A Runaway River

—Among the apothegms prevalent in my boyhood was one which averred that fortresses should be built by the Spanish, attacked by the French, and defended by the English. This saying had for me possessed small interest—being, as it seemed, the usual proverb in three cantos — until it was my fortune to sojourn in the dominions of Queen Isabella. I then had reason to admit the force of at least one statement made by this proverb ; for, whether it be cathedral or fortress, wall or tower, the efforts of the Spanish architect are matchless. As to the Moor of earlier date, he has left behind such evidences in fountain, well, and aqueduct as to justify the claim made by his eulogists that he was the first and greatest of hydraulists.

With some such thoughts as these we cross the grand old Moorish bridge which spans the Guadalquivir, in search of a Roman city whose ruin was wrought through the waywardness of the yellow stream we leave behind us. Presently we overtake a dusky group whom we had fancied to be pilgrims like ourselves. But hark ! the vibrant ejaculation, “Arre, mula ! ” It is the muleteer ; and as for the ejaculation, have not our guidebooks told us that arre is, Arabice, “ gee up ” ? So it is. The Arabic lingers in the slang and imprecations heard in the humbler purlieus of the country, long after that stately language has been generally replaced by the resonant Castilian, just as the tawny waters which we have crossed must long have lingered in pool and shallow after the mighty torrent had taken its route elsewhere for the sea.

Flushing with this idea, we step forward and ask the man whose Arabic has given us pause the name of the town that lies before us. Promptly he replies, “ Talca.” Thus, with other fragments of the language of Spain’s early conquerors, is preserved the Arabic corruption of the name of an ancient town, the birthplace of three Roman emperors. The course of the Guadalquivir having changed, the city followed it, reëstablishing itself on the site of what is now known as Seville ; and to the abandoned portion was given the name Sevilla la Vieja. The obscurity in which it has slumbered these several hundred years may be compared to that which has overtaken some Pennsylvania town skipped by the railway, that dry river of enterprise and traffic. Observing how a place once so great and famous almost fades from the face of the earth for no better reason than that its river has absconded, can we wonder that the facile passageway which water affords is so essential a part of a city’s life ?

What we behold in Sevilla la Vieja is a wilderness of gray rocks, mostly shapeless, covered with verdure and undergrowth, swarming with sheep, goats, and other animals, as though the insect inhabitants of such decay had grown to giant size. Some small concession there may be to the living and the human in the form of streets, possibly implying a municipality and a mayor, though of either there is little indication in the prospect before us : all consciousness of the life of the present is swallowed up in the vast, the preponderating evidences of the past.

More gray ruins. With its tumbling and tumbled walls, the place seems too gray for a ghost. Such people as once may have walked these streets appear to have been dead so long that they have forgotten to haunt. The aqueduct, broken in at various places, its archways dislodged and fallen, gives the impression of a monster serpent decayed all save its skeleton, and that partially so. And here let me observe that, for some reason, all ruins, from the Roman on the Moselle to those under consideration, are specially in league with luxuriant nature. Within their mournful precincts the verdure is unusually green ; the wild flowers are deeper in hue ; even the children playing around the crumbling débris seem brighter-eyed and fresher in color than children elsewhere ; in a word, all that nature can do in lifting up a voice of protest against the incursions of time is here more conspicuous than elsewhere. Never have I heard such happy laughter as on this spot of earth ; the very streams gurgling through the caved-in aqueduct have more of the plashy music of my native brooks than I have listened to in any liquid numbers heard outside the land of home.

The sheep and the goats which are grazing and gamboling about the place seem to have eaten in Arabia of that “ insane root ” said to take captive the goatish reason. There is something wild in their leaps; a suggestion, moreover, that their horns grow longer and in a finer curve than elsewhere is the nature of their kind. And the sheep, — ah, well, they are the merino sheep which the Ohio farmer has learned to appreciate and to breed.

But look ! Coming down the hillside a figure approaches that may have stepped forth bodily from the pages of Don Quixote or of Gil Blas. It is a swineherd. He wears a jerkin of sheepskin, with the wool turned out on warm days, turned in when the weather is cold, and secured by a belt of the same material. He holds in his hand a long slender staff, which needs only to be bent at the end to look like the shepherd’s crook in picture. He is accompanied by a score or two of most eloquent pigs, jet black and glossy ; having rather long legs, yet nevertheless exceedingly fat. They have been fed on acorns in the forest, and are now brought down to drink of the sweet water that flows from this dismantled archway of the past. Their sunset draught being finished, the swineherd gathers them under his unbending crook, and goes off with them in the direction of the mountains.

And now approaches his reverence, a lean, ascetic parish priest. His shovel hat is in good condition, though well worn. His cassock shows that he respects his calling, and that he requires respect from his penitents. Nearing our party, his face lights up with an expression of absolute benignity. He raises his trembling hands and administers a blessing, all the more pathetic because he is old and poor, and much of his asceticism is evidently due to hunger ; for his parish can afford none of the luxuries of life, and but scantily some of the necessities. The respectful obeisance of our muleteer shows us that even his lawless class reveres the good padre. As the priest moves slowly away, we hear the deep tone of the bell of the church towards which he is walking. The children cease their gambols, muleteer and peasant and artisan stand still, and I know that the spell of the Ave Maria is upon all.

After the brief services announced by that sweet-toned bell, a repast is offered by our priest, — a repast most simple and primitive, consisting of nothing but a little fruit and some of the delicious bread of the country. The very crust is a luxury, and for that reason, to increase its surface, the loaves are made in the shape of crabs. Some goat’s milk, taken from the horn drinking-cup, concludes the refection. Now follows an embarrassed effort at repayment, wholly unsuccessful, though clerical poverty is eloquent in glazed cassock and broken shoon.

As we return, the sun having now descended behind the olive-crowned hills, we are inevitably reminded of another Mount of Olives, associating it in our thoughts with all that is sweet and forgiving and unresisting in the life we have been observing here. Meanwhile, our reverie is pervaded by the tinkle of innumerable bells, as of returning flocks. Other and larger bells, at varying distances, speak of summons to vespers or to refection. I recall what an officer in the Mexican war once told me : that everywhere in Spanish America these metallic tongues have a magic music of their own that compels in the rugged volunteer thoughts of chivalry and romance, if not of religious devotion. He further declared that the making of church bells with the melody which is resonant of heaven has for centuries been a lost art. They are no longer made in Mexico, although there, as in Spain, they are still to be heard in perfection.

As the penumbra of evening gathers into the gloaming, objects grow more indistinct to sight, while sounds arise with an increased significance of audible distinctness; just as the sense of hearing is believed to be enhanced by the loss of sight. The vague outlines of tree, rock, and ruin become illustrated, as it were, by the “ Arre, mula ! ” of the muleteer. All noises and humming sounds seem to converge into a torrent of melody which now we recognize as the vesper hymn of some neighboring convent. The gloaming deepens, till out come the stars; not faltering forth with the hesitating twinkle of our own climate and atmosphere, but shining with the full, steady confidence, the joyous effulgence, of stars and planets that know how glad the world will be to view them. One bright particular star seems to us to halt over the Moorish bridge by which we return on our way to Seville. Beautifully clear shines this star, casting a sheen like that of a rising younger moon upon the trembling waters of the Guadalquivir. It starts a remembrance of that old Spanish ballad so admirably translated by Lockhart: —

Such was, and in memory remains, a twilight view of Seville the Old ; such the gray mood of ruins, such the vagaries of a runaway river.