VALENCIA.
The journey from Granada to Valencia, made all de un tiron (at one breath), as they say in Spain, is one of those recreations in which a rational man indulges only once in his life. From Granada to Menjibar, a village on the left bank of the Guadalquivir, between Jaen and Andujar, is a night's ride by diligence; from Menjibar to the Alcazar de San Juan is a half-day's journey by railway in an uncurtained carriage, through a plain as bare as the palm of one's hand, under a blazing sun; and from the Alcazar de San Juan to Valencia, taking account of an entire evening spent in the station of the Alcazar, makes another night and another morning before one reaches the longed-for city at noon, where Nature, as Emile Praga would say, is horrified at the dreadful idea that there are still four months of summer.
But it must be said that the country through which one passes is so beautiful from beginning to the end that if one were capable of appreciation when one is dead with sleep and finds one's self turning into water by reason of the heat, one would go into ecstasies a thousand times. It is a journey of unexpected landscapes, sudden vistas, remarkable contrasts, theatrical effects of Nature, so to speak—marvellous and fantastic transformations, which leave in the mind an indescribable, vague illusion of having passed not through a part of Spain, but along an entire meridian of the earth across the most dissimilar countries. From the vega of Granada, which you cross in the moonlight, almost opening a way among the groves and gardens, in the midst of a luxuriant vegetation that seems to crowd around you like a tossing sea, ready to overflow and engulf you with its billows of verdure,—from this you emerge into the midst of ragged and precipitous mountains, where not a trace of human habitation is to be seen; you graze the edge of precipices, wind along the banks of mountain-torrents, run along at the bottom of the ravines, and seem to be lost in a rocky labyrinth. Then you come out a second time among the green hills and flowery fields of upper Andalusia, and then, all suddenly, the fields and hills disappear and you find yourself in the midst of the rocky mountains of the Sierra Morena, that hang over your head from every direction and close the horizon all around like the walls of an immense abyss. You leave the Sierra Morena, and the desert plains of La Mancha stretch before you; you leave La Mancha and advance through the flowery plain of Almansa, varied by every sort of cultivation, presenting the appearance of a vast carpet of checkered pattern colored in all the shades of green that can be found upon the pallet of a landscape-painter. And, finally, the plain of Almansa opens into a delightful oasis, a land blest of God, a true earthly paradise, the kingdom of Valencia, from whose boundaries, even to the city itself, you pass through gardens, vineyards, fragrant orange-groves, white villas encircled by terraces, cheerful, brightly-colored villages, clusters, avenues, and groves of palms, pomegranates, aloes, and sugar-canes, interminable hedges of Indian fig, long chains of low hills, and conical mounds cultivated as kitchen-gardens and flower-beds, laid out with minute care from top to bottom, and variegated like great bunches of grass and flowers; and everywhere a vigorous vegetation which hides every bare spot, covers every height, clothes every projection, climbs, falls, trails along, marches forward, overflows, intertwines, shuts off the view, impedes the road, dazzles with its verdure, wearies with its beauty, confounds with its caprices and its frolics, and produces an effect as of a sudden parting of the earth raised to fever heat by the fires of a secret volcano.
The first building which meets the eye on entering Valencia is an immense bull-ring situated to the right of the railway. The building consists of four orders of superimposed arches rising on stout pilasters, all of brick, and in the distance resembling the Colosseum. It is the bull-ring where on the fourth of September, 1871, King Amadeus, in the presence of thousands of spectators, shook hands with Tato, the celebrated one-legged torero, who as director of the spectacle had asked permission to render his homage in the royal box. Valencia is full of mementos of the duke d'Aosta. The sacristan of the cathedral has in his possession a gold chronometer bearing the duke's initials in diamonds, with a chain of pearls, which was presented by him when he went to pray in the chapel of Our Lady of the Desolate. In the hospice of the same name the poor remember that one day they received their daily bread from his hand. In the mosaic workshop of one Nolla they preserve two bricks, upon one of which he cut his own name with his sword, and upon the other the name of the queen. In the Plaza di Tetuan the people point out the house of Count di Cervellon, where he was entertained; it is the same house in which Ferdinand VII. signed the decrees annulling the constitution in 1814, in which Queen Christina abdicated the throne in 1840, in which Queen Isabella spent some days in 1858. In short, there is not a corner of the city of which it cannot be said, Here he shook hands with a working-man, here he visited a factory, there he passed on foot far from his suite, surrounded by a crowd, trustful, serene, and smiling.
It was in Valencia, since I am speaking of the duke d'Aosta,—it was in the city of Valencia that a little girl of five years in reciting some verses touched upon that terrible subject of a foreign king with probably the noblest and most considerate words spoken in Spain for many years previous to that time—words which, if all Spain had remembered and pondered then, would perhaps have spared her many of those calamities which have befallen her, and others which still threaten; words which perhaps one day some Spaniard may repeat with a sigh, and which already at this time draw from events a marvellous light of truth and beauty. And, since these verses are graceful and simple, I transcribe them here. The poem is entitled "God and the King," and runs as follows:
"Dios, en todo soberano,
Creó un dia á los mortales,
Y á todos nos hizo iguales