The Canal Is The Notion Of The Young King Of Spain, And The
Work On It Goes Forward Night And Day.
The electric lights were shedding
their blinding glare on the deafening clatter of the excavating
machinery, and it was
An unworthy relief to escape from the intense
modernity of the scene to that medieval retreat nearer the city where
the _aficionados_ night-long watch the bulls coming up from their
pastures for the fight or the feast, whichever you choose to call it, of
the morrow. These amateurs, whom it would be rude to call sports, lurk
in the wayside cafe over their cups of chocolate and wait till in that
darkest hour before dawn, with irregular trampling and deep bellowing,
these hapless heroes of the arena pass on to their doom. It is a great
thing for the _aficionados_ who may imagine in that bellowing the the
gladiator's hail of _Morituri salutant._ At any rate, it is very chic;
it gives a man standing in Seville, which disputes with Madrid the
primacy in bull-feasting. If the national capital has bull-feasting
every Sunday of the year, all the famous _torreros_ come from Andalusia,
with the bulls, their brave antagonists, and in the great provincial
capital there are bull-feasts of insurpassable, if not incomparable,
splendor.
Before our pleasant drive ended we passed, as we had already passed
several times, the scene of the famous Feria of Seville, the cattle show
which draws tens of thousands to the city every springtime for business
and pleasure, but mostly pleasure. The Feria focuses in its greatest
intensity at one of the entrances to the Delicias, where the street is
then so dense with every sort of vehicle that people can cross it only
by the branching viaduct, which rises in two several ascents from each
footway, intersecting at top and delivering their endless multitudes on
the opposite sidewalk. Along the street are gay pavilions and cottages
where the nobility live through the Feria with their families and
welcome the public to the sight of their revelry through the open doors
and windows. Then, if ever, the stranger may see the dancing, and hear
the singing and playing which all the other year in Seville disappoints
him of.
VIII
On the eve of All Saints, after we had driven over the worst road in the
world outside of Spain or America, we arrived at the entrance of the
cemetery where Baedeker had mysteriously said "some sort of fair was
held." Then we perceived that we were present at the preparations for
celebrating one of the most affecting events of the Spanish year. This
was the visit of kindred and friends bringing tokens of remembrance and
affection to the dead. The whole long, rough way we had passed them on
foot, and at the cemetery gate we found them arriving in public cabs, as
well as in private carriages, with the dignity and gravity of
smooth-shaven footmen and coachmen. In Spain these functionaries look
their office more solemnly even than in England and affect you as
peculiarly correct and eighteenth-century.
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