GIBRALTAR
Calpe is now the famous fortress of Gibraltar, a bit of Spain held by the British Empire. Abyla, upon the shore of Africa, is now the penal colony Ceuta, a piece of Moorish territory, conquered and held by force of Spanish arms. At the bases of these two mighty cliffs the waters of two oceans mingle; for there the wide Atlantic, the waterway of the new world, touches the historic inland ocean, around the shores of which are grouped the nations that have ruled the world in ages past. The narrow channel that links the seas together serves also to separate two lands so widely dissimilar that nowhere in the world may the traveler, with so little effort, enjoy a greater shock of contrast than by crossing the Gibraltar Strait from Southern Spain to Tangier, in Morocco.
CAPE SPARTEL LIGHT
(By Permission)
In the space of a few short hours he may there go back a thousand years; pass from to-day to a mysterious yesterday, strangely remote from us in life and thought. Within sight of the shores of Europe, within sight of the Spanish railway stations, within sound of the cannon of Gibraltar, he will find a land in which there are no roads of any sort, a people who still use in war the picturesque Arabian flintlock and the clumsy yataghan; he will find a remnant of the Middle Ages, so perfectly preserved by the peculiar embalming influence of the Mohammedan religion that the Morocco of to-day differs little from the Morocco of the year one thousand.
A CITY LIKE A DRIFT OF SNOW