Borrow had taken considerable risk in making the journey to Seville with the Courier. The whole of La Mancha was overrun with the Carlist-banditti, who, “whenever it pleases them, stop the Courier, burn the vehicle and letters, murder the paltry escort which attends, and carry away any chance passenger to the mountains, where an enormous ransom is demanded, which if not paid brings on the dilemma of four shots through the head, as the Spaniards say.” The Courier’s previous journey over the same route had ended in the murder of the escort and the burning of the coach, the Courier himself escaping through the good offices of one of the bandits, who had formerly been his postilion. Borrow was shown the blood-soaked turf and the skull of one of the soldiers. At Manzanares, Borrow invited to breakfast with him the Prophetess who was so unpopular at Earl Street. Continuing the journey, he reached Seville without mishap, and a few days later Antonio arrived with the horses. It was found that the two cases of Testaments that had been forwarded from Madrid had been stopped at the Seville Customs House, and Borrow had recourse to subterfuge in order to get them and save his journey from being in vain.
“For a few dollars,” he tells Mr Brandram (2nd May), “I procured a fiador or person who engaged that the chests should be carried down the river and embarked at San Lucar for a foreign land. Yesterday I hired a boat and sent them down, but on the way I landed in a secure place all the Testaments which I intend for this part of the country.”
The fiador had kept to the letter of his undertaking, and the chests were duly delivered at San Lucar; but a considerable portion of their contents, some two hundred Testaments, had been abstracted, and these had to be smuggled into Seville under the cloaks of master and servant. The officials appear to have treated Borrow with the greatest possible courtesy and consideration, and they told him that his “intentions were known and honored.”
Borrow had great hopes of achieving something for the Gospel’s sake in Seville; but the operation would be a delicate one. To Mr Brandram he wrote:—
“Consider my situation here. I am in a city by nature very Levitical, as it contains within it the most magnificent and splendidly endowed cathedral of any in Spain. I am surrounded by priests and friars, who know and hate me, and who, if I commit the slightest act of indiscretion, will halloo their myrmidons against me. The press is closed to me, the libraries are barred against me, I have no one to assist me but my hired servant, no pious English families to comfort or encourage me, the British subjects here being ranker papists and a hundred times more bigoted than the Spanish themselves, the Consul, a renegade Quaker. Yet notwithstanding, with God’s assistance, I will do much, though silently, burrowing like the mole in darkness beneath the ground. Those who have triumphed in Madrid, and in the two Castiles, where the difficulties were seven times greater, are not to be dismayed by priestly frowns at Seville.” [293]
On arriving at Seville Borrow had put up at the Posada de la Reyna, in the Calle Gimios, and here on 4th May (he had arrived about 24th April) he encountered Lieut.-Colonel Elers Napier. Borrow liked nothing so well as appearing in the rôle of a mysterious stranger. He loved mystery as much as a dramatic moment. His admiration of Baron Taylor was largely based upon the innumerable conjectures as to who it was that surrounded his puzzling personality with such an air of mystery. That May morning Colonel Napier, who was also staying at the Posada de la Reyna, was wandering about the galleries overlooking the patio. He writes:—
“whilst occupied in moralising over the dripping water spouts, I observed a tall, gentlemanly-looking man dressed in a semarra [zamarra, a sheepskin jacket with the wool outside] leaning over the balustrades and apparently engaged in a similar manner with myself . . . From the stranger’s complexion, which was fair, but with brilliant black eyes, I concluded he was not a Spaniard; in short, there was something so remarkable in his appearance that it was difficult to say to what nation he might belong. He was tall, with a commanding appearance; yet, though apparently in the flower of manhood, his hair was so deeply tinged with the winter of either age or sorrow as to be nearly snow white.” [294a]
Colonel Napier was thoroughly mystified. The stranger answered his French in “the purest Parisian Accent”; yet he proved capable of speaking fluent English, of giving orders to his Greek servant in Romaïc, of conversing “in good Castillian with ‘mine host’,” and of exchanging salutations in German with another resident at the fonda. Later the Colonel had the gratification of startling the Unknown by replying to some remark of his in Hindi; but only momentarily, for he showed himself “delighted on finding I was an Indian, and entered freely, and with depth and acuteness, on the affairs of the East, most of which part of the world he had visited.” [294b]
No one could give any information about “the mysterious Unknown,” who or what he was, or why he was travelling. It was known that the police entertained suspicions that he was a Russian spy, and kept him under strict observation. Whatever else he was, Colonel Napier found him “a very agreeable companion.” [295]
On the following morning (a Sunday) Colonel Napier and his Unknown set out on horseback on an excursion to the ruins of Italica. As they sat on a ruined wall of the Convent of San Isidoro, contemplating the scene of ruin and desolation around, “the ‘Unknown’ began to feel the vein of poetry creeping through his inward soul, and gave vent to it by reciting with great emphasis and effect” some lines that the scene called up to his mind.