And his Versailles,
'II se plut a tyranniser la nature.'"
As the bilious Philip paused before this mass of sculptured
extravagance, he looked at it a moment with evident pleasure. Then he
thought of the bill, and whined, "Thou hast amused me three minutes and
hast cost me three millions."
To do Philip justice, he did not allow the bills to trouble him much. He
died owing forty-five million piastres, which his dutiful son refused to
pay. When you deal with Bourbons, it is well to remember the Spanish
proverb, "A sparrow in the hand is better than a bustard on the wing."
We wasted an hour in walking through the palace. It is, like all
palaces, too fine and dreary to describe. Miles of drawing-rooms and
boudoirs, with an infinity of tapestry and gilt chairs, all the
apartments haunted by the demon of ennui. All idea of comfort is
sacrificed to costly glitter and flimsy magnificence. Some fine
paintings were pining in exile on the desolate walls. They looked
homesick for the Museum, where they could be seen of men.
The next morning we drove down the mountain and over the rolling plain
to the fine old city of Segovia. In point of antiquity and historic
interest it is inferior to no town in Spain. It has lost its ancient
importance as a seat of government and a mart of commerce. Its
population is now not more than eleven thousand. Its manufactures have
gone to decay. Its woollen works, which once employed fourteen thousand
persons and produced annually twenty-five thousand pieces of cloth, now
sustain a sickly existence and turn out not more than two hundred pieces
yearly. Its mint, which once spread over Spain a Danaean shower of
ounces and dollars, is now reduced to the humble office of striking
copper cuartos. More than two centuries ago this decline began. Boisel,
who was there in 1669, speaks of the city as "presque desert et fort
pauvre." He mentions as a mark of the general unthrift that the day he
arrived there was no bread in town until two o'clock in the afternoon,
"and no one was astonished at it."
Yet even in its poverty and rags it has the air of a town that has seen
better days. Tradition says it was founded by Hercules. It was an
important city of the Roman Empire, and a great capital in the days of
the Arab monarchy. It was the court of the star-gazing King Alonso the
Wise. Through a dozen centuries it was the flower of the mountains of
Castile. Each succeeding age and race beautified and embellished it, and
each, departing, left the trace of its passage in the abiding granite of
its monuments. The Romans left the glorious aqueduct, that work of
demigods who scorned to mention it in their histories; its mediaeval
bishops bequeathed to later times their ideas of ecclesiastical
architecture; and the Arabs the science of fortification and the
industrial arts.
Its very ruin and decay makes it only more precious to the traveller.
There are here none of the modern and commonplace evidences of life and
activity that shock the artistic sense in other towns. All is old,
moribund, and picturesque. It lies here in the heart of the Guadarramas,
lost and forgotten by the civilization of the age, muttering in its
senile dream of the glories of an older world. It has not vitality
enough to attract a railroad, and so is only reached by a long and
tiresome journey by diligence. Its solitude is rarely intruded upon by
the impertinent curious, and the red back of Murray is a rare apparition
in its winding streets.
Yet those who come are richly repaid. One does not quickly forget the
impression produced by the first view of the vast aqueduct, as you drive
into the town from La Granja. It comes upon you in an instant, - the two
great ranges of superimposed arches, over one hundred feet high,
spanning the ravine-like suburb from the outer hills to the Alcazar. You
raise your eyes from the market-place, with its dickering crowd, from
the old and squalid houses clustered like shot rubbish at the foot of
the chasm, to this grand and soaring wonder of utilitarian architecture,
with something of a fancy that it was never made, that it has stood
there since the morning of the world. It has the lightness and the
strength, the absence of ornament and the essential beauty, the vastness
and the perfection, of a work of nature.
It is one of those gigantic works of Trajan, so common in that
magnificent age that Roman authors do not allude to it. It was built to
bring the cool mountain water of the Sierra Fonfria a distance of nine
miles through the hills, the gulches, and the pine forests of Valsain,
and over the open plain to the thirsty city of Segovia. The aqueduct
proper runs from the old tower of Caseron three thousand feet to the
reservoir where the water deposits its sand and sediment, and thence
begins the series of one hundred and nineteen arches, which traverse
three thousand feet more and pass the valley, the arrabal, and reach the
citadel. It is composed of great blocks of granite, so perfectly framed
and fitted that not a particle of mortar or cement is employed in the
construction.
The wonder of the work is not so much in its vastness or its beauty as
in its tremendous solidity and duration. A portion of it had been cut
away by barbarous armies during the fifteenth century, and in the reign
of Isabella the Catholic the monk-architect of the Parral, Juan
Escovedo, the greatest builder of his day in Spain, repaired it. These
repairs have themselves twice needed repairing since then.
