What has always astonished me about these little towns of Islam is the apparent importance of their history compared with their present appearance. I know that it is the fashion to accept, literally enough, the stories of their past doings, and I know that I am going against the fashion in flatly refusing to accept those stories. I do not believe them. I do not believe them of Cordova, and I am fully prepared to disbelieve them of Granada itself. Certainly I disbelieve them of this little town which, as I have so abused it and as, after all, it gave me hospitality, I will not dishonour by name. Its wretched crumbling plaster, its low hovels, the lump of mud which it called a Mosque, the incredible accumulation of filth upon all sides, the air of stagnation and disease, the mere scale of the place, belied the exaggerations of the chronicles. And as I considered that I might have to spend there Heaven knows how many days while messengers were fetching what might or might not bring to life the poor dead car, I could not bear the prospect.
I therefore did something which I could not afford. I took aside the chief of my hauling gang of twenty-four and struck a bargain with him. I said to him: "I cannot possibly reach the port which I intended to reach over this illimitable wet mass of dusty earth; it is a day's journey away, even if the car were in working order. Is there no other place on the sea coast nearer by where I could get some sort of vessel to take me to a human land? I care not what vessel it is, even though it be one of those vessels which they beach, which are open without deck and run under one lateen sail," for I was not (at the nearest point) much more than a full hundred miles from Cadiz and the Ports of Spain.
He told me that there was one little third-rate port, if you could call it a port, and it was one day's walk away, or, say, five or six hours of marching. Then, at an enormous price, was it arranged with a new team that the car should be hauled by ropes, and hauled it was through the most incredible places, I sitting at the steering-wheel and good Moors hauling in two teams over sandy hillock and across awkward ghylls, until, from a height, we saw suddenly a new road properly modelled, European, Christian, civilised; and beyond it the mixed roofs of Christendom and of Islam; beyond these again the sea: that sea to which the Mohammedan Conqueror came more than a thousand years ago, and into which he rode his horse, saying: "Lord, God! Were I not stopped by this your sea I would ride farther and farther to the West, conquering all lands for your honour and that of your Prophet."
Once on this road things grew easier. There were vehicles and there was life. I paid off my team with a heavy heart, adding (as courtesy, custom, and necessity demanded) a great deal to the agreed sum. Then I went down into the little town.
It was a delightful surprise to find as pleasant a little town as ever the evil powers permitted to survive upon this earth. It was clean, it was even coquettish. It was neat; it climbed down the side of a steep hill and below it a charming little harbour held a brig of sorts, very old, many native boats—large open boats, used for fishing—and, to my great joy, a steamer!
It was a tramp steamer, and that of the smaller sort. It was the least of steamers; it was a Benjamin; but when I heard that it would try to start next day for Cadiz I thought it as great a piece of luck as a reprieve, or a fortune, or the sudden power to write a piece of verse which one has been in travail of for years. The next day I paid my money and I went on board, and at noon, which was high tide, that steamer got across the Bar.
Not all steamers can cross the Bar of this little port. Even as we went out we saw the rusty skeleton of a French ship which had gone to pieces in that same attempt a year before.
It was a dreadful Bar. I can only compare it to Appledore in Devon, and I doubt if there was any more water than there is over Appledore; perhaps less; but, as I have said, this steamer was the least of steamers and drew as little as a steamer can if it is to take the high seas at all.
There was little wind upon the Atlantic, but huge rollers coming in unbroken, one over the other, monotonously enormous, unceasing. And I said to myself, as she pointed her nose northward: "It will be slow; it must be endured; but we are making for Christian land, and this night perhaps (for what is a hundred miles?) I shall sleep in Paradise, or, at any rate, in Cadiz." But not at all. There happened a very strange thing indeed. Hardly had her nose been pointed North and the Bar perhaps half a mile behind us, and Africa the horrible, the sterile, the bare, now no longer a place of weariness but a coastline to be observed at my ease, when the man commanding this little ship dropped anchor and lit a pipe.