The most witching element in the enchantment of this river is its stillness, its unfathomable, unbroken quietude. In the sixteenth century it was navigable as far as Toledo, but the mills upon its banks are now for ever silent; no traffic has deflowered its legendary charms; neither boat nor barge cuts a way along its inactive waters. In an age when every resource of nature is feverishly applied to the service of commerce or luxury, there is something majestic in such uselessness. When the wherry that plies sleepily from bank to bank floats into view, the sight is a positive shock to artistic sensibilities. It seems an idle desecration. Only the gold-seekers—symbol of eternal illusion, ever nourished and ever elusive to the grasp of man, who builds fresh illusions of the ashes of past deceptions—may continue to trouble its wild untamed depths. So from time to time these children of tradition, believing in the tale of its golden sands, go down to the reedy banks, after an inundation, with sifters, and industriously gather up the sand the river has flung from its bottom. They pour water over it, shake it well, and then hungrily examine the grains that remain in the vain hope of finding gold. Before Ponz’s time the dean of the Church of the Infantas was said to possess a piece of gold cast up by the Tagus, and the complaint then was that many another piece had been carelessly broken and scattered by the silversmiths. But Ponz doubts the golden legend even so early as the last century. To explain the undoubted fact that the river had at different times cast up treasure, he assumes that in each reversal and exodus of race brought about by the evolution of Toledo’s history, Roman, Gothic, Moorish, Hebrew, and Christian, the fugitives had the habit of burying near the river treasure in provision for the expected return. Even this is no supposition to be scorned, and adds to the romantic interest of the deserted Tagus.
Garcilaso de la Vega has chanted the golden charms of the Tagus, and Cervantes writes of “the delicate works wrought by the four nymphs who, from their crystal dwelling, lifted their heads above the waves of the Tagus, and sat on the green meadow to work at those rich stuffs which the ingenious poet paints for us, and which were fashioned of gold and silk and pearls.” Now, as then, like Lope the Asturian, aquadores descend to the river-brink with their donkeys laden with water-jars, which they fill below, and bridge the upward rocky paths shouting: Agua fresca. The plays of Cervantes were acted at Toledo, which permitted Lope de Vega, who lived then in the royal city, to make an ill-natured reference to the great biographer of the ingenious Hidalgo in his correspondence, and jeering at his plays, call him a “nescio.”[15] Lope little dreamed in his bitterness and jealousy that the “nescio” would forever stand before posterity as the sole representative of Castillian genius, and that the miserable little inn he dwelt in at Toledo would be forever a spot of pious pilgrimage.
A more substantial source of wealth than the gold of Tagus was the valuable lead and mineral mines of the Montes de Toledo, forty leagues distance. In the bright days of civic power they belonged to the municipality. King Fernando, the saint, sold them to the town for the sum of 400,000 golden ducats, but the city little by little disposed of a considerable part of this property to private individuals for exploitation, and, like everything else, here the mines to-day have lost in value.
In his few succinct pages on Toledo, Mr Street gives us a very excellent bit of sober impressionism, which merits quotation: “The road from the famous bridge of Alcántara, passing under the gateway which guards it into a small walled courtyard, turns sharply to the right under another archway, and then rises slowly below the walls until, with another sharp turn, it passes under the magnificent Moorish Puerta del Sol, and so on into the heart of the city.
“The Alcázar is the only important building seen on entering on this side; but from the other side of the city, where the bridge of San Martin crosses the Tagus, the cathedral is a feature in the view, though it never seems to be so prominent as might be expected with a church of its grand scale.[16] From both these points of view, indeed, it must be remembered that the effect is not produced by the beauty or grandeur of any one building; it is the desolate sublimity of the dark rocks that bound the river; the serried phalanx of wall, and town, and house that line the cliffs; the tropical colour of sky and earth, and masonry; and finally the forlorn, decaying and deserted aspect of the whole that makes the views so impressive and so unusual. Looking away from the city walls towards the north, the view is much more riant, for there the Tagus, escaping from its rocky defile, meanders across a fertile vega, and long lines of trees, with here a ruined castle, and there the repose of the curious Church of the Cristo de la Vega, and there again the famous factory of arms, give colour and incident to a view which would anywhere be thought beautiful, but is doubly grateful by comparison with the sad dignity of the forlorn old city.”
Toledo’s finest hour is at sunset, especially in the month of October. Nowhere have I seen the setting sun cast such a rich and lovely flush over the earth. The brown visage of the town for one intense moment is made radiant by the deep crimson flames, and the red light sheds a glorious beauty upon empty hill-sides and river-washed plains. Magic enfolds city and land, and space is so abridged by the matchless purity of the atmosphere that the eye is tricked into the belief that distant objects are quite close. Painters complain of this singular deception, which makes it so difficult to seize and reproduce the features of town and landscape. But the mere observer will naturally rejoice in an attraction the more.