From Bruges, the capital of West Flanders, to Ghent, the capital of East Flanders, it is only half an hour's journey by rail; but the contrast between them is remarkable. Bruges is a city of the dead, of still life, of stagnant waters, of mouldering walls and melancholy streets, long since fallen from its high estate into utter decay. Ghent, on the other hand, is active, bustling, prosperous. The narrow lanes and gloomy courts of mediæval times have, in many parts, been swept away to make room for broad, well-lighted streets and squares, through which electric trams, crowded with busy people, run incessantly all day long. Bruges is known as 'La Morte.' Ghent is often called 'La Ville de Flore,' from the numerous gardens and hot-houses which supply plants to the markets of France, Germany, America, and other countries. Other branches of industry thrive. The trade in flax, linen, leather goods, engines, and lace, is large and flourishing. There are warehouses packed full of articles of commerce waiting to be sent off by canal or railway, and yards piled high with wood from North America, or bags of Portland cement from England.
Two great canals, one connecting the town with the estuary of the Scheldt near the sea, and the other leading, through Bruges, to Ostend, admit merchant vessels and huge barges to a commodious harbour, where steam cranes and all the appliances of a busy seaport are in full swing. There never is a crowd in Bruges, except during the yearly Procession of the Holy Blood; but every day in Ghent, if by chance a drawbridge over one of the canals is raised, a crowd of working people gathers to wait impatiently while some deeply-laden barge passes slowly through, and, the moment the passage is free, rushes over in haste. These are Flemings in a hurry. One never sees them in Bruges.
Ghent, then, is a modern commercial town; but, in spite of all the changes which time and progress have brought about, it is, like most of the other Flemish towns, full of sights which carry us back in a moment to the distant past.
GHENT
An old lace-maker.
The Lys and the Scheldt, winding through Belgium from west to east, meet almost in the centre of the province of East Flanders; and at the point where they join a number of islands have been formed by numerous channels, pools, and backwaters which are connected with the two rivers. In early times, no doubt, the spot was nothing but a morass, and on one of the pieces of drier ground the first wooden houses of Ghent were erected. After that, during the course of centuries, the town spread from island to island, and as each island was occupied a bridge was built, so that by degrees between twenty and thirty islands, joined by a number of bridges, were covered with dwelling-houses and public buildings, and the whole surrounded by a wall and moat.
But long before buildings of brick or stone replaced the dark wooden houses, of which only one now remains, the people of Ghent had acquired the character of being the most intractable of all the Flemings; and when Philip of Alsace, Count of Flanders, came back from the Holy Land, towards the end of the twelfth century, he erected, on the site of an old fortress which Baldwin Bras -de-Fer had built 200 years before, a strong castle for the purpose of overawing the townsmen.
On the left bank of the Lys, which, passing through the middle of the town, threads its way close under the basements of the houses, is the Place Ste. Pharailde, with its picturesque buildings of the Middle Ages; and on the north side of this Place stand the massive remains of the old stronghold.
It is a grim, forbidding place, now known as the Château des Comtes. On three sides high black walls rise straight out of the water, and on the fourth side a deep archway leads into a large courtyard, in the middle of which is the donjon, said to date from the ninth century. There is a vast, dim banquet-hall, with an immense chimney-piece, and small windows with stone seats sunk deep in the walls, where King Edward III. of England and Queen Philippa feasted with Jacques van Artevelde in the year 1339, during the war with France. Dark, narrow staircases lead from story to story within the thickness of the walls, or wind up through turrets pierced with small windows a few inches square. Far down in the foundations are dismal oubliettes and torture-chambers; and in one corner of what is supposed to have been a prison is an iron-bound chest full of the skeletons of persons who suffered in the religious troubles of the sixteenth century. This gloomy place, once the abode of so much cruelty, is one of the most interesting sights in Ghent.