Sunset is the hour for a divine walk along the jagged and broken precipices above the river. You follow the steep Calle de la Barca behind the Cathedral down to the ferry, where a few lazy oar strokes take you across the narrow Tagus. The effect midway is surprising. Looking towards the bridge of Alcántara and San Servando, the waters seem to force their way between the immense brown rocks from the castle ruins, and lie steep and still like a mountain tarn. Little splashes of green and flowery bloom high up among the rocks give a pretty touch to the grim picture, and over the harsh remains of the city walls you will note a common but bright little suggestion of garden life. On the road above, rounding the superb curve of Antiquerela, a boy on mule-back is a slight silhouette of vanishing grace, and the evening bells in the upper air sound thin and ethereal above the sea-like roar of the water breaks below the silent Moorish mills. Not even the modern hint of existence and the squalid little galleries, with linen hanging out to dry over a broken bit of castellated wall, will disturb your feeling of reverie among the forgotten ages. Nor will the living light upon the trees, flashing rose and yellow through their branches and across the reeds along the river, nor the quaint figures moving lazily up the mule-path that cuts its crooked way over the naked rocks to the Valle, in the least disturb your bemused sensation of enchanted negation. The beauty of the hour and scene will trouble you less than its strangeness and quietude. Go further up, until you reach Nuestra Señora de la Valle, and from this point the old city will show you its most admirable grouping. At your feet, far down the precipitous shore line, a broken mirror of jade or muddy gold, zig-zagged by lines of foam along the breakwaters, and above the opposite bank, mapped upward, roof against roof, in
pale brown, with spaces of green here and there where the gardens show, the town reveals itself in all its magnificent eccentricity. Here some notion of the Cathedral from outside may be gathered. The Gate of Lions directly fronts you, and the apse stands out from its crowd of buildings, while the bell tower dominates the scene in all its majestic isolation. From the flat roofs rise a mass of upper domes and mudejar towers that add an Arabian note to the great Gothic picture, and the immense square of the Alcázar with its three towers, bold, undecorated, and monotonous, is perched in odd supremacy above the girdling path that now runs under the mutilated wall. The hills lie backward, reddish-purple, silent, perfumed, and sombre, and the Vega with its broad bright smile of verdure and bloom travels beyond the famous bridge of San Martin. Between the rocky shore and the ruins of a Roman bridge are big sandy reaches, and every step you take among the brushwood scents the air with the strong aromatic odours of the herbs. About here Perez Bayen tells us,[17] the Roman Cañeria ran, carrying water from San Servando by the bridge of San Martin. The little tower, el horno del Vidro, near the monastery of La Sisla, he suggests, was a Roman Castellum Aquarium. The steep waterway of La Sisla, called the Valle de la Desgollada (in honour of the customary legend of a lover’s broken neck for love’s sake), was probably used for the aqueduct, as the ruins of the arches below, along the old road of La Plata, indicate. The water must have been conducted into the city by the gate of the twelve stones, where the bridge was high. Now, alas, the aqueduct, like the wonderful artifice of Juanelo Turriano of Cremona, in Charles V.’s reign, has vanished. The water-works of Toledo nowadays are sadly deficient after the Roman, Moor, and even early Castillian, though the glory of this period belongs to Lombardy and not to Castille. Juanelo, as well as giving his name to his famous “artifice,” was the means of bestowing a quaint and striking name on a street below the cathedral, so-called to-day, Hombre de Palo (man of wood) where he lived. He fabricated a wooden statue that went from his house to the archbishop’s for bread and meat, bowing and nodding, first in gracious overtures and then in obsequious thanks, and carried back the offerings to Juanelo’s house. Few Toledanos, dawdling in and out of this little curved street, now remember why it is so oddly named, or bestow a thought upon the ingenious Italian who dwelt there in the sixteenth century, and whose fame drew admiring travellers even from remote Oxford.