It is impossible to imagine a ruin more stately than that of the grand mediæval castle which, upon a gentle eminence on the outskirts, dominates the town. Granite built upon a granite base, the walls sharp and clear to-day, look as if cut but nine years ago instead of nine centuries. Here is the dignity of age without its feebleness. A vast battlemented outer wall, with corner bastions and pointed crenellations, surrounds the majestic keep, the monolithic battlements of which, huge single stones, stand uninjured still by time or the more destructive hand of man. The cyclopean masses are reddened now by lichen and stained by weather, but nine centuries have failed to crumble them, and they stand a splendid monument of the first of the two outstanding epochs in Portuguese history, when the nation was stirred with vast ambitions and endowed with heroic energy to fulfil them. Affonso Henriques of Guimarães was the protagonist of the first epoch, that of national independence; Prince Henry the Navigator, the protagonist of the second, that of national expansion.
Guimarães is delightful, and an artist might spend a month in its quaint streets and alleys without exhausting the “bits” that call for delineation. One charming old-world corner is the square in which stands the church that alone remains of the vast monastery founded by the Leonese Princess Munia—the Collegiada the townspeople call it, although I believe it bears officially another name. The early florid Gothic tower is a beautiful one, and more beautiful still the detached rood canopy at its west end, with its quaint mixture of early Gothic with Greek and Byzantine ornament. Opposite this is the low-arched sixteenth-century arcade beneath the town-hall, and the houses that surround the irregular little praça are in picturesque keeping with the rest. There is in a street called Largo dos Trigães, one of the finest stretches of crenellated wall that ever I saw. It must be three hundred yards long, and at least five-and-twenty feet high, independent of its pointed battlements, and is in the most perfect preservation though many centuries old. It is said to enclose the grounds of a disestablished monastery, for Guimarães was in old times monastic or nothing.
But curious and interesting as Guimarães is, I was not drawn thither mainly to see the town, but to examine in the Sarmento museum the objects discovered in the excavation of Citania. The collection is at present in a state of chaos, which may possibly be remedied when the reconstruction of the house is completed by the authorities. The number of objects is immense, though by far the greater part of them came from other places in the neighbourhood than Citania, and are mainly attributable to the Roman period, though many of them are very early and ante-Christian. The few purely Roman objects, however, found at Citania are neither peculiar to the place nor of special interest. What is far more attractive to the student are the relics that exist of the real and original Celtiberian makers of the hill town.
First of all is the famous Pedra Formosa, to which reference has been made. It stands at present in the open at the back of the Sarmento house, but protected from the weather by a low roof which unfortunately prevents a photograph being secured of it. It is a thick slab of granite, seven feet long by nine feet wide, and notwithstanding the contention of Dr. Hübner, who has not seen it, I am convinced that, whatever may have been its purpose, its position was intended to be horizontal, and that it is not a sepulchral stone to be set on edge. At present it is mounted on four low posts or pillars, like a table, and the elaborate carving upon it can be consequently seen plainly. At the top of its shorter diameter in the centre is a hollow, ending in a point, the outer circumference of the hollow being about the size of a human head. From this, extending downwards about six feet to a semicircular gap cut into the stone, at the foot is a raised cord-like pattern cut out of the thickness of the stone, beneath which is bored a tunnel, or channel, leading from the point of the hollow cone at the top down to a hole through the stone at the bottom, a few inches from the semicircular gap. From the base of the hollow at the top, leading obliquely to the sides, are two other raised cord-like ridges similar to that from top to bottom; the main design being roughly that of a human being with the hollow for the head, the straight cord from top to bottom for the body and legs, and the oblique cords for the arms. The whole of the spaces between the cords are filled with a most intricate series of designs, beautifully incised in the stone, concentric whorls, curves, and scrolls being in each case the main motive.
Whatever may have been the purpose of the stone—religious, sacrificial, or tribal—the work must have occupied many men for a long period, and the skill, both of design and execution, prove that the artificers must have reached a relatively high stage of artistic development. The art is obviously ante-Christian, and the form of the stone suggests that it may have been sacrificial, with the hollow cone to receive the blood from a severed jugular and the tunnel beneath the central cord to convey it to where the priest stood in the gap to catch it as it ran through the hole at the bottom of the stone. The incised design shows no indication of Greek or Roman influence, but the concentric curves are identical with some of the earliest ornamental decoration of the stonework in the museum brought from other Celto-Roman places in the neighbourhood, and also with the decoration upon Celtic pottery found elsewhere in Portugal and at Carmona in Spain.
A stone of great interest found also at Citania may perhaps add more to our knowledge than the mysterious Pedra Formosa. It bears an inscription in the Celtiberian character, of which comparatively few specimens have hitherto been discovered, and no key has been found to decipher them. One of those known and reproduced by Dr. Hübner was found at Peñalba de Castro in Spain, and appears to be nearly identical in character with that from Citania; whilst another, also in Hübner, brought from Barcelona, presents several important differences. The Citania inscription is here reproduced, and I am indebted to Professor Rhys, the famous Celtic authority, for an interesting suggestion, namely, that the whole inscription, although written in the unknown Celtiberian character, may be intended to be read in Latin; in which case the first line and a half might represent Syatenunius. This point, however, I must leave as being too abstruse for a book of this kind. We are on firmer ground in the case of the very numerous specimens of red pottery found at Citania and stamped with a mark entirely unknown elsewhere. The marks of Roman potters on jars and pitchers were always printed in small letters outside the mouth, whereas the marked pieces in question from Citania bear in letters an inch long inside the mouth “Camal” or “Arg,” and sometimes both words, and scores of red tiles have also been found similarly marked ARG
CAMAL. Upon a lintel-stone from Citania in the museum I read the words CORONERI CALI DOMUS, and another, apparently from the same house, is mentioned by Dr. Sarmento, but which I did not see, bearing the inscription CRON CAMALI DOMUS, most of the pottery bearing Camal’s name having been found near this house. Whether Camal was a Celto-Roman potter, or, as seems much more likely, a great personage or chief of Citania, is a point yet to be decided; but from the fact that the name on the clay vessels is not situated where the potter’s mark is usually inscribed, would tend to the belief that he was the owner rather than the manufacturer. Arg, or Airg, as it may be read, may have represented a Celtiberian title or dignity, and Camal, or Camalus, is undoubtedly a Celtic name. It is unlikely, moreover, that if Camal had simply been a potter his son Coronerus would have considered it necessary to record upon his stone door-lintel the fact of his descent, which he probably would have done if his father Camalus was a person of consequence. Another peculiar fact in connection with the incised ornamentation upon stones at Citania is the repetition of the Swastick or wheeled cross and the wheeled whorl, which are of pre-Christian and oriental origin, this design being also quite frequent in the objects found in other places in the neighbourhood, and amongst Celtic remains in other parts of the Peninsula.
The death of Dr. Sarmento has, of course, put an end to his self-sacrificing life-task, leaving by far the greater part of the exploration of the outer zones of Citania unattempted. It is almost too much to hope that any other similarly public-spirited Portuguese will provide the funds needed for the purpose, for there is little enthusiasm for such subjects in the country; but if funds could be obtained to excavate extensively the lower slopes of the hill on the south side where numerous hillocks suggest that sepulchral remains may lie beneath, it is probable that discoveries of great importance in Celtiberian civilisation would be made, and perhaps the riddle of the Celtiberian alphabet solved.
IV
BUSSACO
After losing sight of the marvellous view across the river of the city upon its amphitheatre of hills, the road from Oporto towards the south runs through a country of drifting sands parallel with the seashore. Pines bending away from the prevailing westerly wind stand singly and in clumps at first, and then in vast tracts, as in the Landes about Arcachon, binding the unstable soil together; and within a few miles of Oporto here and there a sea-bathing village of châlets and houses of entertainment breaks the monotony of the scene. It was but seven in the evening, but the autumn day had already sunk into dusk with an angry streaked black and crimson after-glow when I came to the little thermal bathing village of Luzo, on the lower slopes of the mountains that cover the whole of the north of Portugal except the strip of country bordering the sea. For some miles, ever since we had left the main railway line from Oporto to Lisbon at Pampilhosa junction, we had been rising, whilst the pines bordering the line had been growing thicker and more sturdy, and from Luzo onward the way grew still steeper. The stars shone brightly, but a dew almost as heavy as rain was falling as the carriage that had met me at the station drawn by two gigantic mules, rattled along the excellent road through Luzo.