It was from a terrace of this old Gothic palace near the bridge that, according to legend, Don Roderick, the last of the Goths in Spain, saw Florinda, daughter of one Count Julian, bathing in the yellow Tagus under a four-arched tower which still invades the flood, and goes by the name of the Bath of Florinda. From his passion for her, and their mutual error, the popular tale, with vigorous disregard of chronology, deduces the fall of Spain before the Berber armies; and as most old stories here receive an ecclesiastical tinge, this one relates how Florinda's sinful ghost continued to haunt the spot where we now stood, until laid by a good friar with cross and benediction. The sharp fall of the bank at first glance looked to consist of ordinary earth and stones, but on closer scrutiny turned out to contain quantities of brick bits from the old forts and towers which one generation after another had built on the heights, and which had slowly mouldered into nullity. Even so the firm lines of history have fallen away and crumbled into romance, which sifts through the crannies of the whole withered old city. As a lady of my acquaintance graphically said, it seems as if ashes had been thrown over this ancient capital, covering it with a film of oblivion. The rocks, towers, churches, ruins, are just so much corporeal mythology—object, lessons in fable. A little girl, becomingly neckerchiefed, wandered by us while we leaned dreaming above the river; and she was singing one of the wild little songs of the country, full of melancholy melody:
"Fair Malaga, adios!
Ah, land where I was born,
Thou hadst mother-love for all,
But for me step-mother's scorn!"
All unconscious of the monuments around her, she stopped when she saw that we had turned and were listening. Then we resumed our way, passing, I may literally say, as if in a trance up into the town again, where we presently found ourselves in front of St. John of the Kings, a venerable church, formerly connected with a Franciscan monastery which the French burnt. On the outer wall high up hangs a stern fringe of chains, placed there as votive tokens by released Christian captives from Granada, in 1492; and there they have remained since America was discovered!
To this church is attached a most beautiful cloister, calm with the
solitude of nearly four hundred years. Around three sides the rich
clustered columns, each with its figures of holy
men supported under pointed canopies, mark the
delicate Gothic arches, through which the sunlight
slants upon the pavement, falling between
the leaves of aspiring vines that twine upward
from the garden in the middle. There the rose-laurel
blooms, and a rude fountain perpetually
gurgles, hidden in thick greenery; and on the
fourth side the wall is dismantled as the French
bombardment left it. Seventy years have passed,
and though the sculptured blocks for restoration
have been got together, the vines grow over them,
and no work has been done. We mounted the
bell-tower part way with the custodian, and gained
a gallery looking into the chapel, strangely adorned with regal shields
and huge eagles in stone. On our way, under one part of the tower
roof, we found a hen calmly strutting with her brood. "It was meant
for celibacy," said the custodian, "but times change, and you see that
family life has established itself here after all."
I don't know whether there is anything particularly sacred about the hens of this district, but after seeing this one in the church-tower I began to think there might be, especially as on the way home we discovered another imprisoned fowl disconsolately looking down at us from the topmost window of a venerable patrician residence.