Rejoining our donkeys, we set off on our downward ride. Midway we were overtaken by a party of boisterous young men who tore down the mountainside laughing and shouting, gave us a breathless good-day in passing, and vanished with giant strides down a precipitous shortcut, apparently intent on breaking their necks. We looked on aghast, but our guides evidently considered it no abnormal way of descending a mountain.
“Going downhill no one is old,” says the island proverb reassuringly; no doubt the subsequent stiffness of our own knees was the result of not having gone down sufficiently fast.
The Palma carnival differs so greatly from that function as celebrated on the Riviera as to be worthy of mention. There the tourist element and its accompanying ostentation of wealth are the most conspicuous features of the performance. Here, in Palma, all this is wholly lacking, and the carnival has retained its native character to a truly refreshing degree. It is essentially a people’s festival, with hardly a foreigner present.
From three o’clock in the afternoon till late at night the whole town is en fête; all the shops are shut, and the shop people sit in merry groups before their doors; the balconies overlooking the Borne are crowded, and the wide Borne itself is a seething throng of people on foot sauntering up and down, and chaffing one another in high good-humour.
The troops—of which five or six thousand are quartered at Palma—send a large contingent to the crowd of holiday-makers; infantrymen in long, blue coats, crimson trousers, and bright green gloves, mingle with pretty girls in kerchief and rebosillo, whose hair is powdered thick with coloured confetti. Here is an old peasant, come in from the country, wearing under his hat a handkerchief wound round his head in the style of his Catalonian ancestors; his wife has donned her gayest shawl, and has brought the baby, who chuckles with delight at the festive scene and wears a funny little straw hat shaped like a Saracen turban trimmed with scarlet pompoms.
Tiny maidens of four and five are costumed as grand ladies, and walk about, quaintly dignified, with proudly trailing train and flaunting fan, in rich brocade skirts and velvet bodices, with long, white gloves, and hair elaborately dressed with flowers and high tortoise-shell combs. A party of Arabs, draped in white sheets and armed with spears, lead about an unfortunate comrade disguised as a dancing bear, who is vigorously kept up to his part throughout the day; and small boys, dressed as Pierrots, or rejoicing simply in the disguise afforded by a pasteboard nose and a high falsetto voice, caper unrestrained through the crowd.
Towards evening a couple of hundred carriages turn out into the streets; galarétas, landaus, dogcarts, and wagons form into line and follow each other in slow procession round and round the Borne. The smart barouche and pair of the Captain-General is preceded by a humble donkey-cart, and followed by a heavy country charrette overflowing with clowns. Every one is dressed according to taste, and every one is free to throw things at every one else. The imperturbably correct coachman of a stylish turn-out gets hit on the nose by an egg-shell stuffed with confetti; the gentleman seated beside him—who wears a mask and an amazing tow-wig—replies with a well-directed volley, and a furious fusillade ensues, the enemy coming up to the very windows of the galarétas to pour in a deadly fire among the occupants.
Mounted officers, armed with paper rockets, do battle with the people in the balconies, who, in return, hail down missiles and torrents of confetti upon their assailants. Eggshells fly in showers from carriage to carriage, smashing upon any head they meet with. On the wide Place Weyler the confetti lie so thick that the square resembles some cathedral floor—tinted by stained glass windows, and the carriages and horses are so tangled up in coloured streamers that they appear to have broken through a great rainbow spider’s web and carried it bodily away with them.
By eight o’clock the Carnival is a thing of the past, and the gay, good-humoured crowd is in full retreat, thoroughly tired out.