He calls it the Devil's Bridge, and tells you this
story. The Evil One was in love with a pretty girl of the upper town,
and full of protestations of devotion. The fair Segovian listened to him
one evening, when her plump arms ached with the work of bringing water
from the ravine, and promised eyes of favor if his Infernal Majesty
would build an aqueduct to her door before morning. He worked all night,
like the Devil, and the maiden, opening her black eyes at sunrise, saw
him putting the last stone in the last arch, as the first ray of the sun
lighted on his shining tail. The Church, we think very unfairly, decided
that he had failed, and released the coquettish contractor from her
promise; and it is said the Devil has never trusted a Sego-vian out of
his sight again.
The bartizaned keep of the Moorish Alcazar is perched on the western
promontory of the city that guards the meeting of the streams Eresma and
Clamores. It has been in the changes of the warring times a palace, a
fortress, a prison (where our friend - everybody's friend - Gil Blas was
once confined), and of late years a college of artillery. In one of its
rooms Alonso the Wise studied the heavens more than was good for his
orthodoxy, and from one of its windows a lady of the court once dropped
a royal baby, of the bad blood of Trasta-mara. Henry of Trastamara will
seem more real if we connect him with fiction. He was the son of "La
Favorita," who will outlast all legitimate princesses, in the deathless
music of Donizetti.
Driving through a throng of beggars that encumbered the carriage wheels
as grasshoppers sometimes do the locomotives on a Western railway, we
came to the fine Gothic Cathedral, built by Gil de Ontanon, father and
son, in the early part of the sixteenth century. It is a delight to the
eyes; the rich harmonious color of the stone, the symmetry of
proportion, the profuse opulence and grave finish of the details. It was
built in that happy era of architecture when a builder of taste and
culture had all the past of Gothic art at his disposition, and before
the degrading influence of the Jesuits appeared in the churches of
Europe. Within the Cathedral is remarkably airy and graceful in effect.
A most judicious use has been made of the exquisite salmon-colored
marbles of the country in the great altar and the pavement.
We were met by civil ecclesiastics of the foundation and shown the
beauties and the wonders of the place. Among much that is worthless,
there is one very impressive Descent from the Cross by Juan de Juni, of
which that excellent Mr. Madoz says "it is worthy to rank with the best
masterpieces of Raphael or - Mengs;" as if one should say of a poet that
he was equal to Shakespeare or Southey.
We walked through the cloisters and looked at the tombs. A flood of warm
light poured through the graceful arches and lit up the trees in the
garden and set the birds to singing, and made these cloisters pleasanter
to remember than they usually are. Our attendant priest told us, with an
earnest credulity that was very touching, the story of Maria del Salto,
Mary of the Leap, whose history was staring at us from the wall. She was
a Jewish lady, whose husband had doubts of her discretion, and so threw
her from a local Tarpeian rock. As she fell she invoked the Virgin, and
came down easily, sustained, as you see in the picture, by her faith and
her petticoats.
As we parted from the good fathers and entered our carriages at the door
of the church, the swarm of mendicants had become an army. The word had
doubtless gone through the city of the outlandish men who had gone into
the Cathedral with whole coats, and the result was a levee en masse of
the needy. Every coin that was thrown to them but increased the clamor,
as it confirmed them in their idea of the boundless wealth and
munificence of the givers. We recalled the profound thought of Emerson,
"If the rich were only as rich as the poor think them!"
At last we drove desperately away through the ragged and screaming
throng. We passed by the former home of the Jeronomite monks of the
Parral, which was once called an earthly paradise, and in later years
has been a pen for swine; past crumbling convents and ruined churches;
past the charming Romanesque San Millan, girdled with its round-arched
cloisters; the granite palace of his Reverence the Bishop of Segovia,
and the elegant tower of St. Esteban, where the Roman is dying and the
Gothic is dawning; and every step of the route is a study and a joy to
the antiquarian.
But though enriched by all these legacies of an immemorial past, there
seems no hope, no future for Segovia. It is as dead as the cities of the
Plain. Its spindles have rusted into silence. Its gay company is gone.
Its streets are too large for the population, and yet they swarm with
beggars. I had often heard it compared in outline to a ship, - the
sunrise astern and the prow pointing westward, - and as we drove away
that day and I looked back to the receding town, it seemed to me like a
grand hulk of some richly laden galleon, aground on the rock that holds
it, alone, abandoned to its fate among the barren billows of the
tumbling ridges, its crew tired out with struggling and apathetic in
despair, mocked by the finest air and the clearest sunshine that ever
shone, and gazing always forward to the new world and the new times
hidden in the rosy sunset, which they shall never see.
