earth seemed heavy with 
 their immemorial sleep. Life had come to a halt. 
 Even Signore Demonti forgot his mysterious re- 
 sponsibilities. The sombre oaks held out their 
 branches against the sun and rained down the in- 
 fluence of their placid repose upon their sleeping 
 guardian. 
 
 When in the cool of the afternoon we descended 
 the breakneck paths which lead to the village of 
 Desulo — unwittingly performing those dizzy feats 
 of horsemanship which the Italian cavalry officers 
 are represented as doing in the cinematograph 
 
 234 
 
ARRIVAL OF MONSIGNOR 
 
 shows — the shadows had already crept half-way 
 up the slopes of the valley. As we stumbled 
 through the precipitous streets I remarked a 
 medley of quilts and bedclothes hanging out of 
 the windows and over the balconies. I supposed 
 that there had been an orgy of washing in the 
 village, but Felipe explained that they were hung 
 out to do honour to Monsignor the Bishop of 
 Oristano, who was to make his processional entry 
 into Desulo that evening. The streets were de- 
 serted, for the three thousand souls who inhabit 
 Desulo — ^heaven alone knows what there is on 
 these barren hills to feed three thousand hungry 
 stomachs — had gone out of the village, man, 
 woman, and child, to welcome Monsignor. We 
 rode down the valley road until we came to a 
 turning where the hill-side slopes down to the 
 highway in a series of rocky terraces. There the 
 women of Desulo, dressed from head to foot in 
 crimson, were massed like a solid bank of human 
 flowers. Their gaze was turned down the valley 
 to a point where the road bends round a shoulder 
 of the hill. A couple of priests dashed past on 
 horseback, as dusty as millers. In the distance 
 we heard a report of fire-arms, and presently 
 little dots of red and white began to appear at a 
 bend of the road. Gradually we discerned the 
 cavalcade of peasants, mounted on their sturdy 
 little mountain horses, who were escorting the 
 bishop to the village. Behind them marched the 
 
 235 
 
THE GATE OF SILVER 
 
 confraternity of the Rosario, white-robed, bear- 
 ing silk banners figured with faded saints, and 
 twinkling lanterns upon lofty poles. A dense 
 parti-coloured multitude followed after, and out 
 of the voluminous dust came the sonorous chant 
 of Ave Maria. Beneath the dust trembled a white 
 silk canopy, and beneath the canopy marched an 
 imposing figure in purple. When the canopy 
 reached the rock where the women were massed 
 the procession came to a halt. A young man with 
 fierce moustache and the soft eyes of a poet was 
 propelled by the surging crowd behind him into 
 the presence of the bishop. When within a foot 
 of Monsignor he discharged a passionate oration 
 at him Uke a broadside. He had the eloquence of 
 a burning emotion, and it was unfortunate that 
 his action was somewhat impeded by the pressiu-e 
 of the crowd. As he spoke in Sardo, I understood 
 scarcely a word, but Felipe afterwards translated 
 his speech for me as follows : 
 
 " Oh ! Monsignor ! We are making her the 
 most ardent welcome. We are making the wel- 
 come to the representative of Gesu Cristo. Oh ! 
 The independencia Barbaracina ! Barbagia was 
 being independent to the Romans. Poi, Barbagia 
 was being independent to the Spaniards. We 
 never had the collar on the neck to nobody. Oh ! 
 But we put the collar on the neck to Holy Church. 
 We wear it with proudness. Poi. When the Gen- 
 nargentu feel the august feet of Monsignor upon 
 
 236 
 
THE CONFRATERNITY OF THE ROSARIO 
 
THE AMBASSADOR OF HEAVEN 
 
 themselves, they are exhilarated. We also are 
 being exhilarated. The heart of Desulo is going 
 to crack. Oh ! It is going to crack with proud- 
 ness. Oh, poi ! Because it is making the welcome 
 to the Ambassador of Heaven ! " 
 
 The heart of Desulo exploded in a mighty 
 " Evviva ! " the rifles cracked, the horses reared, 
 the birettas whirled in the air, and the celestial 
 ambassador smiled a little wearily. He was a full- 
 fleshed young man, and perspired freely into an 
 episcopal lace handkerchief. He had the lips of 
 an ascetic in the face of an epicure. But it was a 
 face that was schooled to restrain or express any 
 emotion at will. It had attended to the oration 
 with a deprecatory downward cast of the eyes ; 
 now, when the jewelled hand was raised in bene- 
 diction, it shone with a benignity that travelled 
 to the furthest limits of the crowd and tenderly 
 comprehended the women kneeling like drooping 
 flowers among the rocks. Signore Demonti also 
 attempted to kneel, but he was so encumbered 
 with offensive weapons that as soon as he had ex- 
 tricated himself^ from his gun and sword and 
 pistol and got on to his knees, the multitude was 
 sweeping on again and he was all but ridden 
 down by the impetuous horsemen of Desulo. The 
 canopy bearers shouldered their poles, and the 
 procession, that was now engulfed in the crowd, 
 surged on towards the village. The young men 
 spurred their horses into a fury, and then jerked 
 
 237 
 
THE GATE OF SILVER 
 
 them back on their haunches ; the incessant dis- 
 charge of rifles and pistols and fowhng-pieces was 
 as deafening as a battle ; the children screamed 
 like parakeets ; and high over the dusty pande- 
 monium was the clangour of the bells in the church 
 tower, shrill and terrible, like old men's laughter. 
 
 In all this there was something that was un- 
 equivocally pagan. In Barbagia, as in all places 
 where the observances of the Church arouse an 
 almost savage ardour, Christianity has the shal- 
 lowest root. The spiritual fermentation springs 
 from a vastly older faith — if that can be called 
 faith which is as spontaneous and undetermined 
 as instinct. Christianity is the mould which gives 
 a definite form to the primeval emotions, but any 
 other mould would do as well. The advent of the 
 bishop was not the cause, but merely the occasion 
 of the unloosing of so much delirium. Little did 
 he guess, the pale-faced, diplomatic young man, 
 as his gloved hand caressed the crowd with airy 
 benedictions, that his advent had awaked the 
 echo of ancestral voices and unloosed the ecstasy 
 that had once been inflamed by Baal and Astarte 
 and Allah. 
 
 " There is all Africa and her prodigies in us," 
 said Thomas Browne. Perhaps the last two or 
 three hundred years have done much to circum- 
 scribe this incalculable continent of the human 
 heart ; but there is and will always remain a 
 corner of it which is the seed-bed of passion and 
 
 238 
 
THE CENTRAL FIRE 
 
 unreason. Because of it the improbable has al- 
 ways happened. Out of it have proceeded all 
 saturnalias and revolutions, all poetry and re- 
 ligion, all that divine disorder in the throes of 
 which the world is from age to age re-born. The 
 extent of it in any man or any people is the thing 
 I most care to know about them. All other quali- 
 ties are merely furrows upon the surface ; but 
 this central fire is the maker and unmaker of 
 civilisations. In this twilit valley of Barbagia a 
 momentary flame shot up out of the volcano over 
 which all our social order is built. It flashed 
 harmlessly enough, but it was not without its 
 vivid suggestiveness. I said that the landscape 
 seemed to call for dramatic action — ^to-night it 
 did not call in vain. The mountains shone with 
 that bright velvet gloom of sunset which excites 
 the eye more than vibrating colours. The sha- 
 dows flooded up the valley and overtook the 
 tumult of men and horses pouring into the village. 
 In the midst of the cloudy pillar of dust the un- 
 steady lanterns flickered and the discharges of 
 the guns made little spurts of flame. Beneath the 
 lessening din there sounded, like the bourdon note 
 of an organ, the grievous undertone — miserere 
 nobis, peccadores. 
 
 Desulo, like almost all the desolate villages of 
 Barbagia, has the unpremeditated beauty of an 
 
 239 
 
THE GATE OF SILVER 
 
 animal's lair. It suggests the deftness, the in- 
 stinctive rather than the reasoned construction 
 of the swallow's nest or the beaver's hut. It is 
 split up into four separate clusters, each of which 
 clings limpet-like to the steep slope of the valley. 
 Seen from above, each cluster has the tiny com- 
 pactness and isolation of a bee-hive. The houses 
 are rough and slatternly, built of a brown stone 
 which age darkens to the colour of smoke. The 
 tiles are either of a dull red clay or grey worm- 
 eaten wood. Over the streets and yards hang 
 rotting wooden balconies, so frail that it seems 
 as if the slightest footfall must shatter them. 
 The streets are dark, narrow, twisted, furtive, 
 precipitous as the mountain-side on which they 
 are built. There is something violent, almost 
 tragic, in the aspect of the place. It cowers be- 
 neath the shadow of the mountain, upon the 
 verge of the woods, comfortless, insecure, invaded, 
 as it were, by the fear of the wild. 
 
 Night in Desulo has all those terrors which it 
 is the business of a human habitation to dispel. 
 The influence of the mountains and the forests is 
 palpable in the darkness. When the dark falls, 
 the noise of talk and quarrelling which fills the 
 streets all day is silenced as suddenly as when the 
 approach of a hawk hushes the chattering of 
 sparrows. I never once heard the echo of laughter 
 or of song. The only memory that I have of the 
 long nights of Desulo is that of black streets be- 
 
 240 
 
o 
 
 m 
 
 n 
 
 fa 
 o 
 
THE WIDOW 
 
 neath starlit skies, of bare, shadowy rooms lit by 
 a faintly glowing brazier, and round it a group 
 of silent figures squatting Arab-like on their 
 haunches, of a woman standing motionless upon 
 a crazy balcony and gazing, for the space of hours 
 it seemed, into the inky darkness. 
 
 There is a tragic figure which one sees in all 
 Sardinian villages — ^the widow. She belongs to a 
 race apart. She wears the habit of mourning all 
 her life. Dressed from head to foot in black, she 
 walks among the troops of women and girls in 
 their gay scarlet costumes like a perpetual em- 
 blem of death. She appears to be without 
 friends ; she is shunned as though she were a 
 felon. I suppose she has a home, but usually she 
 haunts the streets. She sits all day in the corners 
 of deserted yards, moving into the shade when 
 the sun burns hotly at midday, and creeping into 
 the light at evening. Her face rarely wears the 
 expression either of sorrow or despair, but only 
 the blankness of one for whom there is no future. 
 Generally she is old, terribly old, almost de- 
 humanised by the frightful dishonour of age. I 
 remember one who sat all day on a balcony of a 
 dilapidated courtyard. She had the face of 
 a ghoul — greenish skin stretched tightly over a 
 framework of bones, and red sores where the eyes 
 should have been. She squatted like an idol, 
 moving only to twirl the spindle which she let 
 drop from the balcony and then jerked up again 
 241 
 
THE GATE OF SILVER 
 
 with a regular, mechanical action. All day her 
 posture remained the same, until evening over- 
 took her in her abandonment — still counting out 
 her residue of time by the rhythm of the falling 
 flax. 
 
 Desulo would be a very sad little village with- 
 out the women. Their gay clothing gives the 
 town the appearance of being perpetually en file. 
 The primary colours are primary in a double 
 sense, for unquestionably they have a wholly 
 irresistible attraction for primitive peoples. The 
 costumes of Barbagia differ in every village, but 
 the component colours are always red and blue 
 and yellow. In Desulo the f oimdation of the dress 
 is a rather sombre blood-red, the bodice is bright 
 with dashes of embroidery, the sleeves are striped 
 with blue and yellow. The apron has a wide 
 border of blue or scarlet ; but if the woman or 
 the girl has lost her parents, she wears a purple 
 border for the rest of her life. On all occasions of 
 ceremony — Sundays, feasts, weddings, and the 
 like — a kind of black cowl is worn, which falls to 
 the waist. Drawn low over the brows, quite 
 hiding the hair, it gives a solemn and almost 
 tragic aspect to these dark faces which have all 
 the sad beauty of the East. Something of the 
 East, too, they have in their blood, for these 
 Barbaracini are sprung from an Arab tribe which 
 penetrated into the heart of Sardinia more than 
 a thousand years ago, and were left stranded 
 
 242 
 
THE BEAUTY OF WOMEN 
 
 there when the tide of invasion ebbed back again 
 to Africa. 
 
 I have never quite been able to understand 
 that strange association of beauty with sorrow. 
 In almost all deeply beautiful faces there is the 
 hint of a shadow. Perhaps it is the shadow that 
 makes the beauty. But not only faces, but also 
 scenes that are heavy with beauty — ^trees stand- 
 ing beside still water, ancient buildings in the 
 open places of a wood, all objects that are made 
 beautiful by sunset and moonlight — have the 
 fatal gift of sadness. Is it the briefness of beauty's 
 season of efflorescence, its feebleness to withstand 
 decay, that brings the sense of tears ? Certainly 
 the beauty of southern and eastern women is as 
 much more poignant than that of any other as 
 its duration is more brief. Perhaps it is a know- 
 ledge of the shortness of their spring and of the 
 bitter length of the inevitable winter that casts 
 a shadow over the faces of the women of Desulo, 
 Their beauty has also a little of the enchantment 
 which beauty borrows from a suggestion of mys- 
 tery. They are inscrutable and sphinx-like to a 
 degree that is perplexing to one who has been 
 accustomed to the faces of the city -bred peoples, 
 which are usually as legible as a newspaper and 
 as empty of mystery. Their features are unre- 
 laxed, like those of a mask, yet the swift passing 
 of a light or shadow gives the hint of deeps of 
 passion — incalculable, dangerous, explosive. 
 
 243 
 
THE GATE OF SILVER 
 
 The art of walking with grace is in England an 
 almost unknown distinction ; but every woman 
 who wishes to learn it should go to Desulo. I 
 doubt, however, whether by mere observation she 
 could school herself to the careful and measured 
 motion of the women of Desulo. Probably it is 
 the menial task of carrying burdens on their heads 
 up and down the perilous declivities of their vil- 
 lage streets that has given them the gait of queens. 
 They hold their bodies erectly, without stiffness ; 
 the legs swing evenly from the hips with a long, 
 secure stride ; the feet are planted firmly yet 
 lightly, heel and toe all at once. They have all 
 the qualities which delight the eye in the motion 
 of a wild animal — ^the alertness, the unconscious 
 pride, the free play of muscle, the hint of reserves 
 of strength. Moreover, in Desulo — I do not know 
 that it is true of other villages — ^they combine 
 this natural grace with a curious hieratical atti- 
 tude — arms folded across the breast and hands 
 clasping the elbows — ^in which, I think, is a 
 memory of long-forgotten rites. On the feast of 
 St. Peter, at the summons of the church bell, all 
 the women climbed up to the little forest church 
 above the village, and as I saw them passing one 
 by one across the grassy clearing of the woods 
 with this solemn, gliding motion, it seemed as if 
 the marble breed of women on a Grecian urn had 
 suddenly taken body and life. 
 
 * * 
 
 * 
 
 244 
 
o 
 
 CO 
 
 n 
 
 o 
 o 
 
THE FESTA OF SAN PIETRO 
 
 The feast of St. Peter took place a few days 
 after the entry of the bishop into the village. The 
 church of St. Peter is a forlorn little structure 
 with a whitewashed fagade, standing in the soli- 
 tude of the woods. It contains nothing more 
 valuable than an oleograph portrait of the saint 
 and a painted plaster image which represents the 
 chief of the apostles as a comical, round-shoul- 
 dered little old man with the gleeful here-we-are- 
 again expression of a Jack-in-the-box figure. All 
 through the long, sunny morning the women had 
 been kneeling in the crowded church and in the 
 shelterless glare of the grass-grown piazza. To- 
 wards evening the saint was mounted on a couple 
 of poles and taken to breathe the thyme-scented 
 air of the woods. All day wines and liqueurs were 
 to be had for the asking, and it was a triumphing 
 procession that wound unsteadily through the 
 woods, calling out to the apathetic oaks for mercy, 
 now and at the hour of death, amen. 
 
 After the procession the priest invited me to 
 go with him and call upon the padrone della festa. 
 The patron of the feast is commonly a robber — 
 not, of course, a man that has demeaned himself 
 by any pitiful act of petty larceny, but one who 
 has achieved a place in the criminal hierarchy by 
 one of those desperate adventures of brigandage 
 or cattle-raiding which prove a man's worth and 
 give him a kind of rank and esteem in Barbagia, 
 as once they did upon the Scottish border. As, 
 
 245 
 
THE GATE OF SILVER 
 
 however, it is expedient to pursue one's spiritual 
 equally with one's temporal welfare, the mis- 
 demeanant usually consents to become the patron 
 and to bear the expenses of a festa, thus by an 
 outlay of thirty or forty lire insuring the risks of 
 damage to his soul. 
 
 We entered a large, low-ceiled room, paved 
 with brick. Everything was handsomely^ ap- 
 pointed and in order. Two shining copper bowls 
 for making bread stood near the fire, a gigantic 
 wooden spit hung from the wall, red and white 
 wine were set upon the table, a copper coffee-pot 
 steamed upon the hearth. The 'padrone and his 
 sons were seated ceremoniously on chairs ranged 
 along the wall. 
 
 " Laudadu siada Zesu Gristo ! — ^May Jesus 
 Christ be praised ! " — ^he said gravely as he rose 
 to meet us. 
 
 " Semper siada lavdadu .' " we replied, "May He 
 be praised for ever ! " The conversation was in 
 Sardo. For my part, I was taken up with admira- 
 tion of the patron and his four sons. Their dress 
 had a rich and barbaric splendour. The sheepskin 
 had a curled black fleece of the finest gloss ; the 
 giuhbone, or short jacket, was of fiame-Uke ver- 
 milion ; the vest of crimson velvet, with bars of 
 golden embroidery ; the white shirt fastened at 
 the throat with jewelled buttons. The men were 
 nearly perfect specimens of the human animal — 
 erect, defiant, all muscle, blood, and bone, a 
 
 246 
 
!5 
 < 
 
 O 
 
 M 
 o 
 IS 
 
 u 
 w 
 o 
 
 1^ 
 a 
 
 s 
 
 g 
 
 H 
 
 M 
 
THE PATRON-ROBBER 
 
 hidden energy plainly perceptible in every line of 
 their statuesque repose. The face of the patron, 
 although he had barely crossed the threshold of 
 middle age, was of the patriarchal type. It was 
 the face of a man who had lived strongly and 
 violently, who had hated, fought, commanded, 
 plotted, perhaps had loved, but never had feared 
 or pitied. It was the legible writing of a mind 
 full of what may be called the lore of life — that 
 stock of human wisdom which is not consciously 
 acquired, but grows like a natural growth. Long 
 contact with nature and with men who were as 
 ruthless and cunning as nature had taught him 
 many secrets. He knew all the rude and eternal 
 truths as men knew them before life became con- 
 fused by a multitude of trifles. He had seen 
 things nakedly which our civilisation covers up. 
 His face, therefore, was graver than those of men 
 who only see life between the two sides of a street, 
 yet not, as theirs are, perplexed. It was assured, 
 reliant, almost serene. His sons were like him — 
 bronzed, deep-eyed, with features cut like a 
 cameo. There was the same quiet confidence in 
 their expression, but mixed with a kind of antici- 
 pating wonder— clearly they had not yet passed 
 through that fire in which passion is transmuted 
 into experience. 
 
 The conversation, which had for some time 
 been maintained a little uneasily between the 
 priest and the robber-patron, soon lapsed alto- 
 gether, and we sat in the darkening room in 
 
 247 
 
THE GATE OF SILVER 
 
 silence. There was no embarrassment, however, 
 but rather the sense of repose which accompanies 
 the performance of a piece of ritual. Silence is no 
 restraint to men of this breed. It is their natural 
 atmosphere, as talk is the natural atmosphere of 
 men in towns. But when they speak, it is not to 
 repeat a phrase they have read in the newspaper, 
 but to say the things they have felt rather than 
 thought in the silent days and nights upon the 
 mountains. What conception of life, I wondered, 
 lay behind those sombre eyes ? The spirit of men 
 is principally formed and coloured by what their 
 eyes look out on to. The things which these shep- 
 herds had seen had been for the most part silent, 
 enduring, unchanging things — ^the bare breast of 
 the mountains, the shadow of forests, the dark- 
 ness of torrent-cleft valleys, the birth of flaming 
 dawns, the wise, instinctive ways of beasts. All 
 the summer they lived in branch-built huts 
 among the mountains, by day lying beneath the 
 sheltering arms of the oak trees, at night sleeping 
 among the quiet cattle. In the winter there was 
 the bare comfort of dark rooms and the glowing 
 brazier. At intervals this sober rhythm of life 
 was broken by moments when the smouldering 
 fires of the heart shot out into flame— the Ho- 
 meric orgies of the festa, the wild torch-lit nights 
 of drinking, dancing, and song, the sudden fren- 
 zies, as upon the evening when the Bishop of 
 Oristano made his entry into Desulo. 
 
 248 
 
XII 
 
 THE FESTA OF SAN COSTANTINO 
 
 In general, the -railway stations of Sardinia are as 
 desolate as its mountains. Perhaps more so, for 
 they have that utter desolation of inflexible order 
 which is even more oppressive than the desola- 
 tion of waste and savage places. The blank block- 
 house is the severest prose of architecture ; the 
 glittering lines stretching infinitely up and down 
 forbid the eye to digress into the landscape. A 
 lizard basks on the burning stretch of concrete ; 
 a family of persistent grasshoppers makes baffled 
 attempts to ascend the dazzling walls of the 
 station-house ; a few bees buzz round the bung- 
 hole of a cask of sweet wine ; a wine-bemused 
 peasant sleeps in the waiting-room. At rare in- 
 tervals a train arrives and falls under the sopo- 
 rific influence of the place. Apparently it halts 
 for no other reason than to allow the employees 
 of the train to converse with the employees of the 
 station. When the conversation flags, an official 
 surveys the long perspective of blistering car- 
 riages, hastens the departure of imaginary pas- 
 sengers with a cry of Alia vettura, and sounds a 
 
 249 
 
THE FESTA OF SAN COSTANTINO 
 
 wailful note upon a horn. The engine responds 
 with a startled exclamation, like a man prema- 
 turely awaked out of sleep, creeps off down the 
 line, and the station resumes its sim-stupefied 
 siesta. 
 
 When we drew up at the station of Abbasanta, 
 however, on the morning of the fifth of July, it 
 was clear that something unusual was toward. 
 The platform was packed with a seething motley 
 throng of peasants. Most of them were encum- 
 bered with bundles of clothing, food, and house- 
 hold goods, as if in flight. A similar crowd was 
 packed into the train, or rather, as we steamed 
 into Abbasanta, extruding from the windows of 
 it. The mob on the platform welcomed the mob 
 in the train with a cheer, and seethed more vio- 
 lently to make room for it. There was a stampede 
 to the exit doors. In the road outside the station 
 were drawn up some sixty or seventy long two- 
 wheeled carts, covered with tunnel-Uke awnings, 
 some drawn by bullocks, some by horses. The 
 bridles of the horses were gay with red-and-blue 
 woollen tassels, flashing with little mirrors, and 
 noisy with bells. The crowd roared, laughed, 
 quarrelled, and fought as it surged round the 
 carts. Little by little it was swallowed up by the 
 dark-tunnelled awnings, and at last the populous 
 city upon wheels got into motion. In a swirl of 
 dust and amid a tempest of cries the carts raced 
 down the six miles of slanting road into the valley 
 
 250 
 
r ^ 
 
 
 m 
 
 m 
 m 
 
 o 
 
 El 
 I" 
 ■< 
 
 a 
 
 la 
 o 
 
 \ 
 
A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT 
 
 of the Siddu, crossed the river, and crawled tedi- 
 ously up the opposite slope to the little village of 
 Sedilo. 
 
 Sedilo has not the huddled character of a moun- 
 tain village. Its line of one-storied cottages 
 straggles over half a mile or more of road. Having 
 no beauty to display or wares to sell, it possesses 
 no inn. But now it was suddenly called upon to 
 house a surplus population of six or seven thou- 
 sand souls. Most of them, it was true, were well 
 enough content to sleep beneath the starry rafters 
 of the sky, but some — prosperous borghesi of Sas- 
 sari, Sennori, and Oristano — had forgotten the 
 ancestral way and learned the timidity of towns. 
 Of these I perforce was one, knowing none in all 
 this crowd of whom I could ask the shelter of a 
 cart or the corner of a rug. 
 
 I followed a company of peasants to a house 
 that looked more substantial than the rest in 
 quest of sleeping room. At the door stood a 
 fierce beldam of a woman, short-skirted, bare- 
 legged, arms akimbo, in whose face a great beauty 
 had been at civil war with all the ills of life and 
 had been sadly worsted in the encounter. She led 
 the way into a large room, dark and bare, which 
 might have been a stable. It had an earthen floor, 
 and upon the floor were strewn the sleeping forms 
 of four-and-twenty men and women, not count- 
 ing dogs and children. Along a narrow passage 
 between the prostrate bodies the horses from the 
 
 251 
 
THE FESTA OF SAN COSTANTINO 
 
 carts picked their way to the stable at the further 
 end. The woman threw a contemptuous glance 
 over the corpse-like figures, as if surveying the 
 slaughter of her own hands, and ejaculated — 
 Repvhlicani di Sennori. A pieasant woman who 
 was suckling a baby appeared to resent the 
 stigma, and exclaimed. No, non siamo repvhli- 
 cani, siamo huoni catolici. Then began a poUtical- 
 theological wrangle as to whether it was possible 
 to be at the same time a republican and a good 
 Catholic, which became so embittered that it 
 threatened to awaken the four-and-twenty sleep- 
 ers of Sennori. I cut short the dispute by asking 
 whether room could be made for yet another 
 sleeper. It appeared that it could, provided that 
 the sleeper could disburse five lire. The accom- 
 modation seemed barely to warrant the charge. 
 I remonstrated, and was told that if I didn't like 
 it I could sleep in a ditch and chance getting 
 malaria. Misliking the alternative, I submitted 
 to the one and only extortion that I met with in 
 Sardinia, and closed with the bargain. The charge 
 was for sleeping only. When I suggested the in- 
 dispensability of food, the virago replied that she 
 had none, and that if she had she couldn't serve 
 it, with no room for the soles of her feet to rest on. 
 But in Sardinia neighbourliness does not wait 
 upon etiquette. If you enter a town a stranger at 
 sunset, you are like enough to be embarrassed 
 by new-made friends before bed-time. I was not 
 
 252 
 
A LITERARY HOST 
 
 in the least surprised, therefore, to find one of 
 these confidential strangers pull me by the arm 
 and draw me out of the house. My conductor led 
 me down the village street to a ruinous structure 
 which he signed to me to enter. As it was in- 
 habited by a mare and a foal, some dogs, a brood 
 or two of chickens, I concluded that his wish was 
 to entertain me by an inspection of his stable. 
 Afterwards, on observing a table propped up with 
 bricks, two stools, and a coloured print of a Nord- 
 deutscher-Lloyd steamship full steam upon the 
 Prussian-blue high seas, I decided that the place 
 was his home. The man went to the corner of the 
 room and kicked a bundle of rags. The rags 
 stirred, shaped themselves, and stood up in the 
 image of a woman. It took long to convince her 
 that food was wanted, but once persuaded, she 
 fetched some sticks, kindled a bonfire in the 
 middle of the room, and quickly fried a dish of 
 eggs. My host was strangely incommunicative. 
 For some minutes he watched me eat with close 
 attention ; then he stormed up and down the 
 room, addressing to the mare, the foal, and the 
 dogs a fervent and eloquent oration, in which 
 there was a frequent repetition of the names of 
 Costantino, Carlo Magno, Orlando, and other 
 heroes of high romance. When I asked him 
 his occupation, he said that he wrote. There was 
 little of authorship about him except the poverty ; 
 but he refused to amplify his confession, replying 
 
 353 
 
THE FESTA OF SAN COSTANTINO 
 
 evasively to my cross-questioning by drinking my 
 health, to the certain detriment of his own, in a 
 black, bitter, and poisonous wine. 
 
 It is half an hour's walk down a steep, stony 
 lane from Sedilo to the church of San Costantino, 
 around which thefesta is held. This short passage 
 offered as sharp a spectacle of human suffering as 
 any circle of Dante's inferno. Along the sides of 
 the lane all the abjects of Sardinia were gathered 
 together — ^men and women exhibiting all the de- 
 formities and deficiencies of their bodies naked 
 to the general view. Those who had knees knelt 
 on them ; those who had hands stretched them 
 out importimately, with a rosary wound round 
 the fingers ; all had tongues, and intoned an un- 
 ceasing litany of sorrow — Caridad e compasion, 
 huona gente, caridad e compasion. They demanded 
 alms rather than begged them. There was a note 
 of defiance and command in their importunity. 
 They seemed to fix upon you a personal responsi- 
 bility for the world's and nattire's injustice, and 
 called upon you by San Costantino and all the 
 hierarchy of heaven to right it. They arrested 
 you by the wrist and by the ankle. They con- 
 strained you by their eye to be attentive to the 
 tale of their woes, as the Ancient Mariner con- 
 strained the Wedding Guest. Not until you had 
 brutally beaten them off did their manner soften, 
 and then, sympathetically, they wished you 
 Bitona festa — a delicate shaft of reproach which 
 
 234 
 
A PRIMITIVE EMPORIUM 
 
 quivered in the tender parts of the conscience 
 more painfully than any imprecation. 
 
 The church of San Costantino stands upon the 
 steep slope of a hill. On the side where the ground 
 falls away to the valley it is defended by a double 
 wall like a fortress. The first enclosure, which is 
 entered by two arched gateways, is a level space 
 of several acres ; from this a steep path ascends 
 to the little platform in front of the church. 
 Standing upon this terrace, one looks down as 
 from the walls of a castle upon the crowded space 
 below and away over the wide valley of the Tirso, 
 with the silver, serpent-like folds of the river 
 shining in the midst of an expanse of sombre grey 
 and brown. 
 
 The lower enclosure had now become half camp, 
 half market ; at one end were lines of hooded 
 wagons, among which were horses, dogs, children, 
 fires, cooking-utensils, and all the impedimenta 
 of camp life. Between the arched entrance and 
 the ascent to the church there were little streets 
 formed of booths. Here you could buy cloth, 
 boots, lace, sheep-bells, leather waistcoats, water- 
 bottles, wine, oranges, torroni, tin coffee-pots, 
 meat, knives, sickles — everything, in fact, that 
 the Sardinian peasant had ever heard or dreamed 
 of. Here were the succulent oranges and exqui- 
 site vernaccia of Oristano ; the wines of Ogliastra 
 and Oliena ; smoked fish from Bosa ; great 
 blocks of torroni from Tonara melting in the 
 
 255 
 
THE FESTA OF SAN COSTANTINO 
 
 sun ; aranciata, a candy made of the peel of 
 oranges ; garapigna, a sweet and scented variety 
 of ice-cream ; and the thin, large loaves of bread 
 known from its shape as carta di musica. Here 
 also was all the fun of the fair. Here were the 
 cardsharpers who tempted you with a doubtful- 
 looking five-lira piece to " find the lady " ; here 
 was a primitive roulette-table at which you gam- 
 bled for centesimi at the disadvantageous odds of 
 thirty to one against ; and here was another re- 
 volving table upon which you might cast five 
 centesimi and leave fate to decide whether the 
 prize should be a mouth-organ or a brooch set 
 with coloured glass. At the entrance to one booth 
 two knights in armour were gibbeted, and a show- 
 man invited you to walk up and see the marionette 
 show. At another a lady in rose-coloured tights 
 and a green plush huntsman's coat beguiled you 
 with an invitation to see her dance upon the 
 tight-rope — for the festa of San Costantino has 
 fallen sorhewhat from its primitive simplicity. 
 
 The insignificant image of San Costantino is 
 still, however, the magnet that draws half the 
 province of Sassari to this desolate hill-side. 
 Every reveller is half a pilgrim. His first duty is 
 to pay his homage to the saint. I stood among 
 the shifting crowd on the little piazza in front of 
 the church and watched the peasants arriving 
 in companies and families. Very many rode up 
 on horseback — sometimes a whole family on a 
 
 256 
 
ARRIVAL OF THE PILGRIMS 
 
 single horse. The father sat proudly in the saddle, 
 carrying an unfurled, brocaded banner of red and 
 gold and purple ; his young son, gay with a 
 brand-new lambskin jerkin and red tunic, sat 
 astride in front of him ; his wife rode behind on 
 a pillion with an infant at her breast. The little 
 family halted at the door of the church ; the 
 peasant doffed his biretta and lowered the ban- 
 ner to the earth ; the woman and the children 
 crossed themselves. Then they rode round the 
 church, thrice in one direction and thrice in the 
 other, halting each time that they passed the 
 open door, saluting and making the sign of the 
 cross. Young peasants with guns upon their 
 shoulders spurred their horses round the church 
 at a gallop. On some of the horses women were 
 riding astride — ^wild Meg Merilees of the south, 
 with savage, beautiful faces ravished by the sun, 
 and hair, like a horse's mane, falling loose down 
 their backs upon the saddle. There were peasant 
 priests, as raw and terrible as pugilists ; skin- 
 clad shepherds who had lived so long in the 
 mountains that they had become as wild as the 
 beasts they herded ; wealthy farmers' wives in 
 ancestral embroidered bodices, carrying tall, ela- 
 borately-painted candles between split canes to 
 protect them against accident. 
 
 The crowd on foot pressed up the ascent to the 
 church until the piazza was crowded with kneel- 
 ing figures. There were the costumes and faces 
 
 R 257 
 
THE FESTA OF SAN COSTANTINO 
 
 special to a hundred different villages of the two 
 provinces : the golden-faced women from the 
 Campidano, with yellow handkerchiefs round 
 their heads and snowy linen half-drawn across 
 their opulent bosoms ; women of Oristano, wide- 
 skirted, half-veiled, dressed in rich browns and 
 blacks ; the fierce daughters of Barbagia, flashing 
 in the barbaric blood-red and crimson of Tonara, 
 Aritzo, Fonni, and Nuoro ; women of Goceano, 
 pallid and with the large sad eyes of Arabs ; beau- 
 tiful girls of Orane and Bosa, with glowing faces 
 swathed in ample white wimples. There were 
 mysterious figures half hidden by a dark hood 
 that covered the head and fell to the waist ; 
 bride-like apparitions, glistening with golden em- 
 broidery and brocade and fluttering with veils ; 
 children with close-fitting bonnets, like elaborate 
 and expensive dolls ; boys in blue tunics diapered 
 with red diamonds, like medieval jesters. 
 
 I went into the church. It was mean and with- 
 out beauty. Round the walls was hung a collec- 
 tion of crude paintings, for the most part repre- 
 sentations of sufferers on sick-beds regarding 
 without surprise the descent of Saint Constantine 
 on his white charger through the ceiling. The 
 atmosphere, charged with incense and candle- 
 smoke and the breath of a thousand worshippers, 
 was suffocating. The church was thronged from 
 the door to the altar steps. Up a narrow lane in 
 the midst of the nave men and women on their 
 
 258 
 

 PEASANTS OF BARBAGIA 
 
HOMAGE TO THE SAINT 
 
 knees painfully scrambled their way to the altar. 
 Some of them had even proceeded in this fashion 
 through the dust and dirt of the fair from the en- 
 trance gate. The women wore their hair loose. 
 Sweat and melting candle-grease dropped fast on 
 the stone flags. Their clothes were wearing into 
 rags. But still they set their faces, gripped the 
 tall candles, and dragged themselves onwards to- 
 wards the altar, resolute to compel the saint to 
 work a miracle in their behalf. 
 
 To the right of the steps leading up to the 
 chancel an independent crowd was gathered 
 round a table on which stood a little pot image of 
 San Costantino. The Emperor was represented 
 as a debonair young man, some eight inches high, 
 with a vapid expression, a long, fair fringe, a 
 green robe, and buff stockings. In front of him 
 was a saucer full of centesimi and also a little 
 paper money. Occasionally a woman stepped 
 forward, dropped a coin into the saucer, and, 
 taking the image in her hands, kissed the buff 
 knees with reverence. Little boys were elbowing 
 a passage among the crowd and selling sheets on 
 which were twenty-five vilely-printed verses ad- 
 dressed to the emperor-saint. The verses were 
 sung by a florid, shock-headed young man with a 
 fiery SiciUan cast of countenance, the crowd 
 coming in at the chorus. He lounged on the 
 corner of a bench, but the violence of his singing 
 inflamed his face and bathed it in perspiration. 
 
 359 
 
THE FESTA OF SAN COSTANTINO 
 
 He held a black and yellow handkerchief in his 
 left iiand on which was printed a map of Italy ; 
 during the chorus he buried his dripping forehead 
 in the Lombard plain. Some one held a candle a 
 few inches off the end of his nose, for though it 
 was noon the church was almost dark. His voice 
 was like the rasp of a grindstone for quality, but 
 it was backed by the finest pair of lungs in Sar- 
 dinia. The chorus was a tuneless cry of agony : 
 
 Siades tiostru avmocadu 
 Costaniinu imperatore ! 
 
 The word " imperatore " was held on like an 
 organ stop. The singers let each syllable go with 
 infinite reluctance, and clung to the last as if it 
 were their last chance of compelling the attention 
 of the saint in heaven. I never heard such im- 
 portunity, such anguish, expressed in the human 
 voice before. At the end of the twenty-five verses 
 was printed the footnote : 
 
 Visto : se ne permette la stampa 
 t Eugenia Cano, Vescovo 
 
 This couplet also was rendered with indescri- 
 bable fervour. The florid young man was clearly 
 of the same opinion as the EngUsh convict who 
 was overheard in the prison chapel to remark, 
 " It does yer good, the bloomin' 'ymn," for the 
 final syllable of the chorus had not been dragged 
 out to its conclusion before a still hoarser and 
 more desperate shout announced that he had 
 
 260 
 
A RABELAISIAN REPAST 
 
 plunged back into the first verse and proposed to 
 bellow the biography of St. Constantine over 
 again. 
 
 After all, the real business of a Sardinian feast 
 is feasting. It is the rite that is most carefully 
 observed. It is a gastronomic orgy such as only 
 men whose appetites have been whetted by a 
 year's abstemious living are capable of. The man- 
 ner of it is pantagruelic. Every horse carries a 
 hertola, a kind of gaily embroidered saddle-bag, 
 the voluminous pockets of which are gorged with 
 the carcases of sheep and cinghiali, partridges, 
 woodcock and all manner of game, smoked fish, 
 maccaroni, and goat's milk cheese. About noon 
 the air is pungent with the savour of roasted flesh 
 and steam from boiling cauldrons. For dessert 
 there are wagonfuls of oranges and immense^ 
 shining cherries that are to be had at two pounds 
 a penny. The rich torroni is piled up in rocks. 
 Wine flows lavishly from inexhaustible wooden 
 casks. 
 
 In the heat of the afternoon the clamour of the 
 festa died down. From the shadow of wagons and 
 rocks came the languid melody of launeddas — ^the 
 wooden pipes which are the primitive instrument 
 of Sardinia — and the lugubrious wail of accor- 
 dions. The singers improvised the songs as they 
 sang. The motives were exceedingly simple : 
 " St. Peter cast the net into the sea with his left 
 hand, but when he drew it to the boat it was 
 
 261 
 
THE FESTA OF SAN COSTANTINO 
 
 heavy with fish." " The sunUght shows forth the 
 joy of the morning, and I show forth my joy with 
 my singing." And I heard a little child, who 
 scarcely had mastered the elements of speech, 
 chanting a rhyme to a palpitating young sparrow 
 that he was crushing in his palm : 
 
 Poor sad little bird ! 
 
 Thy mother is crying for thecj 
 
 She is crying for thee among the sheaves of barley. 
 
 But never will she find thee. 
 
 And never wilt thou see her again. 
 
 Poor sad little bird ! 
 
 Then the wretched infant gave a final squeeze and 
 the palpitations ceased for ever. 
 
 Over the festa there reigned a singular sense of 
 well-being. Man had made his peace with the 
 forces of earth and heaven. Nature, who is so 
 great an enemy to man in Sardinia, vexing him 
 with extremes of heat, racking him with fevers, 
 obstructing his progress with heart-straining hills 
 and yielding only a grudging return to his painful 
 labour, had relaxed her warfare. The sun warmed 
 him ; the trees and the rocks shaded him ; the 
 hills bared their breast to the sky to make a 
 spacious picture for him. Heaven also, that 
 doubtful auxiliary, was conciliated. And had not 
 San Costantino been rejoiced with the noise that 
 had been made in his honour all the morning in 
 the church, and with the prettiest blue and yellow 
 candles that were burning on his altar ? It was 
 
 262 
 
A BREAK-NECK CHARGE 
 
 one of those rare moments when Ufe calls a truce. 
 All disturbing preoccupations were banished with 
 the beggars outside the walls of the festa. Neither 
 pain nor desire, by whose alternate pricking in 
 the flanks we are urged forward, was in the saddle. 
 All the emotions of the body and the spirit were 
 sleeping, except a certain even pulse of pleasure — 
 regular, continuous, almost insensible, like the act 
 of breathing. 
 
 When the first colours of evening appeared in 
 the sky, the festa awoke with a start, for the great 
 spectacle of the day was at hand. The stalls were 
 covered up ; the wagons were drawn to one side ; 
 the large enclosure which all day long had been 
 thronged with people was cleared by the cara- 
 hinieri. Everybody climbed up to the natural 
 amphitheatre of the hill-side which commanded 
 a view of the church and the whole enclosure. 
 On the ridge of a hill half a mile away stood a 
 mass of horsemen, a couple of hundred strong. 
 Their guns and banners gave them the appear- 
 ance of an army in battle array. Their leader, 
 mounted on a roan horse, carried a yellow pennon. 
 A shot was fired, and immediately the whole 
 cavalcade broke away at a gallop. With wild cries 
 they swept over the rocky ground towards the 
 church. On the narrow platform in front of the 
 church there was barely space for the two hun- 
 dred frenzied animals ; they jostled and fought 
 for a precarious footing, in peril every moment 
 
 263 
 
THE FESTA OF SAN COSTANTINO 
 
 of slipping down the steep incline on to the 
 booths below. At a signal they galloped in a dis- 
 orderly crowd seven times round the building. 
 Then, with a fresh discharge of guns, the horse- 
 men thundered down the precipitous path that 
 led to the lower enclosure. In the midst of the 
 space that is encircled by the booths stands a 
 stone pillar surmounted by an iron cross. The 
 pillar diminishes year by year ; for since it has 
 the miraculous property of curing fevers and 
 other sicknesses, every prudent housewife scrapes 
 off a little of the sacred dust and packs it away 
 in the bertola before mounting on her pilUon and 
 leaving the festa. Round this pillar the horsemen 
 whirled, in a fan-like extension, thrice from west 
 to east, and thrice from east to west. The volume 
 of dust obscured for a few moments the light of 
 the sun. In the vague obscurity there was a light- 
 ning vision of banners and rifle-barrels, the 
 frenzy of pallid faces, the extended limbs of 
 horses, bloodshot eyes, and mouths dripping with 
 foam. At the finish of the sixth circuit the horses 
 wheeled round to the left, pounded up the steep 
 path to the church, and then dispersed like a 
 broken wave on the hill-side. 
 
 This exploit, known as s'ardia, has a religious 
 significance, for it commemorates a victory of 
 St, Constantine. Every horseman is under the 
 special protection of the saint, who holds him up 
 so that not one of his bones shall be broken. The 
 
 264 
 
THE BRIGHT EYES OF DANGER 
 
 spectators watch it with a kind of awe. If a rider 
 should be unseated or butted in the stomach by 
 the shaft of a banner, or should any other divert- 
 ing incident take place, it is an offence to smile. 
 Once a woman did smile, and to this day you 
 may see the stone, standing upright near the 
 church, into which she was turned by the anger 
 of the saint. But, like every other incident of 
 religion in Sardinia, this frenzy is the expression 
 of a natural instinct of primitive man on which 
 Christianity has merely laid its fingers. At the 
 bitter smell of the burnt powder and at the sound 
 of their own savage cries the habits of twenty 
 generations of pastoral life fell from the men like 
 a cloak and disclosed the unchanged passions of 
 the hunter and the fighter smouldering in every 
 man, but in these peasants burning very near to 
 the surface. Their souls delighted again in war 
 and the joy and the splendour of it. They re- 
 sponded to that spell which shines in " the bright 
 eyes of danger." And perhaps it is because they 
 still court danger like a mistress that you see in 
 their eyes a special brightness which you no 
 longer see in places from which well-policed com- 
 munities have all but banished her. 
 
 As soon as the sun had carried the day away 
 with it beyond the tops of the hills, the lesSer 
 lights of acetylene gas began to rule the night. 
 They ruled it so despotically, however, so ruth- 
 lessly stripped the kindly shadows from one's fea- 
 
 265 
 
THE FESTA OF SAN COSTANTINO 
 
 tures and person, that one experienced a disquiet- 
 ing foretaste of the soul's nakedness on Doomsday 
 morning. The door of the marionette show stood 
 open, and the gloom within offered a welcome 
 concealment. The tiny theatre was overcrowded 
 and reeked of the farmyard. The opening of the 
 proscenium was not much larger than that of a 
 good-sized dog-kennel. One unshaded candle in 
 the middle of the stage shone upon a gaudy back- 
 cloth, representing an aggressive building by the 
 sea which might have been a bathing establish- 
 ment at Ostend, but was probably the scene- 
 painter's vision of Dido's Carthage. A deep voice 
 descended mysteriously from the painted skies 
 like the voice of God, but the next moment I 
 recognised it to be the voice of my host, who had 
 spoken vaguely of Carlo Magno and Orlando in 
 the earUer part of the day. The mystery of his 
 authorship was now explained. What he wrote, 
 or perhaps adapted, was the dialogue for his 
 marionettes. Very soon I saw the author himself, 
 or rather as much of him as was visible below the 
 lower button of his waistcoat. He took up a 
 position on the seaward side of the stage, obscur- 
 ing the view of the shipping in the harbour. 
 When the voice ceased, a knight in golden 
 armour swooped out of the wings, skimming the 
 boards like a homing aeroplane. He had golden 
 hair and a black moustache which would have 
 borne comparison with that of any of Ouida's 
 
 266 
 
MARIONETTES 
 
 guardsmen. His back was rigidly curved, as 
 though he were in mortal agony — and so perhaps 
 he was, for his back was transfixed by a steel rod 
 about the length of a poker, by means of which 
 he was reluctantly thrust forth into the midst of 
 the stage. 
 
 No sooner did he stand glittering in front of 
 the candle than the first row of the audience stood 
 up in order to see over the group of children whose 
 black heads were silhouetted against the floor of 
 the stage like the shades of footlights. The second 
 row stood up and tiptoed to overlook the first ; 
 the third followed, and so on until the back row 
 also rose and mounted on their bench. When 
 they were all standing they all began to shout, 
 " Seduti ! seduti ! " The two cardbinieri who 
 were stationed at the door also shouted " Seduti ! " 
 and a voice thundered " Seduti ! " from the card- 
 board skies. Nobody, however, sat down, and so 
 when silence had been recovered the golden knight 
 went on declaiming to an audience that stood at 
 attention. His language was majestic, but as it was 
 also Sardinian I understood little of it. The theme 
 of the drarna was, however, simple and universal. 
 In addition to the golden knight, the dramatis 
 personse were a purple-and-silver lady and a for- 
 eign gentleman who doubtless stood for the Grand 
 Turk. The relationships of this menage a trois 
 were explained in long monologues to the audi- 
 ence, but the upshot was obvious — there was one 
 
 267 
 
THE FESTA OF SAN COSTANTINO 
 
 genlleman too many, and he therefore must be 
 removed. In the marionette theatre there is only 
 one way of removing the superfluous male, and 
 that is by the dmllo. And a very bloody duel it 
 was. The Grand Turk was manipulated by the 
 showman's daughter, who spoke the lady's part, 
 and was therefore at some disadvantage. The 
 combatants drew their swords by means of a 
 string, leapt off the boards, flew through the air, 
 and met with a violent shock which brought them 
 to earth again. This was repeated half a score of 
 times. The showman bent his knee and thrust 
 out with the steel rod as if it had been a bayonet. 
 The resistance of the Grand Turk grew feebler. 
 At the last encounter he fell to the ground and 
 remained there until time was counted out. The 
 golden knight, however, had not yet won the 
 lady, for there now appeared in rapid succession 
 a number of scarlet individuals who resembled 
 English militiamen, but were in reality janiz- 
 aries. They swooped down upon the knight, but 
 he pinked each one with his sword, until six 
 corpses lay in a pile at his feet. The lady had 
 shown considerable indifference during the en- 
 counter. She had been leaning against a Cartha- 
 ginian temple, fixedly staring at the carabinieri 
 in the audience. At the death of the sixth and 
 last janizary, however, she roused herself from 
 her reverie with a jerk, walked across the stage 
 in little, bird-like hops, and fell into the arms of 
 
 268 
 
NIGHTFALL 
 
 the victorious knight. The curtain fell, and -the 
 audience streamed out. 
 
 The reign of acetylene was now over. A few 
 wind-blown candles and torches tossed the sha- 
 dows hither and thither. Low, drifting clouds 
 obscured the moon and put out the stars ; a cold 
 wind rushed up from the valley, heralding a 
 storm. All day a roar of laughter and chaffering 
 and expostulation had gone up from the festa, 
 quite deafening the still, small voices of the wil- 
 derness in the midst of which we were encamped. 
 But now the wilderness encroached upon us, as 
 it were ; we became for the first time sensible 
 that we lay in the lap of the encircling hills ; the 
 little human hubbub died down as if in fear, and 
 the night besieged us with silence. The alleys 
 between the lines of booths were deserted. In the 
 little wicker huts men crouched together round a 
 feeble light. Wine passed from mouth to mouth 
 in an endless circuit, and one man improvised in 
 a minor key the eternal themes of love and hate 
 and the hardship of life. The listeners bent for- 
 ward to catch the words of the singer, for at this 
 hour speech begins to grow inarticulate. The 
 light played such tricks with their faces that the 
 effect was like that of a congregation of those 
 grotesque Sarde idols which you may see in the 
 museum at Cagliari, suddenly come to life after 
 their two thousand years of immobility. 
 
 The air throbbed with the groaning of accor- 
 
 269 
 
THE FESTA OF SAN COSTANTINO 
 
 dions. In the large space round the sacred pillar 
 men and women had linked fingers and formed 
 large circles. They were dancing the ballo tondo. 
 It was a grave, silent dance. At a first glance the 
 dancers appeared to be almost motionless. Then 
 I saw that the left foot of the dancers slid to and 
 fro, and the right crossed over it and tapped the 
 ground twice or thrice. Very slowly the whole 
 ring revolved. No one spoke or even smiled. En- 
 circling the rigid figure in their midst, whose 
 accordion set the measure for their feet to tread, 
 the dancers had the air of worshippers. The dance 
 reverted to its ritual origin. Perhaps from that 
 subliminal reservoir, unplumbed by the waking 
 consciousness, in which the memories of the race 
 are stored, the spirit of an ancient religion 
 emerged and compelled the body to the perform- 
 ance of rites the meaning of which the intelligence 
 had long ago forgotten. 
 
 The mystic midnight dance had a mesmeric in- 
 fluence. How long I watched it I cannot tell, but 
 when in a momentary gleam of moonlight I 
 looked at my watch, I saw that it was half-past 
 one. The lane leading to Sedilo was strangely 
 silent, but still in my ears reverberated the mena- 
 cing refrain, Caridad e compasion, huona gente. 
 I found the house where I was to sleep with some 
 difficulty, as all the houses in the village were 
 hidden behind lines of carts. On entering the 
 kitchen, I heard all round me the sounds of heavy 
 
 270 
 
ENTRANCE TO THE FESTA, SEDILO 
 
THE DAY'S END 
 
 breathing. The light of a match showed the floor 
 still strewn with the bodies of the four-and- 
 twenty sleepers. The door leading into the stable 
 yard was open. A man, doubled up over a sack 
 of beans, had sunk to sleep in the attitude of 
 prayer. The forms of white, ghost-like horses 
 loomed vaguely in the shadows of the yard. I 
 groped among the sleepers until I found a bare 
 space of earth to lie down upon. 
 
 271 
 
XIII 
 
 THE BURIED CITY 
 
 However long I have lived in a place, I always 
 feel a stranger in it until I know something of 
 what men have done there since the beginnings 
 of time. I can never think of a place purely geo- 
 graphically. Travel involves a double journey — 
 one forward through space, the other backward 
 through time. If you book to any point in the 
 Mediterranean, together with the ticket that is 
 good for a thousand miles or so you receive a 
 second invisible ticket, valid for thrice as many 
 thousand years, which will carry you to the 
 world of the Corsairs, of the Saracens, of the 
 Caesars, of the Phoenicians. And it is perhaps on 
 this more secret and extensive journey that you 
 will encounter the strangest adventures, experi- 
 ence the keenest delights and the most intolerable 
 repulsions. 
 
 Everybody knows how the destiny of a race is 
 shaped by its environment ; but I think it is not 
 altogether fanciful to suppose that men have re- 
 acted upon the place they have lived in. I do not 
 mean merely that they have modified its physical 
 
 272 
 
THE SPIRIT OF PLACES 
 
 aspect. The working is subtler than that. I con- 
 ceive that places which men have long inhabited, 
 where their life has been intense and passionate 
 and continuous for hundreds or thousands of 
 years, are so saturated with human emotions that 
 for long after the original agents have disappeared 
 from the scene it is impossible to live in them or 
 even to pass through them without being to some 
 extent affected by the human spirit which they 
 have absorbed. I think that not a little of the 
 secret trouble which from time to time may fall 
 upon you in strange places is due to these silent 
 communications. Places, no less than men, are 
 haunted by their past. There are many scenes of 
 crime, not naturally repellent, which long after 
 the event impart an adumbration of the horror 
 they have seen enacted. There is a palpable in- 
 fluence in many churches that is exuded by stones 
 impregnated by prayer, And there are many 
 landscapes which have oppressed me with an in- 
 definable sense of evil even before I discovered 
 among their rocks those long stone tables which 
 once were wet with the blood of human sacrifices. 
 The truth is that inanimate objects are much less 
 inanimate than we suppose. I cannot but believe 
 that those triumphs and tragedies in which the 
 soul of a people is deeply involved do not leave 
 the spirit of places altogether untouched. 
 
 The degree of affection or dislike which certain 
 towns arouse within us seems to me to depend 
 s 273 
 
THE BURIED CITY 
 
 less on their natural beauty or ugliness than on 
 the quality of the human emotions whose tides 
 have ebbed and flowed within them. To what 
 else can you attribute those intimations of sym- 
 pathy or antipathy which you frequently experi- 
 ence even when you enter a town at night and 
 cannot at all discern its features ? They are not 
 dependent upon any physical reaction. They are 
 formed upon the reports of that army of skir- 
 mishers which the spirit of a man sends out when 
 he enters an unknown region, which warn him of 
 the nearness of a friendly or hostile presence long 
 before the inner sentinels of the senses bring in 
 their more detailed messages. It is useless to de- 
 mand a reason for the aversions and preferences 
 of these spiritual monitors, but it is best for your 
 peace of mind not to disregard their admonitions. 
 I know that I hated Sinis more passionately than 
 I ever hated any place before ; but I should not 
 know how to justify the hatred except by refer- 
 ence to this supreme and arbitrary authority, to 
 which I have long since resigned the choice of my 
 acquaintance among cities and places. I can only, 
 therefore, record the impressions of a day during 
 which I was ill at ease. 
 
 Sardinia is as surprising in its physical as in its 
 racial contrasts. In six hours the toy train crawls 
 down the branch railway from the highlands of 
 
 274 
 
ORISTANO 
 
 Nuoro to the lowland of Oristano — ^that is to say, 
 from the Switzerland to the Holland of Sardinia, 
 or rather to I know not what mud-flats of Asia or 
 Africa, for the character of Sinis is not European, 
 but almost wholly Oriental, Sinis is the delta 
 region at the mouth of Sardinia's principal river, 
 the Tirso ; and, like many other deltas, it has 
 the luxuriance of life which seems to be bred not 
 of health, but of corruption. 
 
 I have not a word to say against Oristano, the 
 capital of this region. It is true that the Sar- 
 dinian proverb says, Chi va ad Oristano resta ad 
 Oristano, meaning that you take up your last 
 quarters in the cypress-shaded cemetery. It is 
 one of the worst hotbeds of malaria in the island. 
 The stagnant lakes in which it abounds are pro- 
 lific breeding-places of mosquitoes. You will find 
 the doors and windows of your room at the 
 albergo wired like a meat-safe, in order that you 
 may be protected from the terror that flies by 
 night. Apart from devising stratagems against 
 flies and mosquitoes, there is little to do at Oris- 
 tano. Sitting outside a cafe in the Piazza del 
 Mercato and watching the groups of citizens 
 yawning in the sun, I asked an inhabitant what 
 was the principal diversion of the town. He 
 spread out both his hands in an abrupt half 
 circle which comprised the whole of the square. 
 Questo ! he remarked complacently — a simplifi- 
 cation of the science of pleasure which to my 
 
 275 
 
THE BURIED CITY 
 
 mind seemed to denote no inconsiderable degree 
 of culture. 
 
 Oristano is one of those cities in which one 
 might well expect the melancholy fit to fall. It is 
 full of the symbols of decay. In point of age it is 
 more juvenile than most Sardinian towns, for it 
 has not yet celebrated its thousandth birthday. 
 But then, it had the misfortune to be born old. 
 When the ancient Roman city of Tharros on the 
 coast succumbed to the onslaughts of the Saracens 
 in the eleventh century, the populace made one of 
 those sudden resolutions which seem to have come 
 so easily to the citizens of the Middle Ages, and 
 transferred their city bodily ten miles further in- 
 land. Out of the ruins of Tharros, Oristano was 
 born. Fragments of the older town were utilised 
 in its construction. You can still see the ruins of 
 the mud and rubble walls dovetailed among its 
 houses, and relics of arches and columns imbedded 
 like fossils in its slums. Its stones are full of the 
 memory of Eleonora, the Sardinian Jeanne d'Arc, 
 who broke the power of the Spaniards. Its cathe- 
 dral is an unremarkable eighteenth-century edi- 
 fice ; but the admirable campanile, with its 
 cupola of green and copper-coloured tiles, man- 
 ages to convey a hint of Byzantium. Perhaps it 
 was because I came straight down to Oristano 
 after wandering among the wild villages of Bar- 
 bagia that, in spite of its puny population of eight 
 thousand souls, it seemed to me to have so sur- 
 
 276 
 
A SINISTER COUNTRY 
 
 prisingly much of the suavity and amenity of a 
 city. For some reason which I cannot explain 
 the undramatic play that was enacted all day 
 upon the broad market-place, with the four- 
 square, medieval tower of San Cristoforo for a 
 background, was no less diverting to me than to 
 the citizen to whom it afforded all his meed of 
 pleasure. 
 
 But Oristano was like a friendly town in the 
 midst of a hostile country. I had no sooner left 
 its walls than I became aware of a sinister in- 
 fluence. I walked along a sombre avenue as 
 obscure as a cathedral aisle until I came to a 
 stone bridge spanning the Tirso. The Tirso is the 
 longest river in Sardinia, and has its birth in the 
 pure mountain torrents of Barbagia, but it did 
 not rush to meet the embrace of the sea with 
 the freshness and freedom which a mountain 
 river should have. The plain seemed to have cor- 
 rupted it ; it slunk between the piers of the 
 bridge in a brown, turgid flood, noiseless and 
 odoriferous. Having gained the open country, 
 the road ran between two fences of contorted 
 cactus — surely it is the cactus rather than the 
 mandrake which should groan when it is up- 
 rooted — overtopped by a growth of giant gera- 
 nium, flaunting a perfectly sin-like scarlet. Twice 
 it passed through deserted villages, but without 
 losing anything of its unnecessary breadth, for it 
 was broad as the road that leads to destruction. 
 
 277 
 
THE BURIED CITY 
 
 The houses that flanked it were ignoble, very 
 low, and built of mud bricks. Once, over the 
 cactus hedge, I saw a church standing isolated 
 among the fields. It had a minaret-like tower 
 which most strangely recalled both Holland and 
 Africa. The bells began to ring with a kind of 
 cracked and mocking revelry. I waited and 
 watched. They ceased, and I was scarcely sur- 
 prised that no worshippers answered their sum- 
 mons. The air was so still that I fancied I could 
 hear the empty nave echo to the mutter of the 
 lonely priest. As the walls gleamed in the yellow- 
 ish light, it seemed to be the very chapel of 
 Blake's vision — "the chapel all of gold, that 
 none did dare to enter in." 
 
 It was Sunday morning, but a little further on 
 I came across some peasants baking mud bricks 
 and others reaping the corn. They were plucking 
 it with their fingers, stalk by stalk. If they had 
 cut it with a sickle or a scythe they would have 
 reaped a harvest of thistles and poppies. 
 
 At Cabras the road runs abruptly into a wide 
 lagoon. The village lies upon the shore, but quite 
 unrefreshed by the nearness of the water. I never 
 saw a village, even in the midst of a plain, so deso- 
 late in aspect, so choked and parched with heat, 
 reflecting such a hatefully metallic light. I found 
 the market-place black with men. They were of 
 a type that I had seen nowhere else in the island, 
 and wore a peculiar costume the peculiarity of 
 
 278 
 
CABRAS 
 
 which was the scantiness of it. They were bare 
 from the feet to the middle of the thigh, for the 
 sea and the shallow lagoons are so much their 
 native element that it is never worth their while 
 to dress as landsmen. While the men were stand- 
 ing ankle-deep in the dust, as insensible to the 
 withering heat as lizards, the women were sitting 
 in the cool of the church. They squatted cross- 
 legged on the floor of the nave, blackening the 
 marble pavement from the door to the altar- 
 steps. The company was as sadly dressed as at a 
 Quakers' meeting ; nowhere was there a note of 
 the gay colouring of the south. They were 
 shrouded in sombre shawls, shading from russet 
 to rusty black, which covered their heads and 
 half their faces like veils. Lean dogs ran in and 
 out among the seated figures ; swarthy naked 
 children crawled about like reptiles ; an aged 
 priest murmured at the altar, and throughout the 
 church sounded the mild hum of a conversazione. 
 The conversation and the elaborate business at 
 the altar ceased simultaneously, the women went 
 out into the glare of the piazza, holding their 
 veils across their mouths, and walked swiftly and 
 silently to their homes. 
 
 The little waves of the stagno almost washed 
 the walls of the church. The water was the colour 
 of clay tinged with blood, but round the edges it 
 shone with all the beautiful, unseemly colours of 
 putrescence. A slight breeze agitated it into 
 
 279 
 
THE BURIED CITY 
 
 ripples and brought the warm breath of decay to 
 the nostrils. Near to the shore some worn-out 
 horses stood up to their bellies in the oily water, 
 with their fore-legs tied closely together. Naked 
 urchins, as brown as the red mud, splashed about 
 in the water and threw stones at them. Each 
 time that they were hit they gave a jerky leap 
 forward. A ruined tower on the shore of the lake 
 and a stretch of low hills on the horizon were the 
 only incidents in the flat and featureless land- 
 scape. 
 
 In this afternoon of distressing heat and in this 
 country of desolate, limitless expanse, I made a 
 discovery which very likely you have already 
 made. I discovered that all those qualities that 
 go to make up the charm of the South — I do not 
 mean the tropical, but the European South — 
 may too easily be carried to a point at which 
 they become horrible. There is not a single one 
 of those incidents which make the Ufe of southern 
 countries so pleasurable to look on at that may 
 not be exaggerated and distorted into a means of 
 pain. All that casualness of living, all those cir- 
 cumstances of disorder, which to the traveller 
 newly arrived from countries with business habits 
 are as refreshing as the folly of children after the 
 staid ways of grown-up people, at a certain well- 
 defined point pass from beauty to outrageous 
 squalor. The squalor remains when the trick of 
 the picturesque has ceased to deceive the eye. 
 
 280 
 
HATEFULNESS OF THE SOUTH 
 
 The inimitable southern gesture is essentially the 
 grace of the animal ; at first one forgets the basis 
 of animality which it presumes ; but one day it 
 becomes too explicit, and one thirsts for the grace 
 of the spirit. The gladdening southern light is 
 capable of an intensity that grips the soul with 
 melancholy more fatally than the gloom of the 
 North. Sooner or later in the experience of every 
 northerner who lives in a southern latitude there 
 comes a moment when he cannot help crying out, 
 " Hateful is the dark blue sky vaulted o'er the 
 dark blue sea." The grateful southern heat can 
 torture the body as well as comfort it. The eye 
 wearies of the riot of colour, and searches in vain 
 for cool and temperate tones. And that perpetual 
 charm of Mediterranean countries, the sense of 
 the encompassing past, may become suddenly so 
 acute that the mind revolts against the tyranny 
 of everything that is olden, and hates the un- 
 timely reminder that the end of strength is weak- 
 ness, and of beauty decay. The beauty of the 
 South is not assured and indestructible like that 
 of a Greek statue ; it depends upon the conjunc- 
 tion of felicitous circumstances ; it is like the smile 
 of a woman whose heart is sered. It is a mask, and 
 I shall never again be quite secure against a mis- 
 giving that the mask may at any instant drop 
 and disclose those features, as I saw them at 
 Cabras, which are neither fresh nor kindly nor 
 happy. 
 
 a8i 
 
THE BURIED CITY 
 
 I pushed further on into the heart of this for- 
 lorn country, making for the finger of land point- 
 ing out into the sea, at the extremity of which is 
 the site of the ancient Tharros. The road ran 
 along the shores of the stagnant lake of Cabras 
 and then lost itself in a maze of sandy, weed- 
 grown tracks. To the right and left parched crops 
 were struggling for existence with the choking 
 weeds. Just over the ears of the corn the air 
 trembled as it trembles over a lime-kiln. The rank 
 grass swarmed and hummed with life. Monstrous 
 grasshoppers skirmished before my feet, making 
 a continuous rustling, as of silk dresses, among 
 the dry herbage. Emerald-backed hzards paused 
 listening, and then flashed across the path, seem- 
 ing even more bejewelled and fantastic than their 
 gorgeous imitations in the jewellers' shops. Ma- 
 jestic dragon-flies whirred after their prey. The 
 sun flashed upon the beautiful iridescence of all 
 those insects that feed upon corruption. A my- 
 riad forms of life were busy upon their infini- 
 tesimal activities, yet it was a life which impressed 
 one as being monstrous, exotic, and in some in- 
 explicable way corrupt. 
 
 At length I reached the narrow peninsula that 
 terminates in the Capo S. Marco. Here as a fitting 
 epilogue to this dead region stood a Byzantine 
 basilica, grey, ruinous, and forlorn, in a waste of 
 sand. Its doors and windows were blocked up, 
 its white dome battered and shapeless. It wore 
 
 282 
 
THARROS 
 
 the aspect of uttermost age, yet it was the latest 
 work of man that stood beside this desolate shore. 
 It had been run up in the eighth century ; the 
 builders, to save themselves pains, had utilised 
 the bricks and columns of the Roman town hard 
 by. A little further on was the quarry which had 
 supplied the material for its construction, the 
 debris of ancient Tharros. Little remained of 
 this proud city, which once measured four miles 
 in circumference. Time had dismantled its build- 
 ings, but had been unable to loosen the granite- 
 like mortar which still bound the thin Roman 
 bricks together. The drifting sand had half 
 buried the broken masses of masonry, but the 
 lines of the paved streets and the ruts worn by 
 the chariot wheels were still faintly discernible. 
 As I strolled along the beach I was astounded to 
 find it strewn with fragments of Roman pottery. 
 At every step one trod upon bricks, tiles, arms 
 and mouths of amphorae, morsels of jars and 
 pitchers of every shape and texture — nothing 
 unmutilated, but everything suggesting design 
 and beauty. 
 
 I picked up a piece of terra-cotta, the use of 
 which I could only conjecture ; it might have 
 been a portion of a frieze or of the cornice of a 
 wall. It was crudely decorated with a series of 
 shallow impressions, obviously made by printing 
 the thumb upon the wet clay. Underneath was a 
 row of double indentations, the prints of the first 
 
 283 
 
THE BURIED CITY 
 
 and second fingers. These signatures of the 
 Roman workman were as fresh as if they had 
 been made only yesterday. It was plain that the 
 nails had been long and sharp, that of the second 
 finger broken. The thing was rude and insignifi- 
 cant, worthless from the antiquarian's point of 
 view ; yet it had a magic in it. It was more elo- 
 quent than the most moving page of Gibbon. It 
 had the thrill of the spoken word. It recon- 
 structed a city on these weed-grown sands, popu- 
 lated it with men, snapshotted, as it were, one of 
 those trivial incidents which form nine-tenths of 
 human life — ^the nine-tenths which history ignores 
 —such as the breaking of a finger-nail. For it is 
 the trifles and minutiae of a buried civiUsation 
 that abridge the centuries and enable us to touch 
 hands with the past. 
 
 But I had not yet reached the end of the pro- 
 montory nor progressed far enough down the 
 avenue of the centuries. On the Mediterranean 
 shores, where the writing is still legible, the tale 
 is usually the same : before Rome — Greece, Car- 
 thage, and Phoenicia. When your imagination 
 has carried you back as far as it conveniently can, 
 and out of school-day memories and the mind's 
 jetsam of classical lore you have attempted to 
 reconstruct and repeople a past civilisation, you 
 find that you have to set out on a further journey 
 to more unknown and alien regions. Of Greece 
 and Rome we can form a coherent if not an exact 
 
 284 
 
CHANGE AND DECAY 
 
 account ; but of that mysterious race which set 
 out from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon to explore 
 the world, feeling its way from headland to head- 
 land round the shores of the Mediterranean, like 
 a blind man groping round a room, our images 
 are fantastic and confused. The very name of 
 Tharros, tradition says, derives from a woman of 
 Phoenicia, the wife of a king. The cliff which de- 
 scends abruptly at the end of the promontory is 
 honeycombed with the tombs of the Carthaginian 
 colonists. This deep-hewn necropolis was once a 
 mine of gold and precious stones, but the modern 
 antiquary has completed the work of spoliation 
 that the Saracen began a thousand years ago. 
 Time and tempest have split open the rocks and 
 broken in upon the repose of princes. The wind 
 whistles among the once subterranean chambers, 
 and the narrow doorways through which the 
 corpses were carried to their airless tombs now 
 form broken casements looking out on to the 
 changing sapphire of the sea. Sand and dust 
 have half-choked the massive sarcophagi which 
 once enshrined bracelets and necklets, rings and 
 earrings, and the gold fillets that bound the fore- 
 heads of the priestesses of Baal. 
 
 At Tharros the burden of the past became in- 
 supportable. When it is desiccated, ticketed, 
 boxed in a museum, the past is merely curious, 
 never terrible. Objects uprooted from their natu- 
 ral soil lose their spell ; they may exercise the 
 
 285 
 
THE BURIED CITY 
 
 mind's ingenuity, but they leave the emotions 
 cold. The museum atmosphere dries up the 
 source of tears. At Tharros scarcely anything 
 that you can take account of remains ; it is the 
 emptiness and desolation of the scene that evokes 
 so keen a sense of the destructive and remorse- 
 less working of time. Upon the blank background 
 the imagination flashes pictures of the vivid life 
 once lived within this little space — ^the quays 
 thronged with crowds when the galleys came in 
 from Carthage bringing news of the latest vic- 
 tories of Hannibal ; the narrow, noisy streets, 
 through which the oxen dragged the solid- wheeled 
 carts laden with corn for the granaries of Rome ; 
 the procession of women moving erectly with 
 amphorae on their heads as they went night and 
 morning to the well which you can still find in 
 the waste of sand ; the great temple of the Egyp- 
 tians, the destruction of which Anthony, a native 
 of Tharros, lamented in the ninth century, the 
 Roman temple of Minerva, the forum, and the 
 amphitheatre. Now the place is a desert, and the 
 only sounds that interrupt the deathly silence are 
 the cries of the gulls as they fly over the empty 
 tombs. The scene gave rise to a sense of despair — 
 that most poisonous despair which whispers an 
 assurance of the futility of all human effort. It 
 evoked a vision of destiny as the sad mistress 
 of men and gods alike, quietly alert, infinitely 
 patient, foreseeing the ruin of everything that is 
 
 286 
 
YOUTH AND THE SEA 
 
 laboriously built up, dooming the activity of ages 
 to sterility, secure in her ultimate triumph. In 
 this corner of the world her triumph was already 
 achieved. From here she would push her con- 
 quests further. 
 
 In this vanitas-vanitatum mood I went down 
 to the shore. For the first time in that day of 
 wearying heat, I had a sense of freshness and re- 
 pose. Except for broad half circles of a deeper 
 blue, where the breeze ruffled it, the sea was as 
 unwrinkled as the flesh of a child. The waves 
 rose and fell upon the beach without breaking, 
 with a rhythmic undulation like that of a woman 
 breathing. Here, at last, was something uncor- 
 rupted and incorruptible. The sand was white 
 and firm, and beneath the clear green water it 
 was chequered by the motion of the waves into a 
 flickering pattern of light and shade. Then I saw 
 that I was not alone. A naked boy was splashing 
 among the waves. His skin shone in the water 
 as bright and ruddy as a burnished cherry. He 
 shouted as the waves broke over him. This place 
 of troubling memories was merely his playground. 
 For him there was no past. He lived only in the 
 momentary present, and the present moment for 
 him was simply a sharp point of joy. The sight 
 exorcised the despair which a moment before had 
 whispered that there was nothing perdurable on 
 earth but decay and death. For I was looking on 
 two things that were unconquerable, certainly en- 
 
 287 
 
THE BURIED CITY 
 
 during, always beautiful, and always young — 
 human flesh and the sea. 
 
 But that night I dreamed a dream. I saw a 
 woman sitting upon the red mud of the shore of a 
 still lake. The mud was as hard as a stone and 
 split into fissures by the heat. All round her the 
 air moved in infinitesimal vibrations. Her feet 
 were bare, and the earth that had eaten into 
 them was shot with all manner of iridescent 
 colours. Her fingers were shrunk to such a thin- 
 ness that the bronze rings which she wore upon 
 them rattled whenever she moved a hand. The 
 raising of an eyelid seemed to demand an intoler- 
 able effort. Her eyes were as blank as those of a 
 dead sheep — ^they showed not a hint of pleading 
 or sorrow or any kind of desire, not even of weari- 
 ness or despair. They were meaningless utterly. 
 Then I knew that her name was Sinis. 
 
 288 
 
APPENDIX 
 
THE TRAVELLER IN THE ISLANDS OF 
 THE WESTERN MEDITERRANEAN 
 
 SARDINIA 
 
 Sardinia is the forgotten isle of the Mediter- 
 ranean. Until a generation or two ago its aban- 
 donment was almost as complete as if it had lain 
 among the Outer Hebrides instead of in the very 
 centre of European life. Yet in the dawn of the 
 Mediterranean civilisation it was one of the first 
 places to be touched by the Eastern colonisers of 
 Europe. Some thousand ye£|,rs before Christ a 
 westward migration took place from Asia Minor 
 which is comparable with the great discoveries 
 of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of our era. 
 There was the same fever for the possession of 
 the precious metals. An excitement spread 
 through the coasts of Tyre and Sidon which, per- 
 haps, was not altogether unlike that which went 
 over England and Spain when the reports were 
 made known of the first happy voyages to the 
 Indies and the Americas. Daring adventurers 
 pushed westwards to the silver-bearing moun- 
 tains of Spain, and beyond the Pillars of Hercules 
 to the remote isles of the ocean. The Phoenician 
 
 291 
 
SARDINIA 
 
 fleet, returning with the spoils of Tarshish and 
 the Casserides, put in at the Sardinian harbours 
 of Tharros, Nova, and CaraUs. The great city of 
 CaraUs, with its hundred thousand inhabitants, 
 probably lies buried beneath the waters of the 
 Stagno di Cagliari, but the cliff is still riddled with 
 the tombs of the Carthaginian colonists. The 
 great age of Sardinia arrived when Rome wrested 
 the island from the rival empire of Carthage. Its 
 inhabitants then numbered two millions, more 
 than double the present population. The Romans 
 drove their great highways from Cagliari in the 
 south to Porto Torres at the north-western and 
 Terranova at the north-eastern extremity. The 
 granaries of Rome had to be enlarged to store 
 the grain that the galleys brought from the 
 Sardinian cornfields. The amphitheatre, where 
 twenty thousand citizens used to applaud the 
 combats oi wild beasts and gladiators, still stands 
 on a slope of the hill of Cagliari. 
 
 But when the power of Rome decayed, Sar- 
 dinia fell into a kind of enchanted sleep from 
 which it is only now awaking. If you penetrate 
 into the interior of the island you come upon 
 traces of the civilisation of two thousand years 
 ago. The mode of yoking the oxen and of draw- 
 ing the furrows is Roman ; the construction of 
 the carts, with their solid, spokeless wheels, the 
 form of the plough, the spades, the axes, the 
 baskets, the pitchforks, have remained almost 
 
 29a 
 
THE LINGERING PAST 
 
 unchanged since classical times. In some parts 
 the language that the peasants speak is a dialect 
 of Rome. There are villages where, although you 
 know no word of Spanish or Italian, you can 
 make your wants known through the medium of 
 Latin, There are still Greek phrases embedded 
 in the language which have come down from the 
 time of Justinian, or even from the days of the 
 earliest Greek colonists. Dances which are the 
 same as those of ancient Greece are still danced 
 at feste among the mountains. The launedda, the 
 popular instrument of Sardinia, which is only 
 now giving place to the accordion, is none other 
 than the antique pipe made of reeds. The cos- 
 tume of the peasant bears a certain resemblance 
 to that of the Roman shepherd, and has certainly 
 undergone no change since the Middle Ages. 
 
 The isolation of Sardinia is partly accounted 
 for by the configuration of the island. Sardinia 
 turns its back upon Italy. Along the whole of the 
 eastern coast runs a mountain chain which pre- 
 sents a brusque escarpment towards the mainland 
 and makes the island difficult of access on this 
 side. On the western side the mountains sink to 
 the sea-level in gentler declivities ; the rivers 
 flow down widening valleys to pour themselves 
 into that empty basin of the Mediterranean which 
 lies between Sardinia and the islands of Spain. 
 With the exception of the plain of the Campidano 
 between Cagliari and Oristano, once an arm of the 
 
 293 
 
SARDINIA 
 
 sea, the rest of the island; which has a greater 
 extent than Wales, is a network of mountain 
 ranges. They culminate in the centre in the great 
 mass of the Gennargentu, the Gate of Silver, the 
 highest peaks of which are capped with snow 
 almost all the year round. Before the construc- 
 tion of the roads and of the two branch railways 
 to Nuoro and Sorgono the remote mountain dis- 
 tricts were completely isolated. Each village 
 lived an independent life, preserving its own dia- 
 lect, its own customs, and even its own special 
 costume. 
 
 Undoubtedly the two chief reasons why the 
 traveller has in general shunned Sardinia are its 
 insalubrity and its insecurity. The climate of 
 Sardinia has always had a bad name. Probably 
 the conditions have deteriorated rather than im- 
 proved since the days when Rome got rid of its 
 undesirable citizens by exiling them to Sardinia. 
 The low-lying districts round the coasts are 
 largely covered by shallow salt lakes and marshes 
 which breed the fatal fever, or intemperie, as it is 
 called, that is the curse of the island. The mists 
 arising from the stagni make it somewhat unsafe 
 to be abroad in these regions during the pleasant 
 hours of sundown and sunrise. The summer 
 months are the worst. " The intemperie," says 
 Baedeker, " renders the island, with the excep- 
 tion of the larger towns, uninhabitable for stran- 
 gers from July to October." This condemnation, 
 
 294 
 
AN UNDESIRABLE EXCURSION 
 
 however, is too sweeping. It would, of course, be 
 folly to generalise from a single instance, but in 
 justice to the much-maligned climate I may men- 
 tion that I passed a scorching week in July at 
 Oristano, a veritable fever-nest, without suffering 
 any ill effects. I remember that one day I asked 
 the son of the landlord of the albergo to take me 
 to see some Rorrian tombs which had recently 
 been unearthed. In the late afternoon we went 
 down to the shores of the stagno, and my guide 
 led me along a muddy causeway which ran out 
 among the reeds some distance into the marsh. 
 The air was full of noisome exhalations, and the 
 mosquitoes settled upon us in clouds. When we 
 were in the midst of the swamp the boy turned 
 and told me that the fever was more deadly hera 
 than anywhere else in the island, and that he 
 had brought me to see the interesting draining 
 operations which the Government were under- 
 taking in order to attempt to remedy the pesti- 
 lential conditions ! In this case I didn't regret 
 that I had provided myself with a stock of qui- 
 nine. It is a wise precaution to take if you pro- 
 pose to visit Oristano in July. 
 
 In addition to Oristano there are other locali- 
 ties which have an evil reputation for malaria. 
 The following are the principal : On the west- 
 ward side of the bay of Cagliari, the plain be- 
 tween Capoterra and the stagni of Cagliari ; fur- 
 ther south on the same coast the plain around 
 
 295 
 
SARDINIA 
 
 Pula ; Teulada, at the southern extremity of the 
 island ; on the south-east coast, the district of 
 Sarrabus and the mouth of the Flumendosa 
 (Muravera, Villaputzu, and S. Vito) ; Bosa, on 
 the west coast at the mouth of the Temo ; the 
 district of Nurra in the north ; Porto Torres, the 
 port of embarkation for Corsica and Genoa ; and 
 Terranova, near the Golfo Aranci on the north- 
 east. Fortunately for the traveller, these places 
 have least attraction from the scenic point of 
 view, but there are interesting antiquities at 
 Oristano, Pula, and Porto Torres. The mountain 
 districts, however, are not altogether immune, 
 especially in the month of October. The winds 
 carry the exhalations from the fever zones up to 
 the higher levels. Even at Nuoro, which has an 
 altitude of nearly 2000 feet, I have seen peasants 
 who had been working all day in the valleys re- 
 turn at nightfall trembling with fever. The pea- 
 sant's principal protection against the fever is his 
 costume. The fleece of the mastrtica, which he 
 wears even in the scorching heat of summer, 
 makes him more or less unsusceptible of the 
 effects of the climate. On the whole, however, 
 the dangers of the climate appear to have been 
 exaggerated. The traveller who avoids the low- 
 lying regions at the mouths of the rivers has little 
 to fear, even if he visits the island in the height 
 of the summer. The best season is the spring and 
 early summer. You may expec t rain in February 
 
 296 
 
TRADITIONS OF LAWLESSNESS 
 
 and October, and wind in March. The cUmate ol 
 CagUari and the southern part of the island is 
 pleasant all through the winter, but begins to be 
 unpleasantly warm about the end of June. Natu- 
 rally, in the mountainous districts the winter is 
 more severe and the summer more temperate. 
 The traveller will therefore vary his itinerary 
 according to the time of the year, but he will do 
 well to avoid Sardinia in the month of October. 
 Sardinia has inherited a tradition of lawless- 
 ness from its turbulent past, but to-day the con- 
 ditions are changed. Memories of the vendetta 
 may linger in the district of Gallura in the north, 
 and among the mountains of Nuoro, but with 
 these the traveller has nothing to do. It would, 
 perhaps, be too much to say that brigandage is 
 altogether extinct. One of the first items of news 
 that I saw on opening a paper at Cagliari was 
 that a canon of the cathedral had been seized in 
 Barbagia and carried away to the mountains, the 
 brigands demanding a ransom of 20,000 lire. 
 Whether the chapter considered him worth the 
 price I cannot say. On my first excursion into 
 the interior, I travelled on the branch railway 
 that runs to Tortoli, and got off at Gairo, intend- 
 ing to walk across the hills to Lanusei. On the 
 map the distance did not seem far, but I found 
 that it was a four hours' walk. It was already 
 dusk when I left the wayside station, and I had 
 not gone far when I heard someone calling me. 
 
 297 
 
SARDINIA 
 
 It was a peasant who was walking in the same 
 direction. His surprise at finding a solitary for- 
 eigner setting off at that hour to walk over the 
 mountains to Lanusei was unbounded. As we 
 trudged along a gloomy valley in the shadow of 
 precipitous hills he began to enlarge upon the 
 dangers of travelling in Sardinia. His dialect was 
 difficult to understand. It appeared, however, 
 that I was safe so long as I only met a single 
 native on the road, but if I met a company of 
 two or three they would certainly stop me and 
 demand a thousand lire ! As the darkness had 
 already fallen, he easily persuaded me to spend 
 the night at a cottage by the roadside, the owner 
 of which was a friend of his. It was a wretched 
 hovel. The floor of the room where I slept was so 
 full of holes that I had to move with circumspec- 
 tion in order to avoid being precipitated into the 
 cellar beneath. I confess that at first I suspected 
 a trap, for the friend would have required no 
 make-up if he had been cast for the part of villain 
 in a Drury Lane melodrama. In the morning, 
 however, the peasant showed the same sincere 
 solicitude for my welfare, and offered to accom- 
 pany me as far as Lanusei. 
 
 The wealthy resident perhaps still runs a cer- 
 tain amount of risk in travelling in the wilder 
 parts of Sardinia. Certainly, if he is known to 
 have much money about him, he offers a tempta- 
 tion to the enterprising peasant in those regions 
 
 298 
 
MINOR DANGERS 
 
 where carabinieri are few and far between. But 
 the passing tourist has no cause for alarm. I 
 walked for many days among the mountains with 
 no other weapon than a walking-stick* and though 
 I met many peasants, singly and in companies of 
 two or three, they only stopped me in order to 
 wish that I might go with God. Speaking from 
 my own experience, I would say that the only 
 real perils of travel in Sardinia are its dogs and 
 railway trains. In all countries when you ap- 
 proach a farm or an isolated dwelling in the 
 country you are prepared for a doubtful recep- 
 tion from the dogs. But in Sardinia they scarcely 
 hesitate to attack you even when you are walk- 
 ing peaceably upon the high road. The breed is 
 particularly ferocious, and it is said that the pea- 
 sants have a way of stimulating their ferocity by 
 tying a bladder filled with blood to the neck of a 
 dummy man and encouraging the animals to 
 spring at the neck and tear open the bladder. 
 Travelling on a branch railway in Sardinia has 
 also its dangers. On the main line the trains 
 never get up speed enough to succeed in varying 
 the monotony of the journey by an accident, but 
 on the branch lines they appear to have a con- 
 stitutional incapacity for keeping on the metals. 
 The engine is continually making frantic dashes 
 into the scenery. On the line to Tortoli I made 
 four journeys and had three accidents. On one 
 occasion, after a car had been wrecked, the 
 
 299 
 
SARDINIA 
 
 various employees gathered round the wreckage 
 and spent the remainder of a sultry afternoon in 
 bitterly disputing the proper apportionment of 
 the blame for the accident. As it was impossible 
 to proceed that evening, I spent the night at the 
 railway station, and enjoyed a comfort that I 
 found nowhere else in the island. 
 
 Sardinia lies nearer to Africa than to Europe, 
 but the shortest sea-passage is from Civita Vec- 
 ehia, the port of Rome, to Capo Figari in the 
 Golfo degli Aranci. The steamboat leaves Civita 
 Vecchia daily about five o'clock in the evening. 
 It is about 220 miles from Golfo Aranci to Cagli- 
 ari, a distance which the express accomplishes 
 in some eleven or twelve hours. When I was in 
 Cagliari the municipal council resigned as a 
 protest against the time-table of the state rail- 
 way, so that probably the journey has now been 
 shortened. There is a weekly service direct to 
 Cagliari from Genoa, Naples, Palermo, and Tunis, 
 and a less frequent service from Marseilles. 
 
 In Sardinia you must not look for luxury in the 
 hotels, but you will find a certain amount of com- 
 fort at the Scala di Ferro and the Quattro Mori, 
 at Cagliari. It was the driver of the 'bus who 
 showed me my room at the Scala di Ferro and 
 settled the price of it — ^two and a half lire a day. 
 It was not customary, he said, to allow pension 
 
 300 
 
CAGLIARI 
 
 terms — an arrangement I didn't regret as soon as 
 I discovered the restaurant on the Bastione San 
 Remy, CagUari is not Sardinia, and although its 
 atmosphere is perceptibly different from that of 
 the ordinary Italian town, I don't think it will 
 detain the traveller many days. When you have 
 seen the Roman and Carthaginian tombs in the 
 suburb of S. Avendrace, which are about a mile 
 out of the city just on the right of the Via Na- 
 zionale that runs to Sassari and Porto Torres, 
 when you have walked among the ruins of the 
 Roman amphitheatre, wandered through the 
 streets in the Quartiere " Castello," visited the 
 cathedral, watched the sun set from the Buon 
 Camino, and dined by starlight on the Bastione 
 San Remy, you will begin to long to penetrate 
 into the heart of the real Sardinia that lies on 
 the other side of the encircling rampart of hills. 
 There are three places which you might select 
 as your objective — Lanusei, on the branch line 
 to Tortoli ; Aritzo, on the line to Sorgono ; and 
 Nuoro, which is the terminus of the branch line 
 from Macomer. The charm of Lanusei is its pano- 
 rama of almost Alpine grandeur. It is also one 
 of the chief sporting centres of the island. Owing, 
 however, to its nearness to Tortoli, which has a 
 considerable trade with the Continent, the life 
 here is less primitive than in many other of 
 the mountain districts. The town is acquiring 
 a distinctly modern aspect, and most of the 
 
 301 
 
SARDINIA 
 
 inhabitants wear either the ordinary European 
 dress or a compromise between that and the cos- 
 tume of Sardinia. 
 
 The better plan is to take the train at once to 
 Aritzo. Aritzo is in the heart of Barbagia, and 
 Barbagia is the heart of Sardinia. It is not per- 
 haps the most characteristic village of Barbagia, 
 but then the most essentially Barbagian villages 
 make no provision for the accommodation of tra- 
 vellers. The inn at Aritzo, Albergo Simoncini, is 
 " comfortable " in the Sardinian sense of the 
 word, the English equivalent of which is " toler- 
 able." There you dine in a pleasant upper room 
 with a bare floor, a painted ceiling, and a view 
 overlooking a valley covered with chestnut woods, 
 and musical with" the noise of mountain torrents. 
 The air is fresh and cool even in the summer 
 months. Aritzo is a centre for excursions into the 
 Gennargentu. The sure-footed mountain horses 
 can be hired for one and a half lire a day. It is 
 worth spending a night in the Refugia La Mar- 
 mora in order to see the sun rise on Bruncu Spina 
 (6290 ft.). Within easy reach are the delightful 
 mountain villages of Desulo, notable for the fine 
 barbaric costume of its inhabitants, and Tonara, 
 where the torroni is made, divided into four little 
 hamlets with the Arab-sounding names of Ara- 
 bule, Ilala, Tdneri, and Telaseri. If you wish to 
 stay at Desulo, mournful and enchanting, you 
 will find no inn there, but you can arrange with 
 
 302 
 
p^^ 
 
 <i 
 
 Oh" 
 
 O 
 
 « 
 
 g 
 3 
 
 Q 
 
THE HEART OF THE ISLAND 
 
 one of the wealthier villagers to provide you with 
 a bed. From Aritzo it is a glorious day's ride via 
 Desulo to Fonni, a town that lies upon a rolling 
 tableland more than 3000 feet above the sea. 
 Here are one or two quite decent inns. A dili- 
 gence, or carrozza postale, runs from Fonni to 
 Nuoro, passing through Mamoiada. If you are in 
 the neighbourhood on a Sunday, it is worth while 
 making a detour to Orgosolo to hear the singing 
 at Mass. 
 
 Nuoro is, of course, most easily reached by rail 
 from Macomer, on the main line from Cagliari to 
 Sassari. If anyone were to ask me where he could 
 see all that was most characteristic of Sardinian 
 life and scenery, and yet not forego the usual 
 comforts of civilisation, I would recommend him 
 to go to Nuoro. It is situated in the midst of the 
 Sardinian Switzerland, nearly 2000 feet above 
 the sea, swept by the purest breezes under heaven, 
 backed by masses of solid granite, and command- 
 ing a view of range beyond range of the loftiest 
 mountains of Sardinia, ending in the distant 
 crests of the Gennargentu. The race which in- 
 habits this stern mountain region is proud, pas- 
 sionate, and shadowed with melancholy. Here 
 all the traditions of the old order have held out 
 longest against the encroachments of a more 
 modern civilisation — ^the vendetta, the weird 
 rites that precede the burial of the dead,, the im- 
 provisation of songs, the poetic speech, the 
 
 303 
 
SARDINIA 
 
 ancient solemn dance. If you would seize the 
 spirit of the place, you must read Grazia Deled- 
 da's charming novel, La Via del Male. As befits 
 a place of seven thousand inhabitants, Nuoro 
 possesses, besides a cathedral, one or two moder- 
 ately comfortable inns. About five miles from 
 the town are some interesting prehistoric remains, 
 known as domus de janas, perdas fittas, and tumbas 
 de gigantes. 
 
 The south-west corner of the island is the 
 centre of the mining industry. The district, of 
 which the principal town is Iglesias, is also notable 
 for the unhealthiness of its climate and for the 
 Moorish descent of the inhabitants, who are still 
 spoken of as Maureddos.* . 
 
 Sassari is the capital of the northern province 
 and the great rival of Cagliari. It has spacious 
 squares, pleasant gardens, and a lively air ; but 
 for me it had none of that elusive quaUty which, 
 for want of a better word, we call charm. The 
 reader can, if he likes, consider my judgment 
 biassed, for in the great feud between the capitals 
 of the northern and southern provinces I frankly 
 acknowledge myself to be a partisan of Cagliari. 
 But no one should go to Sassari without visiting 
 the port of Alghero, about twenty miles beyond. 
 A walled city always seems to me to enclose 
 
 * The strain of Eastern blood is very evident in the features of 
 the peasant girl in the illustration on the cover of this book. She is 
 a native of Teulada, 
 
 304 
 

 / ^^ 
 
 
 A SPINSTER OF FONNl 
 
IN FAERY LANDS FORLORN 
 
 almost all of romance that has not perished from 
 the world ; but when its walls rise up out of the 
 sea something is added of sadness and mystery 
 that is equally indescribable and unaccountable. 
 One evening, after dining indifferently well at 
 the Albergo d' Italia and drinking some of that 
 torbato, the sweetest wine I have ever tasted, 
 which is only saved from sickliness by its ex- 
 quisite flavour, I walked along the deserted 
 battlements when the grey stones reddened with 
 the reflection of the glow above the hills on the 
 other side of the bay, and for a few moments 
 that vision of " magic casements opening on 
 the foam of perilous seas in faery lands for- 
 lorn " was made reality. I know that torbato is 
 so named because it is said to perturb the mind. 
 Would you therefore condemn the mood ? Let 
 me rather commend the wine. 
 
 Of all the countries of Western Europe, Sar- 
 dinia is the richest in prehistoric remains. The 
 most remarkable are the nuraghi, pyramid-like 
 structures which I believe are not known to exist 
 in any other part of the world, although they bear 
 a certain resemblance to the talayots of Menorca. 
 Some four thousand of these towers of Cyclopean 
 construction remain scattered throughout the 
 island ; they are most numerous and best pre- 
 served in the region round Macomer. Their origin 
 and their use are wrapped in mystery ; whether 
 
SARDINIA 
 
 they served as temples, tombs, or towers of 
 refuge, whether they were built by the Phceni- 
 cians, Canaanites, Iberians, by eastern races of 
 unknown origin, or by the indigenous inhabitants 
 before the earliest age of colonisation, archaeolo- 
 gists have been unable to agree. 
 
 The most interesting relics of the Roman occu- 
 pation will be found around Cagliari (at No. 253 
 Corso Vittoro Emanuele II are the remains of a 
 villa), Pula, Oristano, and Porto Torres (the port 
 of Sassari). Fordongianus, the ancient Forum 
 Trajani, has a thermal spring and the remains of 
 Roman baths. It can be reached by diUgence 
 either from Oristano or from the next station, 
 Simaxis, a distance of about fifteen and ten miles 
 respectively. The bleak and dreary village of 
 Porto Torres, which stands on the site of Turris 
 Libyssonis, was under the Romans the second 
 most important city in the island. There you 
 will find the ruins of a Roman Temple of Fortune, 
 of the Palazzo del Be Barbaro, and of an aque- 
 duct, but the principal glory of the place is the 
 beautiful, excellently preserved basilica of S. 
 Gavino. 
 
 Sardinia offers exceptional facilities for sport. 
 The mufloni, which perhaps are the wild ancestors 
 of our domestic sheep, have been exterminated 
 in every other island of the Mediterranean except 
 Corsica. They are still to be found among the 
 
 306 
 
SPORT 
 
 fastnesses of the Gennargentu in the neighbour- 
 hood of Desulo, Tonara, Fonni, and Aritzo. Wild 
 deer abound in the mountainous districts of 
 Nuoro, Ozieri, Goeeano, Lanusei, Pula, and Teu- 
 lada. Cinghiali, or wild boar, are very plentiful. 
 The close season for deer and mufloni is from the 
 middle of February to the middle of December ; 
 for cinghiali, from the end of February to May. 
 Tunny fishing is an important industry in Sar- 
 dinia, and one of the most remarkable sights 
 which the island has to offer is the mattanza, or 
 slaughter of the tunny. The season lasts from the 
 beginning of May to the 24th of June. The. best 
 place for seeing a mattanza is Carloforte, in the 
 island of San Pietro, near Iglesias. 
 
 The most vivid picture of the traditional Sar- 
 dinian life is to be seen in the country feste. 
 Unfortunately most of them fall in the months 
 of August, September, and October — the worst 
 possible season for the traveller. 
 
 Cagliari holds the saints in high esteem — or 
 would it be truer to say that its observance of 
 the calendar is so scrupulous because it has so 
 great need of music and pageant ? At the sea- 
 sons of Holy Week, the Assumption, and Corpus 
 Christi the whole city appears to be engrossed in 
 pious duties, as each of the four quarters holds 
 its own celebrations independently. But of all 
 the religious festivals the most renowned and the 
 
 307 
 
SARDINIA 
 
 most characteristic is the festa of Sant' Efisio, the 
 national feast of the island. The ceremony takes 
 the form of a procession to Pula and back — a vil- 
 lage on the other side of the Stagno di Cagliari, 
 nine miles distant, where the saint is believed to 
 have suffered martyrdom. The procession leaves 
 the capital at midday on the 1st of May and re- 
 turns on the evening of the 4th, the image of the 
 saint being escorted by a cavalcade of horsemen 
 in the costume of the ancient Sardinian militia, 
 preceded by musicians playing launeddas. 
 
 The following is a list of the other most impor- 
 tant /este with their approximate dates : — 
 
 Quartu Sant' Elena (six miles from Cagliari), May 
 
 21st and September 11th. 
 Decimannu (ten miles from Cagliari), May 1st and 
 
 the last Sunday of September. 
 Iglesias. Feast of the Virgine di Buoncammino, 
 
 in October, lasts three days. 
 Sorgono. S. Mauro, in May. The feast is held at 
 
 an ancient church in a valley about three 
 
 miles from the town, and lasts three days. 
 Nuoro. S. Salvatore, August 6th ; and La Virgine 
 
 delle Grazie, November 21st. Three days. 
 Oristano. Santa Croce, in September ; and La 
 
 Virgine del Rimedio, also in September. 
 Cabras. Santa Maria Maddalena, May 27th. 
 Fordongianus. S. Lussorio, August 21st. Seven 
 
 days. 
 
 308 
 
FESTE 
 
 Aritzo. S.Basilio, at the beginning of September. 
 
 Desulo. S. Pietro, the end of June. 
 
 Mamoiada. S. Cosimo, September 25th. Three 
 days. 
 
 Sanluri (on the main hne to Cagliari). S. Lorenzo, 
 August 10th. 
 
 Torralba (near Oristano). Sant' Antonio— the /este 
 is held at a little church three miles from 
 the town— and SS. Giuseppe and Sehastiano, 
 September 1st and 2nd. Two famous feste 
 are held at Borutta, about five miles from 
 Torralba — ^that of Corpus, and another on 
 July 29th, when the peasants make the tra- 
 ditional circuit of the church, as at Sedilo. 
 
 Sedilo (station, Abbassanta). S. Costantino, July 
 5th. Three days. 
 
 Mores (near Chiliyani). aS". Giovanni Battista, June 
 24th. Ten days. 
 
 Ploaghe (between Chilivani and Sassari). Feast 
 of the Assumption, August 15th. Twelve in- 
 dividuals, richly vested, walk in the proces- 
 sion representing the Apostles. Also S. Mi- 
 chele, September 29th. 
 
 Porto Torres. S. Gavino, June 3rd. 
 
 Tempio. S. Paulo, August 25th and 26th. 
 
 Sant' Antioco (in the island of the same name on 
 the south-west coast). Sant' Antioco, in May. 
 
 Orgosolo, August 15th, ten days. 
 
 309 
 
MALLORCA 
 
 MALLORCA 
 
 Although discomposing to adventurous spirits, 
 I think it may be taken as a general rule that the 
 beaten track is the best track. Of course, the 
 ideal journey is a voyage of discovery. But the 
 heroic age of travel is over, at any rate as tat as 
 Europe is concerned. The fact that a place is 
 little known is in itself an incitement to visit it, 
 but at this present point of time if a place is 
 little known the odds are that it is little worth 
 knowing. 
 
 Certainly the beaten track in Mallorca passes 
 through a great part of the most notable scenery 
 of the island. After reposing for a while in the 
 large leisure of Palma, even the most hurried tra- 
 veller seldom leaves Mallorca without making 
 two excursions : one by road to Soller, passing 
 through Valldemosa, skirting Miramar and the 
 northern coast, and returning over the Coll de 
 Soller ; the other by rail to Manaoor, a town of 
 little interest, in order to visit the renowned caves 
 — the Cuevas del Drach, near Porto Cristo, and 
 those of Axtd, about fifteen miles further east. 
 The visitor who limits himself to these two routes, 
 however, can scarcely be said to have seen Mal- 
 lorca. To plan a wider itinerary, it would be 
 necessary to know the temperament of the tra- 
 veller and the time at his disposal, but it is pos- 
 
 310 
 
CHARACTER OF HOTELS 
 
 sible to point out the main omissions of the 
 beaten track. 
 
 At Palma you might stay a day or six months, 
 according as you find the place simpatico or not. 
 You can exhaust the sights of the city in a day ; 
 but its grave charm may hold you for many 
 weeks — especially if you are a lover of towns, but 
 have become wearied of large towns. The spirit 
 of a town reaches the stranger to a great extent 
 through the atmosphere of the hotel where he 
 stays. The atmosphere of the Grand Hotel is of 
 the familiar cosmopolitan kind, which seems to 
 interpose a barrier between the place and the 
 visitor, and never allows him to forget for an in- 
 stant that he is a foreigner. At the Alhambra 
 the spirit of the town will come to you through 
 the medium of the music-hall, of which it is a 
 kind of annexe. At the Fonda de Mallorca the 
 medium is pleasantly, and at the H6tel Conti- 
 nental rather unpleasantly, Mallorquin. About 
 four miles from Palma, on the road to Andraitx, 
 is a delightfully situated hotel, Cas Catala, with 
 sunny terraces on the water's edge and a fine 
 view of the bay, although Palma itself is hidden 
 behind a jutting point of land. It is little more 
 than a mile beyond the terminus of the tramway 
 to Porto-Pi, but as the trams keep very early 
 hours it is somewhat isolated at night. 
 
 SoUer can now be reached by railway, but it is 
 infinitely pleasanter to spend an hour or two 
 
 311 
 
MALLORCA 
 
 longer over the journey and go by road, making 
 the detour through Valldemosa, Miramar, and 
 Deya. At Valldemosa stands the Carthusian 
 monastery where Georges Sand and Chopin spent 
 the winter of 1838, occupying a suite of spacious 
 cells with a terrace overlooking the orange groves 
 and the valley. Miramar is a large estate lying 
 on the cliffs of the northern coast, the Mallorquin 
 home of the Austrian Archduke Ludwig Salvator, 
 the author of the standard work on Mallorca, 
 Die Baleares in Wort und Bild geschildert. By the 
 roadside is a hospederia, or guest-house, main- 
 tained by the Archduke, where the traveller is 
 provided with a bed, salt, and olives for three 
 days and nights free of charge. Other provisions 
 he must bring with him — if he brings eggs, Don 
 Fernando's wife will convert them into unforget- 
 able omelettes ! 
 
 SoUer, lying in the midst of its orchards at the 
 foot of the noble sierra of Mallorca, is a place that 
 you will love the more the longer you live in it. 
 You can wander as your fancy leads you among 
 the groves of olives and oranges which surround 
 the town, and you will discover a different walk 
 for every day of the year. It is the best centre 
 for making expeditions on foot or on mule-back 
 into the mountains. The most arduous under- 
 taking is the ascent of Puig Mayor (4740 ft.), 
 the highest mountain in the island. The pools of 
 Gorch Blau lie on the further side of the Puig in 
 
 312 
 
SOLLER 
 
 the very heart of the mountains, some four or 
 five hours from SoUer. If you follow the gorge on 
 towards the northern coast you come to the mag- 
 nificent Torrente de Pareys, but it is best to visit 
 this by sea. Choose a calm day, and take a boat 
 from the port of SoUer, a picturesque little fishing 
 village nestling in a tiny bay about two miles 
 from the town. To go to the pilgrimage church 
 of Nuestra Senora de Lluch is a six hours' expedi- 
 tion ; it is necessary to stay the night at the 
 • monastery and return to SoUer, or proceed to 
 PoUensa the following day. One of the finest 
 walks is that up the Barranco, a ravine up which 
 the mule-track climbs like a staircase, past the 
 Puig de Olofre to the town of Alard, which is 
 connected by rail with Palma. Nearer at hand 
 are the pleasant villages of Fornalutx and Binia- 
 raix. SoUer possesses an agreeable Uttle hotel, 
 La Marina, where the traveller will find more 
 comfort than at any other /onda in the island out- 
 side of Palma. 
 
 East of SoUer the towns which I think will be 
 found most interesting are PoUensa, Alcudia, and 
 perhaps Arta. It is pleasanter, however, not to 
 stay in the dead towns of PoUensa or Alcudia, 
 but at the cheerful ports close by, which are full 
 of peace and idleness and beauty. I have already 
 described the fonda at Puerto-PoUensa, and the 
 reader may have inferred that, while it has many 
 charms, it has no conveniences. It is really a 
 
 313 
 
MALLORCA 
 
 fishermen's venta, or cafe, rather than an inn. 
 Its accommodation, hmited to one bedroom with 
 a window and one without, is quite impossible 
 for a visitor with exacting tastes. Puerto- Alcudia 
 is a decade or two ahead in the matter of civihsa- 
 tion, and possesses an hotel as well as a fonda. 
 The diligenda from La Puebla, the terminus of 
 the railway from Palma, draws up with strict 
 impartiality in the middle of the road between 
 the two, and the landlord of the one and the 
 fondista of the other will dispute ceremoniously 
 for the possession of your person and your pro- 
 perty. If you prefer the company of Mallorquins, 
 you will decide for the fonda ; if that of commer- 
 cial travellers from the peninsula, for the hotel. 
 As I have said, none of the towns of Mallorca 
 except the capital lies actually upon the sea- 
 shore, but there are one or two other ports where 
 it is possible to stay if you can tolerate the very 
 simple life. Porto Colon, the port of Felanitx, 
 and Portocristo, the port of Manacor, are both 
 on the south coast, but neither of them has the 
 same spacious outlook as those in the bays of 
 PoUensa and Alcudia. Capdepera lies among the 
 hills at the easternmost extremity of the island, 
 only a few minutes' walk from the sea, and pos- 
 sesses more than sufficient compensations for the 
 somewhat indifferent comforts of the fonda. A 
 short distance away from the village are the caves 
 of Art^, the chief wonder of the island. My land- 
 
 314- 
 
ANDRAITX 
 
 lord at Capdepera, who had never travelled fur- 
 ther afield than Barcelona, told me that they 
 were the most wonderful in the world. I never 
 saw them, but I have reason to believe that he 
 scarcely overstated the truth. The caves of 
 Manacor (at Portocristo) are not so large, but I 
 believe more beautiful. 
 
 In the corner of the island west of Palma there 
 are one or two charming villages and some very 
 magnificent coast scenery. Andraitx is the prin- 
 cipal town in this district. The driving road from 
 Palma (the drive takes about three hours) wan- 
 ders among fir trees and olive groves, through 
 which you catch enchanting glimpses of the bay. 
 The town itself has sufficient accommodation, 
 but no special interest. It is pleasantly situated, 
 but too far — about four miles — from its port and 
 the rugged coast. Andraitx lives in my memory 
 chiefiy as the starting-point of one of the most 
 delightful expeditions that you can make in the 
 island — ^the four hours' walk to Estallenchs. It is 
 easy to lose your way just after leaving the town 
 in striking over the shoulder of the hill, but as 
 soon as you come out upon the northern coast 
 you will find the single mule-track running along 
 the face of the cliff. The fonda at Estallenchs is 
 one of the most primitive in the island. Bafial- 
 bufar, four miles further on, possesses only a 
 cafe, and it was only after an appeal ad miseri- 
 cordiam that I persuaded the proprietor to let me 
 
 315 
 
MALLORCA 
 
 sleep there. If, therefore, you shrink from the 
 hospitaUty of the primitive Mallorquin fonda, it 
 is advisable to arrange for a carriage to meet you 
 at Estallenchs. In passing through Esporlas, 
 some seven miles beyond Banalbufar, do not 
 omit to visit La Granja, which is one of the most 
 charming country houses in Mallorca. 
 
 I hesitate to advise the traveller to make a 
 sojourn at any of the inland towns of the island. 
 Valldemosa is notable for its fine air and glorious 
 prospects ; Alard is a pleasant little town at the 
 foot of the northern mountains, on the side to- 
 wards the plain ; Arta has the beauty and in- 
 terest of gently hilly country. At any of these 
 three the traveller who is enamoured of quietness 
 could stay with a moderate amount of comfort. 
 But the towns of the plain are pleasanter to look, 
 at than to live in. They have, of course, their 
 own intimate life, but their secrets — and some of 
 them are surprising — are hidden from the passing 
 stranger behind an inexpressive mask. 
 
 The cost of travelling and living in Mallorca is 
 low. At Palma you may be asked ten pesetas a 
 day (a peseta is the equivalent of a franc, about 
 9^d.) ; at the Fonda de Mallorca I paid six. Six 
 or seven and a half is the charge at the better 
 hotels in such towns as SoUer and Alcudia ; but 
 the pension terms at the average Mallorquin /owdo 
 are five pesetas. At some of the little ports you 
 may live well for three pesetas a day — ^less than 
 
 316 
 
MODEST CHARGES 
 
 half a crown. I remember that at Capdepera, 
 where I stayed from Friday night until two 
 o'clock on Monday morning, my bill, which in- 
 cluded the diligence fare from Capdepera to Mana- 
 cor, amounted to less than six shiUings. I found 
 that the charge for a night's lodging, with supper 
 at night and coffee and ensaimada in the morn- 
 ing, varied considerably ; it was usually round 
 about two and a half pesetas, and not infre- 
 quently I paid most for the worst fare. At Deya 
 I dined well and had a clean and spacious bed- 
 room ; it is true that in the evening my host 
 occupied the only easy chair in the 'patio, but I 
 forgave him when in the morning he presented 
 me with a bill for one peseta and a half ! 
 
 MENORCA 
 
 If I were to be candid, I should say that it is 
 scarcely worth your while to go to Menorca unless 
 you dabble in archaeology or are an impressionist 
 painter in quest of effects of sunlight upon white- 
 wash. 
 
 I don't know that my experience was pecu- 
 liarly unhappy, but my general impression of the 
 island was one of cheerlessness. Never have I 
 felt so much in exile as when I was waiting for 
 the steamer at Mahon. The place is habitable, 
 even comfortable, but none the less depressing. 
 
 317 
 
MENORCA 
 
 The H6tel Bustamente makes no attempt to con- 
 ciliate tourists, but it is abundantly provided 
 with those substantial comforts that are neces- 
 sary to the ease of the commercial traveller. In 
 many ways Menorca is more progressive than its 
 sister islands — ^has it not a motor-bus upon its 
 carretera and a republican deputy in the Cortes ? 
 Ciudadela is a pleasanter city than Mahon, but I 
 should not care to stay there many days. There 
 is a secluded little port on the north coast, For- 
 nells, with an excellent fonda close by the shore, 
 which seemed to me to be the happiest place in 
 the island — except perhaps the sunny village of 
 San Cristobal. 
 
 Unquestionably its prehistoric monuments form 
 the main interest of the island. They consist of 
 artificial caves, talayots, nauetas, taulas, and cir- 
 cles. The caves were constructed both for dwell- 
 ing-places and sepulchres. They abound in almost 
 every barranco or ravine in the southern part of 
 the island. The talayot is a low tower of colossal 
 proportions, in shape a truncated cone. It is con- 
 structed of vast rough-hewn stones ; sometimes 
 it is solid throughout, sometimes it is pierced by 
 a low corridor leading to a central chamber. The 
 talayot is not to be confused with the atalaya, the 
 tower wbich is found all round the coast of Mal- 
 lorca, and served in the sixteenth and seven- 
 teenth centuries to warn the inhabitants of the 
 approach of the Corsairs. The fact that the 
 
 318 
 
PREHISTORIC REMAINS 
 
 talayots occur in groups and in positions which 
 frequently afford no view of the sea makes it im- 
 possible that they should ever have been used 
 for purposes of defence. Their purpose was sepul- 
 chral, and they bear an analogy with the funereal 
 monuments of Asia and Egypt. 
 
 The naueta is a later form of talayot, elliptical 
 in shape and of more skilled workmanship. 
 
 The taula is a T-shaped monument consisting 
 of a horizontal block of stone resting upon a ver- 
 tical column, recalling the sacred tau of India. 
 It is frequently surrounded by a fragmentary 
 circle, resembling the Druidical remains of Britain 
 and Britanny. But modern research has dis- 
 proved the Celtic origin of these monuments. 
 
 These remains are scattered over the southern 
 half of the island, but they may all be visited 
 from Mahon, San Cristobal, and Ciudadela. The 
 cave-dwellings of Calas Covas — which alone al- 
 most repay a visit to Menorca — are situated about 
 eight miles south-west of Mahon. The road via 
 San Clemente, skirting various talayots, takes you 
 within half an hour's walk of them. Taulas within 
 reach of Mahon are those of Binimayut, close to 
 San Luis ; Telaty de dalt, three miles from 
 Mahon, just south of the high road to Alayor ; 
 Torrauba d'en Salord and Torre d'en Gaumes, 
 near Alayor. 
 
 Near San Cristobal are the caves of Binigaus, 
 San Jose {covas gardas), Biniatzem, and the tala- 
 
 319 
 
MENORCA 
 
 yots of San Augustin (with chamber), Binicodrell, 
 and Santa Clara. 
 
 The most important remains in the neighbour- 
 hood of Ciudadela are the talayots and caves of 
 S' Hostal and the naueta of Els Tudons. They lie 
 just to the south of the carretera leading to Mahon, 
 about a quarter of an hour's walk from Ciudadela. 
 More to the south are the talayots of Santa Rosa 
 and San Carla. 
 
 IBIZA 
 
 There is no doubt that Ibiza is the most pictur- 
 esque because the most primitive of the Balearic 
 Islands. Mallorca is infinitely richer in natural 
 scenery and the interest of town-life. Menorca 
 possesses its own peculiar associations, and an- 
 tiquities of perhaps greater age, but scarcely of 
 greater value or variety. Ibiza has an imobtru- 
 sive but taking beauty ; it is never grand, but it 
 is never monotonous, and sometimes it has a 
 strange air of remoteness. But its great charm 
 is in the life which is lived there. It is nearest to 
 Spain, but least continental. Old customs and 
 costumes and manners, which vanish at the touch 
 of modern civilisation, have survived there. For 
 this reason it is preferable to visit Ibiza at the 
 season of some important fiesta — Easter, Corpus 
 Christi in May, or the feast of St. John in June. 
 
 320 
 
THE CITY OF IBIZA 
 
 The race is the simplest minded and kindest 
 hearted which it is possible to find. However 
 fierce their quarrels among themselves — and for 
 the most part they are produced only by the 
 ebullition of youthful passion — ^the inhaliitants 
 are the soul of kindness to the forastero. It is 
 sometimes impossible to persuade them to take 
 any money for services rendered, even for refresh- 
 ment at a fonda. But this glimpse of a more 
 primitive life has to be paid for in the discomfort 
 of the accommodation. In the capital it is in- 
 different, and in the villages insufficient. The 
 only hotel in the capital is the fonda of Sebastian 
 Roig on the quay. Most of the bedrooms are 
 divided into three dark and ill-ventilated cubi- 
 cles ; the pension terms are six pesetas a day. 
 
 The city of Ibiza — ^though its appearance is 
 that of a fishing village it has the status of a city 
 — is not rich in objects of interest. Just outside 
 the walls is the Phoenician necropolis of Ereso, 
 It contains about two thousand tombs, into some 
 of which you can enter, passing through a laby- 
 rinth of low chambers and corridors. An hour's 
 drive from the town, at the southern extremity 
 of the island, are the Salinas, or salt-pans — a 
 number of shallow basins covering about six 
 square miles beside which the snow-like salt 
 is piled in gigantic, glittering heaps. Some two 
 miles to the north of Ibiza, at a little distance to 
 the right of the carretera leading to San Juan 
 X 321 
 
IBIZA 
 
 Bautista, stands the church of Nuestra Senora de 
 Jesus, which contains the only important paint- 
 ing in the three islands, a fourteenth-century 
 altarpiece of the Valencian school. 
 
 The three principal villages in the island are 
 San Antonio on the west coast, Santa Eulalia on 
 the east, and San Juan Bautista in the north. 
 All of them are within easy driving distance of 
 the capital — ^nine, ten, and fourteen miles re- 
 spectively. It is not therefore really necessary 
 to spend a night at San Juan and sleep, as I did, 
 behind a curtain in a cafe while the priest and 
 half a dozen cheerful peasants poison the air with 
 the evil-smelling pota, a rank tobacco that is 
 grown in the island. If, however, you wish to see 
 more of the western part of the island, which I 
 think is the most beautiful — ^the region in which 
 lie the hamlets of Sta. Ines, S. Miguel, and 
 S. Matteo — I should advise you to take up your 
 quarters in the clean little port of San Antonio, 
 the ancient Puerto-Magno where the Emperor 
 Charles V, with his fifteen galleys, anchored when 
 on his way to attack the pirates of Algiers in 1541. 
 There you will find a very simple but passable 
 fonda — Can Portas — ^kept by an aged widow. 
 The path to Sta. Ines, to which you can walk in 
 about two hours, wanders among picturesque and 
 lonely valleys. The cave of Sta. Ines, a mile 
 north of San Antonio, contains an ancient Chris- 
 tian catacomb church. The Moors also used it as 
 
 322 
 
THE CLIMATE 
 
 a place of refuge, and you can, if you wish, bring 
 away armfuls of fragments of Moorish pottery. 
 
 The object of visiting Formentera is rather for 
 the pleasure of sailing across the strait in afalucha 
 than for the interest of the island itself. The voy- 
 age, however, has its risks, as sometimes the 
 falucha does not return the same day, and there 
 is always the chance of being becalmed. A small 
 steamer makes the return journey three days a 
 week. 
 
 The climate of the Balearic Islands is ideal. 
 The variations of temperature are less extreme 
 than in the peninsula. It is really possible to 
 visit the islands in spring, summer, autumn, or 
 winter. Of course the summer is hot. From the 
 middle of June onwards through July and August 
 the heat is perhaps too great for comfort in Palma 
 and the plain of Mallorca, but it is never un- 
 pleasantly severe on the northern coast. In 
 January and February there may be a certain 
 amount of rain, but no continuous bad weather. 
 Spring is the most favoured season, but the 
 months of September, October, and November, 
 with the autumn colour and the dry bracing air, 
 are equally delightful. 
 
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