II.
Contrary to our prearranged plan, we decided, upon landing, to engage a carriage. Just why, I hardly knew, but there was a subtle power at work in the mind of one of our party, and although it has never been hinted at since then, in calmly going over that carriage-hiring I think I begin to read the riddle. We had left our French at Haïti, and this was our first experiment on this voyage with Spanish, and I suspect some of us were anxious to see how Cervantes’s language—la idioma Castellana—would work when it came to such a common-place proceeding as the hiring of a carriage.
We came off with colours flying, and took seats in a vehicle made some twenty-five or fifty years ago (quite modern as compared with those of Port-au-Prince), bumped up the steep stony hill, under an old archway, and had our first glimpse of the solid Spanish architecture of Santo Domingo. Everything was interesting; the balconies upheld by graceful supports of wrought iron; the neat appearance of the low-roofed, white and blue washed houses; the ever-beautiful palms and banana groves seen in vistas across the river; even our driver was a source of interest, for I expended my entire vocabulary of Spanish—few words indeed—upon that youth, all to no purpose. All he did was to look dazed and answer, “Si, señora” to everything, hit or miss, until we came to the Cathedral, when, just to make it right with my conscience for having been the innocent cause of all his awful lies, I asked him, pointing to the building, which could be nothing in the mind of a sane man but a cathedral, if that was the Cathedral, and he said: “Si, señora,” and I felt relieved.
No description can convey to your mind an adequate impression of the beauty of this wonderful old cathedral, for one needs colour, colour, colour, everywhere for its proper setting. It is built of the yellowest of soft porous stone, to which time has bequeathed a luminosity, the brilliancy of which no language can rightly picture. It is purely Spanish in its style, depending for its beauty entirely on its symmetry of form and not on extraneous ornamentation; it is built rather low to withstand frequent earthquakes, and from its solidity and simplicity and directness of construction has a charm which few of the later Spanish cathedrals possess. Time has laid her kindly hands upon this temple of God gently—ever so gently, and through many a lifetime has fulfilled the priestly office of consecration.