to the wildest heath of the wildest province of Spain, ignorant of their way, making for a place which the guide believed not to exist. They passed a defile where the carrier had been attacked on his last journey by robbers, who burnt the coach by means of the letters in it, and butchered all except the carrier, who had formerly been the master of one of the gang: as they passed, the ground was still saturated with the blood of one of the murdered soldiers and a dog was gnawing a piece of his skull. Borrow was told of an old viper catcher caught by the robbers, who plundered and stripped him and then tied his hands behind him and thrust his head into his sack, “which contained several of these horrible reptiles alive,” and so he ran mad through the villages until he fell dead. As a background, he had again and again a scene like that one, whose wild waters and mountains, and the “Convent of the Precipices” standing out against the summit, reminded him at once of Salvator Rosa and of Stolberg’s lines to a mountain torrent: “The pine trees are shaken. . . .” Describing the cave at Gibraltar, he spoke of it as always having been “a den for foul night birds, reptiles, and beasts of prey,” of precipice after precipice, abyss after abyss, in apparently endless succession, and of an explorer who perished there and lay “even now rotting in the bowels of the mountain, preyed upon by its blind and noisome worms.”
When he saw a peaceful rich landscape in a bright sunny hour, as at Monte Moro, he shed tears of rapture, sitting on and on in those reveries which, as he well knew, only enervate the mind: or he felt that he would have desired “no better fate than that of a shepherd on the prairies or a hunter on the hills of Bembibre”: or looking through an iron-grated door at a garden court in Seville he sighed that his fate did not permit him to reside in such an Eden for the remainder of his days. For as he delights in the
dismal, grand, or wild, so he does with equal intensity in the sweetness of loveliness, as in the country about Seville: “Oh how pleasant it is, especially in springtide, to stray along the shores of the Guadalquivir! Not far from the city, down the river, lies a grove called Las Delicias, or the Delights. It consists of trees of various kinds, but more especially of poplars and elms, and is traversed by long, shady walks. This grove is the favourite promenade of the Sevillians, and there one occasionally sees assembled whatever the town produces of beauty or gallantry. There wander the black-eyed Andalusian dames and damsels, clad in their graceful silken mantillas; and there gallops the Andalusian cavalier on his long-tailed, thick-maned steed of Moorish ancestry. As the sun is descending, it is enchanting to glance back from this place in the direction of the city; the prospect is inexpressibly beautiful. Yonder in the distance, high and enormous, stands the Golden Tower, now used as a toll-house, but the principal bulwark of the city in the time of the Moors. It stands on the shore of the river, like a giant keeping watch, and is the first edifice which attracts the eye of the voyager as he moves up the stream to Seville. On the other side, opposite the tower, stands the noble Augustine Convent, the ornament of the faubourg of Triana; whilst between the two edifices rolls the broad Guadalquivir, bearing on its bosom a flotilla of barks from Catalonia and Valencia. Farther up is seen the bridge of boats which traverses the water. The principal object of this prospect, however, is the Golden Tower, where the beams of the setting sun seem to be concentrated as in the focus, so that it appears built of pure gold, and probably from that circumstance received the name which it now bears. Cold, cold must the heart be which can remain insensible to the beauties of this magic scene, to do justice to which the pencil of Claude himself were barely equal. Often have I shed tears of rapture
whilst I beheld it, and listened to the thrush and the nightingale piping forth their melodious songs in the woods, and inhaled the breeze laden with the perfume of the thousand orange gardens of Seville.
‘Kennst du das land wo die citronen bluhen?’”
If a scene was not in fact superlative his creative memory would furnish it with what it lacked, giving the cathedral of Palencia, for example, windows painted by Murillo.
CHAPTER XXI—“THE BIBLE IN SPAIN”: THE CHARACTERS
In such scenes, naturally, Borrow placed nothing common and nothing mean. He must have a madman among the ruins, or by a pool a peasant woman sitting, who has been mad ever since her child was drowned there, or a mule and a stallion fighting with hoofs and teeth. The clergy, in their ugly shovel hats and long cloaks, glared at him askance as he passed by their whispering groups in Salamanca: at the English College in Valladolid, he thought of “those pale, smiling, half-foreign priests who, like stealthy grimalkins, traversed green England in all directions” under the persecution of Elizabeth. If he painted an archbishop plainly dressed in black cassock and silken cap, stooping, feeble, pale and emaciated, he set upon his finger a superb amethyst of a dazzling lustre—Borrow never saw a finer, except one belonging to an acquaintance of his own, a Tartar Khan.
The day after his interview with the archbishop he had a visit from Benedict Mol. This man is proved to have existed by a letter from Rey Romero to Borrow mentioning “The German of the Treasure.” [{181}] “True, every word of it!” says Knapp: “Remember our artist never created; he painted from models.” Because he existed, therefore every word of Borrow’s concerning him is true. As Borrow made him, “He is a bulky old man, somewhat above the middle height, and with white hair and ruddy features; his eyes were large and blue, and, whenever he fixed them
on anyone’s countenance, were full of an expression of great eagerness, as if he were expecting the communication of some important tidings. He was dressed commonly enough, in a jacket and trousers of coarse cloth of a russet colour; on his head was an immense sombrero, the brim of which had been much cut and mutilated, so as in some places to resemble the jags or denticles of a saw.”