We Were
Not Able To Do Anything Definite With The New Villas Built Or Building
Around Algeciras, Though They Looked
Very livable, and seemed proof of a
prosperity in the place for which I can give no reason except the
Great
natural beauty of the nearer neighborhood, and the magnificence of the
farther, mountain-walled and skyed over with a September blue in
November. I think it would be a good place to spend the winter if one
liked each day to be exactly like every other. I do not know whether it
is inhabited by English people from Gibraltar, where there are of course
those resources of sport and society which an English colony always
carries with it.
The popular amusements of Algeciras in the off season for bull-feasts
did not readily lend themselves to observance. Chiefly we noted two
young men with a graphophone on wheels which, being pushed about,
wheezed out the latest songs to the acceptance of large crowds. We
ourselves amused a large crowd when one of us attempted to sketch the
yellow facade of a church so small that it seemed all facade; and
another day when that one of us who held the coppers, commonly kept
sacred to blind beggars, delighted an innumerable multitude of
mendicants having their eyesight perfect. They were most of them in the
vigor of youth, and they were waiting on a certain street for the
monthly dole with which a resident of Algeciras may buy immunity for all
the other days of the month. They instantly recognized in the stranger a
fraudulent tax-dodger, and when he attempted tardily to purchase
immunity they poured upon him; in front, behind, on both sides, all
round, they boiled up and bubbled about him; and the exhaustion of his
riches alone saved him alive. It must have been a wonderful spectacle,
and I do not suppose the like of it was ever seen in Algeciras before.
It was a triumph over charity, and left quite out of comparison the
organized onsets of the infant gang which always beset the way to the
hotel under a leader whose battle-cry, at once a demand and a promise,
was "Penny-go-way, Penny-go-way!"
Along that pleasant shore bare-legged fishermen spread their nets, and
going and coming by the Gibraltar boats were sometimes white-hosed,
brown-cloaked, white-turbaned Moors, who occasionally wore Christian
boots, but otherwise looked just such Moslems as landed at Algeciras in
the eighth century; people do not change much in Africa. They were
probably hucksters from the Moorish market in Gibraltar, where they had
given their geese and turkeys the holiday they were taking themselves.
They were handsome men, tall and vigorous, but they did not win me to
sympathy with their architecture or religion, and I am not sure but, if
there had been any concerted movement against them on the landing at
Algeciras, I should have joined in driving them out of Spain. As it was
I made as much Africa as I could of them in defect of crossing to
Tangier, which we had firmly meant to do, but which we forbore doing
till the plague had ceased to rage there. By this time the boat which
touched at Tangier on the way to Cadiz stopped going to Cadiz, and if we
could not go to Cadiz we did not care for going to Tangier. It was
something like this, if not quite like it, and it ended in our seeing
Africa only from the southernmost verge of Europe at Tarifa. At that
little distance across it looked dazzlingly white, like the cotton
vestments of those Moorish marketmen, but probably would have been no
cleaner on closer approach.
III
As a matter of fact, we were very near not going even to Tarifa, though
we had promised ourselves going from the first. But it was very charming
to linger in the civilization of that hotel; to wander through its
garden paths in the afternoon after a forenoon's writing and inhale the
keen aromatic odors of the eucalyptus, and when the day waned to have
tea at an iron table on the seaward terrace. Or if we went to Gibraltar,
it was interesting to wonder why we had gone, and to be so glad of
getting back, and after dinner joining a pleasant international group in
the long reading-room with the hearth-fires at either end which, if you
got near them, were so comforting against the evening chill. Sometimes
the pleasure of the time was heightened by the rain pattering on the
glass roof of the _patio,_ where in the afternoon a bulky Spanish mother
sat mute beside her basket of laces which you could buy if you would,
but need not if you would rather not; in either case she smiled
placidly.
At last we did get together courage enough to drive twelve miles over
the hills to Tarifa, but this courage was pieced out of the fragments of
the courage we had lost for going to Cadiz by the public automobile
which runs daily from Algeciras. The road after you passed Tarifa was so
bad that those who had endured it said nobody could endure it, and in
such a case I was sure I could not, but now I am sorry I did not
venture, for since then I have motored over some of the roads in the
state of Maine and lived. If people in Maine had that Spanish road as
far as Tarifa they would think it the superb Massachusetts state road
gone astray, and it would be thought a good road anywhere, with the
promise of being better when the young eucalyptus trees planted every
few yards along it grew big enough to shade it. But we were glad of as
much sun as we could get on the brisk November morning when we drove out
of the hotel garden and began the long climb, with little intervals of
level and even of lapse.
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