Our stay at Sollér was cut short by the unkindness of the weather. For two days the rain held off, grudgingly; but on the third we awoke to find the whole valley enveloped in a dense Scotch mist; our host looked up at the blurred outlines of the mountains, and he looked at the gusts of cloud that were blowing through the barranco, and he shook his head; he was honest, and he confessed that the prospect was not hopeful. A rain wind sobbed round the house as we sat over the wood fire that evening, and from an adjoining room came the singularly monotonous chant—high, nasal, and quavering—with which a Majorcan servant girl can accompany her sweeping for hours at a time. The effect was indescribably triste, and our thoughts turned to the flesh pots of Palma.
The following morning showed no improvement, so our host’s victoria was requisitioned and we set out on our return to the Grand Hotel. For an hour and a half our two sturdy horses toiled up out of the valley, the winding zigzags of the road affording us now and again a backward glance at the little white town lying in the lap of the hills, framed by converging mountain slopes. On reaching the top of the pass we met a fresher air, and we rattled merrily down the beautifully graded road towards the plain, drawing up presently at the wayside villa of Alfádia.
Alfádia is an ancient caravanserai that still bears traces of its Moorish origin; passing under the high entrance gateway, which has a Moorish ceiling of carved and painted wood, one enters a vast courtyard, surrounded by stables and containing a fountain and a pepper-tree of immense size and age. When first we entered the great quadrangle it was absolutely deserted, but no sooner did our camera mount its tripod than with the mysterious suddenness of Roderick Dhu’s men figures emerged from all sides, anxious to be included in the picture.
Hardly had we regained our carriage when the rain that had long been threatening began to come down—first gently, then harder, and finally with a terrific clap of thunder we were overtaken by a kind of cloudburst. Whipping up the horses our driver made a dash for a wayside inn on the Palma road, and driving in under the deep verandah-like porch running along the whole front of the building we drew up and were gradually joined by other refugees till every inch of standing room was taken up. Cheek by jowl with us were white-tilted orange carts from Sollér, a countryman and his cow, a post cart, sundry mules, and a number of pedestrians who arrived half drowned beneath their umbrellas; and in this most welcome shelter we all remained imprisoned while for the next half hour it rained as I have never seen it rain before. Cascades fell from the edge of the verandah roof, the road became a river, and from the olive grounds gory floods were descending and were struggling and leaping through the culverts like the legions of red rats charmed out of Hamelin by the pied piper.
It is with diffidence that I venture to observe that a very unusual amount of rain fell around Palma this spring—for there is a growing feeling of incredulity on the subject of unusual seasons. I have heard of a man who had lived for thirty years in Algiers, and who asserted that in that time he had experienced thirty unusual seasons. Few winter resorts perhaps could equal this record, but I fancy that in most places abnormal seasons of one kind or another are sufficiently common for the really normal one—when it does make its appearance—to be almost, if not quite, as unusual as the rest.
On April 16th we took the train for Alcúdia and set out on our fourth and final tour in Majorca. When I say that we took the train for Alcúdia I mean that we went as far in that direction as the train would carry us, for with a strange perversity the railway line, instead of running right across the island from Palma to Alcúdia and so connecting the latter and its Minorcan service of boats with the rest of the world, stops short some ten miles from the coast, perhaps with a view to annoying possible invaders.
