Before Or After The Moor, And Performing
Its Beneficent Use After Two Thousand Years As Effectively As In The
Years Before Christ Came To Bless The Peacemakers.
Nine miles from its
mountain source the graceful arches bring the water on their shoulders;
and though there is
Now an English company that pipes other streams to
the city through its underground mains, the Roman aqueduct, eternally
sublime in its usefulness, is constant to the purpose of the forgotten
men who imagined it. The outer surfaces of the channel which it lifted
to the light and air were tagged with weeds and immemorial mosses, and
dripped as with the sweat of its twenty-centuried toil.
We followed it as far as it went on our way to a modern work of peace
and use which the ancient friend and servant of man would feel no
unworthy rival. Beyond the drives and gardens of the Delicias, where we
lingered our last to look at the pleasurers haunting them, we drove far
across the wheat-fields where a ship-canal five miles long is cutting to
rectify the curve of the Guadalquivir and bring Seville many miles
nearer the sea than it has ever been before; hitherto the tramp steamers
have had to follow the course of the ships of Tarshish in their winding
approach. 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.
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