Dick and I wandered through the streets, and in the Plaza de la Constitución, where electric lamps and moonlight mingled bleakly, while never-ending cofradìas passed.
A sky of violet was like a veil of silky gauze, and as the moon slid down the steeps of heaven the vast dome paled. One by one the stars went out like spent matches; dawn was on its way. Electric lights flared and died, leaving a pearly dusk more mysterious than any twilight which falls with night.
The crowds had thinned; but silent brotherhoods moved through streets where there was no other sound than the rustling of their feet, the tap of their leaders' silver batons. So faint was the dawn-dusk, that they were droves of shadows on their way back into night, their candle-lights lost stars. Now and then the clink of a baton brought to some half-shuttered window a face, to be presently joined by other faces, peering down at the dark processions of men and black-robed, penitent women.
Outside the great east door of the cathedral halted a paso, like a huge golden car. Christ was nailed to a cross not yet lifted into place. A Roman soldier, of exaggerated height and sardonic features, stood reading the parchment with the mocking inscription about to be nailed above the thorn-crowned head. His evil mouth was curled in a satirical smile. Two centurions in armour sat their impatient horses, and gave directions for raising the cross. The effect was startling; for in this pale beginning of light, [pg 269]and the atmosphere of tingling exaltation which steeped the town, it was difficult not to believe that the terrible carved figures of wood had life, and that with the eyes of one's flesh one beheld the world's great tragedy.
Somehow the impression of horror was but deepened by the fact that the bearers had come out from under the curtains of the paso, to take off the large pads they wore on their heads, to drink water, and smoke cigarettes with the penitents who had rolled up the masks from their pale, damp faces. They might have been comrades of the Roman soldiers, in their obliviousness of that tortured form on the cross.
It was not yet five o'clock when Dick and I plunged into the cool gloom of the cathedral, passing the spot where Carmona had struck at me, and the chapel where I had taken Monica. The stones were slippery as the floor of a ballroom, with wax dropped from innumerable candles, and the air was heavy with the smoke of stale incense.
The searchlight of dawn could scarcely penetrate the black curtains which throughout Holy Week had draped the cathedral; therefore a solitary beam, like a bar of gold, slanted in through one superb window.
The amethysts, emeralds, and rubies of incomparable painted glass transformed the yellow bar into a rainbow which streamed down the length of the majestic aisle and struck full upon a golden altar. Then slowly the jewelled band moved from the gold carvings, the flames dying as it passed. Travelling, still like a searchlight, it found the prostrate forms of sleeping men exhausted by their vigils, snatched out of veiling darkness kneeling women clad in black, and at last rested on the Holy Week monument itself, paled its myriad candles, and made pools of liquid gold on the vestments of priests who had knelt all night in adoration of the Host.
“Say,” said Dick, half whispering, “I don't gush as a rule; but doesn't it look like the light of salvation coming to save lost souls?”
Not a hotel in Seville had shut its doors that night of Holy [pg 270]Thursday; not a concièrge had done more than nod and wake out of a broken dream, for there had been an excited coming and going through all the dark hours.