When We Drove Back The
Bridge-Menders Stood Aside For Us While We Were Yet Far Off, And The
Women Came To Their Doorways At The Sound Of Our Bells For Another
Exchange Of Jokes With Our Driver.
By the time a protracted file of
mules had preceded us over the bridge, a brisk shower had come
Up, and
after urging our grays at their topmost speed toward the famous church
of San Juan de los Reyes Catolicos, we still had to run from our
carriage door through the rain.
Happily the portal was in the keeping of one of those authorized beggars
who guard the gates of heaven everywhere in that kind country, and he
welcomed us so eagerly from the wet that I could not do less than give
him a big dog at once. In a moment of confusion I turned about, and
taking him for another beggar, I gave him another big dog; and when we
came out of the church he had put off his cap and arranged so complete a
disguise with the red handkerchief bravely tied round his head, that my
innocence was again abused, and once more a big dog passed between us.
But if the merit of the church might only be partially attributed to
him, he was worth the whole three. The merit of the church was
incalculable, for it was meant to be the sepulcher of the Catholic
Kings, who were eventually more fitly buried in the cathedral at
Granada, in the heart of their great conquest; and it is a most
beautiful church, of a mingled Saracenic plateresque Gothic, as the
guide-books remind me, and extravagantly baroque as I myself found it. I
personally recall also a sense of chill obscurity and of an airy gallery
wandering far aloof in the upper gloom, which remains overhead with me
still, and the yet fainter sense of the balconies crowning like capitals
the two pillars fronting the high altar. I am now sorry for our haste,
but one has not so much time for enjoying such churches in their
presence as for regretting them in their absence. One should live near
them, and visit them daily, if one would feel their beauty in its
recondite details; to have come three thousand miles for three minutes
of them is no way of making that beauty part of one's being, and I will
not pretend that I did in this case. What I shall always maintain is
that I had a living heartache from the sight of that space on the fagade
of this church which is overhung with the chains of the Christian
captives rescued from slavery among the Moors by the Catholic Kings in
their conquest of Granada. They were not only the memorials of the most
sorrowful fact, but they represented the misery of a thousand years of
warfare in which the prisoners on either side suffered in chains for
being Moslems or being Christians. The manacles and the fetters on the
church front are merely decorative to the glance, but to the eye that
reads deeper, how structural in their tale of man's inhumanity to man!
How heavily they had hung on weary limbs!
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