Within an hour we descend at Consell and change to the branch line forming the connection with Alaró; a small tram was awaiting us outside the station, and this proved to be the branch line. No road was in sight, but the tram lines vanished into an endless perspective of beanfields, and through these we were slowly drawn by two horses harnessed tandem fashion. Our only fellow-travellers in the tiny front compartment—reserved for the rich who could afford to pay threepence—were a couple of buxom market-women, most deeply interested in our appearance.
Quaint things happen so easily in Majorca that we were not much surprised on reaching Alaró when the tram conductor got down, shouldered our camera and the heavy luncheon basket, and without a word marched away towards the village inn as though it were his business in life to conduct strange ladies there. Setting rocking chairs for us among the wine barrels, he lit a cigar and proceeded to assist in the saddling of the two donkeys that had been ordered overnight for our ascent to the castle of Alaró. One was a riding donkey for my companion, the other a pack animal to carry our impedimenta, its pack saddle being furnished with panniers and fitted with the native breeching strap—a wooden contrivance shaped like a Cupid’s bow, which fits across the donkey’s hind legs and rubs off all the hair.
Away we started in brilliant sunshine with an old man and a boy in attendance, and turning into a narrow track between stone walls we followed a babbling torrent through carob and orange gardens and began to wind up the hillside by a steep zigzag path. Innumerable sheep-bells tinkled among the olive yards, and the voice of a herdsman rang out in a Gregorian chant from far up the heights where he tended his goats among holm oak and pine. Sheer above us towered the perpendicular red scarp of the cliff on which the castle stands, a small white speck upon its edge the Hospedéria of the summit.
A couple of hours’ stiff climb brings one to the back of the cliff, and scaling a rough rock staircase one enters the precincts of the old fortress through a Moorish gate tower with a curious double archway—the outer arch being round-headed and the inner one pointed.
Like a great wedge of cheese with straight cut sides does the cliff of Alaró stand out into the plain; its perpendicular front rises sheer in a terrific precipice, its only approach a steep ascent commanded by a fortified tower. Small need to be told that by assault the castle was impregnable; but it was subdued by siege and starvation in 1285, when Alfonso the Beneficent of Aragon warred with Jaime II. of Majorca. What followed the surrender of Alaró is known to every Majorcan; the Conqueror, exasperated by the vain but most gallant defence of the castle, had its two governors burnt alive at the stake in the presence of his whole army.
“Many of the old olive trees stand on a kind of tripod formed by the splitting and shrinking of their own trunk.”
(page [35])