"Ah! now you see the Neutral Ground; that village to the left is Lineas, where you can get a glass of Manzanilla cheap," exclaimed a companion.
I do not set exceeding store by your pale thin Manzanilla, nor do I care to load my mouth with the flavour of a drug store.
"There are the sheds we put up the time Prim was expected; they are on the Neutral Ground, ha, ha! where the soil is supposed to be inviolate; but we have forgotten to take them down since. We were too many for them."
And now we are by the landing-stairs, and the Customs' officer demands our passport in English. We answer him cheerily that we need none, and to his smiling welcome we step on the soil of British Spain; but it would be unpardonable to begin describing it at the tail of a chapter.
CHAPTER IV.
Gabriel Tar—A Hard Nut to Crack—In the Cemetery—An Old Tipperary Soldier—Marks of the Broad Arrow—The "Scorpions"—The Jaunting-Cars—Amusements on the Bock—Mrs. Damages' Complaint—The Bay, the Alameda, and Tarifa—How to Learn Spanish—Types of the British Officer—The Wily Ben Solomon—A Word for the Subaltern—Sunset Gun—The Sameness of Sutlersville.
Where I went to school, we had a droll lad, whose humour developed itself in mispronunciation. In my nonage I considered that unique. Now I know it is a rather common order of quaintness. Hugh used to call Sierra Leone, "Sarah Alone;" Cambodia, "Gamboge;" Stromboli, "Storm-boiler;" and Gibraltar, "Gabriel Tar." How we used to wrinkle with laughter at his sallies, launched with an artistically unconscious air, until the swooping cane came swishing down on our backs! And here I was in Gabriel Tar. I vow the first inclination I felt was to write to Hugh with the date engraved on the note-paper, and indeed so I should have done, but that I had not seen him for nigh twenty years, and when last I heard of him he was married, and had learned to be serious and to speak with precision. The fun had been driven out of him by responsibility. Propriety had come with prosperity.
Call it by what name you will, Gabriel Tar, or Gibraltar, that infinitesimal scrap of territory over which the Union Jack floats, is supremely unpalatable and insolently insulting to the Spaniard. It is a bitter pill to swallow, an adamantine nut to crack. I suppose he is welcome to take it—when he can; but he knows better than to try. It is the gate of the Mediterranean. Logically, it is an injustice that a stranger should sit in the porter's lodge and swing the key at his girdle; but it is as well that the porter is one who is too surly to barter his trust for gold. So Gabriel Tar will remain intact, until the porter grows feeble or falls asleep.
British Spain, or "the Rock," or Gib, as it is indifferently termed, or Sutlersville, as I prefer to name it, can be converted into an island at the will of its defenders. The sandy spit of Neutral Ground at one side of which Tommy Atkins, fresh-faced, does his sentry-go in brick-red tunic and white pith-helmet, and at the other side of which swarthy Sancho Panza y Toro, in projecting cap and long blue coat, fondles a rifle in the bend of his arm, can readily be flooded; and the bare, sheer, lofty north front, with scores of cannon of the deadliest modern pattern lying in wait behind the irregular embrasures that grimly pit its surface, hardly invites attack. It frowns a calm but determined defiance; and even the Cid himself might be excused if he turned on his heel and puffed a meditative cigarette after he had surveyed it.
British Spain is small, being but one and seven-eighth square miles English in area; but it is mighty strong. The population, comprising the garrison, is less than fifteen thousand; but behind that slender cipher of souls are the millions of the broadest and biggest of empires. I do not know what the population of the cemetery is, but it receives rapid and numerous accessions at each periodical outbreak of cholera. I paid a visit to it—I have a fondness for sauntering in God's acre—and arrived in time to witness a funeral. When the coffin was laid in the grave, a young man, probably the husband of the deceased, threw himself prone on the turf beside the open burial-trench, and burst into such a passionate tempest of heart-rending sobs and moans and wailings, that I had to move away. These Southerners are more demonstrative in their grief than the men of the North. I question if their sorrows spring from deeper depths, or are so lasting. The caretaker of the cemetery, an elderly Tipperary soldier, with a short dudheen in his mouth, was seated smoking on a head-stone by a goat-willow. We got into conversation.