Occasionally—still in unclouded weather—the wind is cold and piercing and all go muffled to the eyes, the men in their capas, the women with long shawls. In the Patio de los Naranjos, beneath the trees laden with oranges, the wind sweeps across the pavement of rough bricks, intergrown with grass and the duller green of mosses, and rattles the fallen leaves in lines and circles. Far above, the great Giralda tower stands pink and creamy grey in the clear winter sky. By the Gate of Pardon, in a corner of hot sun and sheltered from the wind, a few beggars sit warming themselves and watching with Oriental patience and immobility. The streets are mostly too narrow to let in the sun, but in the plazas and any open space men are seen basking in sunshine, tomando el sol. Along the bridge that leads to the suburb of Triana the seats on both sides are crowded. Triana, better than Seville, corresponds to Cervantes’ description of a city where adventures are to be met at every street corner, and Triana supplies an army of loiterers whose life’s mission in winter is to “take the sun.”
On the eve of high festivals in winter, such as the Epiphany, it is already growing dark when services are held, and the vast Cathedral is faintly lit with hundreds of candles and dim hanging lamps, though the last daylight still lingers awhile in the deep reds and purples, green, orange, and every colour of the windows overhead. There is no procession of the Three Kings through the city; at Alcoy, in the province of Valencia, the Three Kings come riding, laden with presents, into the town from beyond the grey mountains that surround it, and half the population goes out to meet them, but Seville is too “civilized” for this.
Even in Seville not all the winter days are cloudless and serene. On some of them the sky is a uniform grey, and the rain falls unceasingly till the centre of the narrower, unevenly cobbled streets, raised at either side and without a pavement, becomes a running stream. But when the Andalusian sun reappears, the houses have an added freshness in their glowing white, or in their coats of faint green or red, yellow or purple (though even these usually have a line of white along the roof), and in the air is a feeling of spring. There is an ancient Andalusian song that makes March say to January—
“Con tres días que me quedan
Y tres que me preste mi compadre Abríl
He de poner tus ovejas
Que te acordarás de mí.”
(With the three days that are left me and three lent me by my friend April, I will put your sheep in such a plight that you will remember me.) This is the Cumbrian:—
“March said to Aperill
‘I see three haggs [sheep] upon a hill.
And if you will lend me dayes three
I’ll find a way to make them dee.’”
But the rigour of the days that follow in Cumberland has no place or parallel in the low-lying districts of Andalucía:—
“The first of them was wind and weet,
The second of them was snaw and sleet,
The third of them was sic a freeze
It froze the birds’ nebs to the trees;
When the three days were past and gane
The three silly haggs came hirpling hame.”
At Seville a few weeks after the Day of the Kings winter is really over: in February the sky has an intenser blue, and with the longer sunshine the warmth increases. The spring days follow in their matchless splendour, till finally the sun’s fiery heat drives all who can leave the city to the cooler refuge of the sea or the hills.