Glories of Spain

by Charles W. Wood

As far as Cervera the country we passed through was evidently picturesque, and only wanted the contrast of sun and shade to make it charming. Conspicuous amidst the landscape for many and many a long mile was the wonderful mountain of Montserrat with its peaks and pinnacles, about which the white mists still rolled and wrapped themselves. The scenery was diversified by many a wide ravine, where tangled bushes grew over the hard rock; many a fertile vale rich in fruit trees, pines, olives, oak and cork trees, intermixed their various shades of green. Beyond Cervera, the country was cold and barren and abounded in rock-strewn plains, to which the grey skies gave a still more sad and sombre tone. We approached Lerida when the shades of night were falling, and could just discern its grand outlines rising out of the great plain. These seemed to yield in interest only to Manresa, whilst the town itself proved far more attractive.

We found the place sufficiently civilised to possess an omnibus, which transported us bag and baggage to the hotel. The long straight thoroughfare in which we found ourselves looked in the darkening night like the fag end of a village, unfinished and unpaved; almost like the street of some far away colonial settlement. It was wide and lined with trees, and beyond the trees on one side, a row of large houses; amongst them our inn; a rambling, cheerless sort of building, too new to be peopled with ghosts or distinguished by artistic outlines. Anything more opposite to the ghostly element could not be imagined. Still, in spite of frightful drawbacks it was some degrees better than Manresa.

We were conducted by a curious but amiable duenna to a large lofty sitting room with a bedroom opening on each side: evidently the state apartments. The place looked empty and neglected, and our candles hardly lighted the obscurity. The electric bells were all broken, and we soon found that if we rang till doomsday no one appeared.

Our duenna was toothless and apparently voiceless, for when she opened her capacious mouth and began to talk, no sound came forth. The mouth worked up and down in absolute silence, and the effect was creepy and peculiar. It almost felt as though a mummy had been galvanised into life minus the voice. Her costume had nothing redeeming about it. An impromptu turban placed over a shock head of hair, petticoats of the shortest, revealing feet and ankles that would have supported a substantial Dutch vrouw. We afterwards found she was the laundress of the establishment, and this was the costume in which she presided at the wash-tub. She smiled sweetly upon H. C. and her face looked like a huge, amiable cavern. With an imagination full of the lovely face of that young novice in Manresa, he shuddered, dropped into the furthest chair, and begged us to complete the arrangements without him.

There was nothing to arrange, and the Dragon soon withdrew with her cavernous smiles and voiceless words. Then from a distant corner we heard an anxious murmur: "What about dinner?" H. C.. had not expired; the Dragon had evidently not frightened away all earthly desires.

Fortunately dinner was forthcoming, though when we had finally settled down and removed the stains of travel, and H. C. had recovered his nerves, the night was growing apace. We plunged into wide passages, and after half a dozen wrong turnings at length found ourselves in the dining-room, large, lofty and well lighted. The chef sent up a civilised bill of fare, and the landlord himself waited upon us; whilst under the influence of fortifying dishes and refined wines the charms of the Manresa novice faded into the background, and H. C. felt almost equal to challenging the Lerida Dragon to single combat as a libel upon her sex. We were conducted back to our rooms by quite a procession, including the thin landlord and imposing landlady, headed by the Dragon bearing a flambeau.

Once on our balcony, we found the night had changed for the better. Clouds had disappeared, stars shone, the trees before us were rustling gently in the wind, calmness and repose had fallen upon the world. It was past ten o'clock; the place seemed still and deserted as a city of the dead; not a sound broke the silence as we went forth for a night-study of Lerida.

It was intensely dark. Here and there an oil lamp glimmered, making darkness visible. Presently we found ourselves on the bridge, looking down upon the waters of the river that runs so closely to the town as to reflect its outlines. To-night it was too dark to reflect anything, excepting here and there a faint track of light thrown by a distant star. The surface was not disturbed by any sort of craft.

To the right rose the houses of the town, and above them faint and shadowy against the night sky, the outlines of the wonderful old cathedral, perched on its rock 300 feet above the town itself.

We tried to reach it, climbing and stumbling up the narrow ill-paved thoroughfares, that seemed to wind and twist about like the contortions of a snake. The darkness might be felt. There was not a solitary light to guide our feet, and every now and then we found ourselves charging a dead wall as Don Quixote charged the windmills.