The Monte Sagrado is reached by a road made through the hill of the Albayzin, which overhangs it on one side. Everywhere we see masses of enormous Indian figs, or prickly pear, the fruit which for months together forms the chief diet of the gipsy population. They live in a quarter by themselves, outside the city, as did the Jews in their ghettos in Italy. In Granada they are more settled in their habits than in other places, with the exception of Seville. Their dwellings are caves dug out of the hill-side, and it is very curious to see the smoke from their fires issuing from holes in the ground amongst the Indian fig plants. Very dirty and smoky are these grottoes; the only daylight which can enter them comes through the doorway. As a rule, the furniture is of the most wretched description, though some of the burrows are better off in this respect than the rest. These poor folk are much looked down upon by their Spanish rulers, to conciliate whom they pretend to be good Catholics—in the old days of the Inquisition a not unnecessary affectation. They excel in many ingenious trades, best of all in horse dealing and thieving, professions nearly allied in most countries. Social pariahs as they have ever been, it need not excite any surprise that they are depraved and ignorant, though, as they have some noble qualities, they must be capable of great improvement when an age of wider sympathy and diminished race prejudice shall enable their neighbours to do justice to them.
They are at war with mankind because they have always been cruelly oppressed and ill-treated; but as in our own country a George Smith of Coalville and a George Borrow in Spain have found the gipsy character well repay the efforts made to improve it, we may fairly hope Christianity will ultimately conquer even this stubborn race. They are light-hearted, clever, courteous, and forgiving, generous, and kind even, to strangers in distress; great lovers of Nature, and full of affection for dumb creatures; surely in such a race there must be the material for improvement!
Rico, the gipsy king, soon became warmly attached to Elsworth, who spent many a pleasant hour in his sooty hut; pigs, fowls, and children wallowed and grovelled together in the mud-floored cabin, which was more suggestive of the Green Isle than of lordly Spain.
It was worth a journey to Granada to hear and see Rico play the guitar. The instrument only really lives in Spain, elsewhere it is but a feeble, voiceless toy; here it speaks, declaims, rouses and fires the brain, but then that is because the performer and the instrument become one. Rico’s guitar was part of himself, not only the strings but the body of the thing.
Often he would gather round him some of the young men and women of the colony, who would accompany his playing with plantive, weird singing and hand-clapping, in perfect tune, strange Eastern dances, with wild gesticulation and choruses which seemed reminiscences of ancient Greece. In return Elsworth, with hearty, manly sympathy, would recite some sweet narrative from the Gospels, and win his way to the hearts of these poor people by stories of the Saviour’s love.
Amulets, charms, fetishes, all these they knew. How the King of Heaven loved the despised Romany people, this was a strange thing to them which the Englishmen had come to teach. But it touched their hearts, poor outcasts!
When he had completed the translation of the Gospel of St. Luke into their language, they would listen with apparent interest to his reading by hours together. This was not the sort of Christianity that had before been presented to them. In its grand simplicity and manifest adaptation to the wants of these wandering children of Nature, surely here if anywhere, was the ideal religion for them; and as for their teacher, who lived their life and proved in a hundred ways his devotion to their interests, who showed that he loved these people, outcast and despised as they were, because of his honour to them as children of the same Father whom he loved, surely they were bound to treat his mission with respect.
And so four years had gone by. He had journeyed with the gipsies into many parts of Spain, but had always returned to Granada as his home, as the centre for his work and life interest.
How real and earnest a life he was living now! On this lofty height overlooking the historic scenes which had occupied so large a space in the annals of the past, what wonder if to an ardent poetic mind, romantic yet intensely practical, there often came, in moments of deep sympathy with mankind born of the love of God, high aspirations after noble deeds, and the determination, when his hour came, to go down into the arena and bear his part manfully in the fight! No, Elsworth was not skulking in idle retirement; not shirking his share of work; but because of a deep conviction that there was work for him to do which required his retirement to fit him for it he stayed, and did what lay to his hand, and waited for the summons.
The life of the hermits of the Theban Desert was a violation of common sense and true religion, inasmuch as it was all preface and no book; all preparation and girding on of armour, and no work; all tuning of instruments, and no music. The great wonder is, how the fanatics could have stood it so long.