The hermits, as I have said, have their separate cottages scattered about the grounds, each with a small patch of land to be cultivated. There they raise fruit, which their rules forbid them to eat, and so it is carried down as a present to some wealthy Cordovan families who support the hermitage by their largesses. Every day poor folk toil up from the plain, some five miles, to this airy perch, and are fed by the monks; but they themselves eat little, abstaining from meat, wine, coffee, tea—everything, indeed, except some few ounces of daily bread, a pint of garbanzos (the tasteless, round yellow bean which is the universal food of the poor in Spain), and a soup made of bread, water, oil, and garlic. They live on nothing and prayer. They rise at three in the morning, and thrice a week they fast from that hour until noon. Their step is slow, and their voices have a strange, inert, sickly sound; but they appeared cheerful enough, and joked with each other. I asked Esteban the name of a tiny yellow flower growing by the path, and he couldn't tell me; but he plucked it tenderly, and began discoursing to Manuel on its beauty. "Tan chiquita," he said, in his poor soft voice. "So little, little, and yet so precious and so finely made!" Another brother was deeply absorbed in snipping off bits of coiled brass wire with a pair of pincers. "These are for the 'Our Fathers,'" he explained, meaning the large beads in the rosary, separated from the smaller "Ave Maria" ones by links of wire. The cottages or huts, surrounded by an outer wall, contain a cell, sometimes cut out of a bowlder lying on the spot, where there is a rude cot, a shelf for holy books and the crucifix, and a grated window, across which waves, perhaps, the broad-leaved bough of a fig-tree. An anteroom, provided with a few utensils and the disciplinary scourge hanging mildly against the wall, completes the strange interior. The lives of the hermits of the Sierra are reduced to the ghastly simplicity of a skeleton; a part of their time is spent in contemplating skulls, and they have a habit of digging their own graves, in order to keep more plainly before their minds the end of all earthly careers. Mistaken as all this seems to many of us, there was a peacefulness about the Hermitage for which many a storm-tossed soul sighs in vain; and I am glad that some few creatures can find here the repose they desire while waiting for death. Some of the hermits are men of rank, who have retired hither disheartened with the world; others are low-born—men afflicted by some form of misfortune or misdemeanor of their own, who wish to hide from life; but all assemble in a pure democracy of sorrow and penitential piety, apparently contented.
We breakfasted at ten in a room hospitably put at our disposal, the windows of which admitted a delicious breeze and opened upon a magnificent view of the plain far below, where the distant city rested like a white mist—an impalpable thing. Brother José brought some olives, to add to the refection which our sumpter-mule had carried to this height. They had a ripe, acid, oily flavor, which made one think of homely things and of patient housewives in remote American hills, who lead lives as monotonous, as self-denying and unnoticed as those which pass on this ridge of the Sierra in Andalusia. Our Novice thought the olives had "a holy flavor;" and I could understand her feeling. Find me a site more fitted for meditation on the volatility of mundane things than this eyry on the mountain-head overlooking the historic valley! There lies Cordova, a mere spot in the reach of soft citron and straw-tinted fields; and the Guadalquivir, winding like a neglected skein of tawny silk thrown down on the mapped landscape. The plain is calm as oblivion. It is oblivion's self; for there the earth has absorbed Cordova the Old, so that not a vestige remains where compressed masses of human dwellings once stood. They are crumbled to an indistinguishable powder. That soft autumnal soil has swallowed up the bones of unnumbered generations, and no trace of them is left. We imagined the glittering legions of Cæsar as they moved slowly through the country, flashing the sun from their compact steel, at that time when they put to the sword twenty-five thousand inhabitants of the city, which had sided with Pompey. We saw the Moors once more envelop it with arms and banners and the fluttering of snowy garments. But all these vanished again like a moving cloud, or a smoke from burning stubble; and the sun still pours its uninterrupted flood of splendor over the land, bringing life and bringing death, with impartial ray.
The Spanish word for "crowded" or "populated" is still used to signify "dense" in any ordinary connection, as the phrase barba poblada, for a thick beard, testifies. The implication is that, when there is any population at all, it must be crowded; a direct transmission, apparently, from periods when inhabitants clustered in immense numbers around the centres of civil power for safety. And the word holds good to-day; for one finds, in the present shrunken human force of the Peninsula, closely packed assemblages of people in the towns and cities, with wide domains of comparatively untenanted country around.
When night closed above us again in the city; when mellow lamps glowed, and a tropical fragrance flowed in from the gardens; when in the long dusky pauses of warm nocturnal silence the watchman's weary and pathetic cry resounded, or hollow-toned church-bells rung the hour, the romance of Cordova seemed to concentrate itself, and fell upon me, as I listened, in chords that took this form:
FLOWER OF SPAIN.
Like a throb of the heart of midnight
I hear a guitar faintly humming,
And through the Alcazar garden
A wandering footstep coming.
A shape by the orange bower's shadow—
Whose shape? Is it mine in a dream?
For my senses are lost in the perfumes
That out of the dark thicket stream.
'Mid the tinkle of Moorish waters,
And the rush of the Guadalquivir,
The rosemary breathes to the jasmine,
That trembles with joyous fear.
And their breath goes silently upward,
Far up to the white burning stars,
With a message of sweetness, half sorrow,
Unknown but to souls that bear scars.