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Read Ebook: From Dan to Beersheba A Description of the Wonderful Land with Maps and Engravings and a Prologue by the Author Containing the Latest Explorations and Discoveries by Newman John Philip
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Ebook has 14 lines and 2273 words, and 1 pages
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A Tidy City--A Sacred Corpse--Remarkable Features of Puerto--A Calesa--Lady Blanche's Castle--A Typical English Engineer--British Enterprise--"Success to the Cadiz Waterworks!"--Visit to a Bodega--Wine and Women--The Coming Man--A Strike 1-18
Expansion of Carlism--A Pseudo-Democracy--Historic Land and Water Marks--An Impudent Stowaway--Spanish Respect for Providence--A Fatal Signal--Playing with Fire--Across the Bay--Farewell to Andalusia--British Spain 42-50
Gabriel Tar--A Hard Nut to Crack--In the Cemetery--An Old Tipperary Soldier--Marks of the Broad Arrow--The "Scorpions"--The Jaunting-Cars--Amusements on the Rock--Mrs. Damages' Complaint--The Bay, the Alameda, and Tarifa--How to Learn Spanish--Types of the British Officer--The Wily Ben Solomon--A Word for the Subaltern--Sunset Gun--The Sameness of Sutlersville 51-75
From Pillar to Pillar--Historic Souvenirs--Off to Africa--The Sweetly Pretty Albert--Gibraltar by Moonlight--The Chain-Gang--Across the Strait--A Difficult Landing--Albert is Hurt--"Fat Mahomet"--The Calendar of the Centuries Put Back--Tangier: the People, the Streets, the Bazaar--Our Hotel--A Coloured Gentleman--Seeing the Sights--Local Memoranda--Jewish Disabilities--Peep at a Photographic Album--The Writer's Notions on Harem Life 76-102
A Pattern Despotism--Some Moorish Peculiarities--A Hell upon Earth--Fighting for Bread--An Air-Bath--Surprises of Tangier--On Slavery--The Writer's Idea of a Moorish Squire--The Ladder of Knowledge--Gulping Forbidden Liquor--Division of Time--Singular Customs--The Shereef of Wazan--The Christian who Captivated the Moor--The Interview--Moslem Patronage of Spain--A Slap for England--A Vision of Beauty--An English Desdemona: Her Plaint--One for the Newspaper Men--The Ladies' Battle--Farewell--The English Lady's Maid--Albert is Indisposed--The Writer Sums up on Morocco 103-135
Barbarossa--Royalist-Republicans--Squaring a Girl--At Irun--"Your Papers?"--The Barber's Shop--A Carlist Spy--An Old Chum--The Alarm--A Breach of Neutrality--Under Fire--Caught in the Toils--The Heroic Thomas--We Slope--A Colleague Advises Me--"A Horse! a Horse!"--State of Bilbao--Don Carlos at Estella--Sanchez Bregua Recalled--Tolosa Invites--Republican Ineptitude--Do not Spur a Free Horse--Very Ancient Boys--Meditations in Bed--A Biscay Storm 269-299
Nearing the End--Firing on the Red Cross--Perpetuity of War--Artistic Hypocrites--The Jubilee Year--The Conflicts of a Peaceful Reign--Major Russell--Quick Promotion--The Foreign Legion--The Aspiring Adventurer--A Leader's Career--A Piratical Proposal--The "Ojaladeros" of Biarritz--A Friend in Need--Buying a Horse--Gilpin Outdone--"Fred Burnaby" 300-317
FOOTNOTES
NOTES OF THE TRANSCRIBER
ROMANTIC SPAIN.
A Tidy City--A Sacred Corpse--Remarkable Features of Puerto--A Calesa--Lady Blanche's Castle--A Typical English Engineer--British Enterprise--"Success to the Cadiz Waterworks!"--Visit to a Bodega--Wine and Women--The Coming Man--A Strike.
PUERTO de Santa Maria has the name of being the neatest and tidiest city in Spain, and neatness and tidiness are such dear homely virtues, I thought I could not do better than hie me thither to see if the tale were true. With a wrench I tore myself from the soft capital of Andalusia, delightful but demoralizing. I was growing lazier every day I spent there; I felt energy oozing out of every pore of my body; and in the end I began to get afraid that if I stopped much longer I should only be fit to sing the song of the sluggard:--"You have waked me too soon, let me slumber again." Seville is a dangerous place; it is worse than Capua; it would enervate Cromwell's Ironsides. Happily for me the mosquitoes found out my bedroom, and pricked me into activity, or I might not have summoned the courage to leave it for weeks, the more especially as I had a sort of excuse for staying. The Cardinal Archbishop had promised a friend of mine to let him inspect the body of St. Fernando, and my friend had promised to take me with him. Now, this was a great favour. St. Fernando is one of the patrons of Seville; he has been dead a long time, but his corpse refuses to putrefy, like those of ordinary mortals; it is a sacred corpse, and in a beatific state of preservation. Three times a year the remains of the holy man are uncovered, and the faithful are admitted to gaze on his incorruptible features. This was not one of the regular occasions; the Cardinal Archbishop had made an exception in compliment to my friend, who is a rising young diplomat, so that the favour was really a favour. I declined it with thanks--very much obliged, indeed--pressure of business called me elsewhere--the cut-and-dry form of excuse; but I never mentioned a word about the mosquitoes. I told my friend to thank the prelate for his graciousness; the prelate expressed his sorrow that my engagements did not permit me to wait, and begged that I would oblige him by letting the British public know the shameful way he and his priests were treated by the Government They had not drawn a penny of salary for three years. This was a fact; and very discreditable it was to the Government, and a good explanation of the disloyalty of their reverences. If a contract is made it should be kept; the State contracted to support the Church, but since Queen Isabella decamped the State had forgotten its engagement.
Puerto de Santa Maria deserves the name it has got. It is a clean and shapely collection of houses, regularly built. People in England are apt to associate the idea of filth with Spain; this, at least in Andalusia, is a mistake. The cleanliness is Flemish. Soap and the scrubbing-brush are not spared; linen is plentiful and spotless, and water is used for other purposes than correcting the strength of wine. Walking down the long main street with its paved causeways and pebbly roadway, with its straight lines of symmetric houses, coquettish in their marble balconies and brightly-painted shutters and railings, one might fancy himself in Brock or Delft but that the roofs are flat, that the gables are not turned to the street, and that the sky is a cloudless blue. I am speaking now of fine days; but there are days when the sky is cloudy and the wind blows, and the waters in the Bay of Cadiz below surge up sullen and yeasty, and there are days when the rain comes down quick, thick, and heavy as from a waterspout, and the streets are turned for the moment into rivulets. But the effects of the rain do not last long; Spain is what washerwomen would call a good drying country. Beyond its neatness and tidiness, Puerto has other features to recommend it to the traveller. It has a bookseller's shop, where the works of Eug?ne Sue and Paul de Kock can be had in choice Spanish, side by side with the Carlist Almanack, "by eminent monarchical writers," and the calendar of the Saragossan prophet ; but it is not to that I refer--half a hundred Andalusian towns can boast the same. It has its demolished convent, but since the revolution of '68 that is no more a novelty than the Alameda, or sand-strewn, poplar-planted promenade, which one meets in every Spanish hamlet. It has the Atlantic waves rolling in at its feet, and a pretty sight it is to mark the feluccas, with single mast crossed by single yard, like an unstrung bow, moored by the wharf or with outspread sail bellying before the breeze on their way to Cadiz beyond, where she sits throned on the other side of the bay, "like a silver cup" glistening in the sunshine, when sunshine there is. The silver cup to which the Gaditanos are fond of comparing their city looked more like dirty pewter as I approached it by water from Puerto; but I was in a tub of a steamer, there was a heavy sea on and a heavy mist out, and perhaps I was qualmish. Not for its booksellers' shops, for its demolished convent, or for its vulgar Atlantic did this Puerto, which the guide-books pass curtly by as "uninteresting," impress me as interesting, but for two features that no seasoned traveller could, would, or should overlook; its female population is the most attractive in Andalusia, and it is the seat of an agreeable English colony. I happened on the latter in a manner that is curious, so curious as to merit relation.
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