A COUNTRY RAILWAY STATION.
And so the team kicked their hardest all the seven miles to Thomar, and performed the distance, as it seemed to me, in one continued gymnastic exercise, more on their fore-legs than on their full complement of limbs. But kicking mules were powerless to mar the delight of the drive. The road was a perfect one, over hills covered with pines and dales ablaze with purple heather. The cool mountain breeze, laden with the scent of wild thyme, brought with it a new sense of delight which made breathing a conscious enjoyment, and the jaded elderly person in the shivering shandrydan felt impelled to shout aloud in mere exhilaration of living in such an atmosphere. Only a three weeks before I had seen Deeside at its best, but Deeside heather was dull, and the Deeside pine-clad hills in their wreaths of clouds were depressing, in comparison with this sparkling sweep of sandy moor and mountain.
Turning the shoulder of the highest ridge we came in sight of the vast and beautiful valley below us with Thomar in its midst upon its river bank nestling in greenery, with its steep, abrupt hill and castle standing sentinel over it. It was Sunday, and, although broad daylight when I drove into Thomar, a flight of rockets rushed into the air from the town-hall, and the braying of a brass band told me that the town was en fête. It was, I learnt, the ceremony of prize-giving and treating the school children by the town council, and all the little ones, clean, chubby, and well-clad they looked, were trooping, shouting, and cheering, as children do the world over. I found a warm welcome at the Hotel União, and was soon convinced that the Chão de Maçãs meeting was right in their assurance that the failure to send the carriage was from no fault of the host, a gentleman of cultured manners and tastes, quite unlike the ordinary type of Portuguese innkeeper. He was distressed to have received no letter to advise him of my coming, as he ought to have done two days before, but an hour or two afterwards he rushed into my room, excited and triumphant. He had forced them to open the post-office, Sunday though it was, and had rescued my letter from a heap which some careless postman had neglected to deliver! Thenceforward Senhor Jose Mathias Araujo, a pattern of Portuguese hotelkeepers, was indefatigable in making me, a mere passing stranger though I was, of whose name he had only heard vaguely, feel at home and comfortable at Thomar.
A CORNER OF THE TOWN HALL AND THE CONVENT, THOMAR.
The place is one which to my latest days I shall never forget. A clean little rectangular town with straight streets of singularly modern aspect, on the banks of an exquisitely beautiful stream fringed by trees and gardens. The shops for the most part are but doorways open upon the street, for they have not adopted the modern fashion of windows for the display of goods. And life in general seems to pass drowsily, for with the exception of a small factory in some ancient conventual buildings on the farther bank of the stream, there is not much doing in the place.
But the object of my coming to this sweet, dull, little town pervades it everywhere. At the end of the three straight streets running from the river to the square market-place, with its ancient church and town-hall, there looms upon a steep hill, right up over the roofs as it seems, the most splendid and interesting mediæval castle-monastery in this land of hill-top strongholds—the ancient fortress headquarters of the crusading knights of the Order of Christ, successors in Portugal of the Templars. Thomar was the metropolis and fief of the Order, and on all sides the emblem of their peculiar cross is evident. Impressed upon my mind for ever is the view as I first gazed upon it from the main street (of course, incongruously called now after Serpa Pinto) on the sparkling autumn day. Clear and sharp high up on the hill against the indigo sky stood a ruined bell tower through whose gaping window the light shone, with tall, pointed cypresses by its side, and flanked by a mighty stretch of warm, grey battlements, above which rose the bulk of a great square keep.
A zigzag path leads from behind the sixteenth-century town-hall in the praça up the rocky sides of the precipitous hill. Gnarled olive trees, dwarf oaks, and aloes grew in the crevices and amidst the ruins of outer walls upon the face of the declivity; and the outer donjon, still standing unwrecked across the path, shows the tremendous strength even of these exterior defences. Above these loomed the Titanic walls, their battlemented sides and turrets, all stained a golden yellow with the lichen that covered them. The inner donjon, which adjoins the picturesque ruined bell tower, gives entrance to a charming grassy garden with tall cypresses, orange trees, and gay flowers, growing in what was once the wide courtyard of the castle; and the huge square main keep standing in the midst, all dismantled as it is, rears its flame-tinged battlements as proudly as when the soldiers of the Cross held this isolated stronghold against the hordes of Islam. The walls are everywhere pierced with loopholes in the shape of a cross surmounting a globe, and the cruciform device of the Order is graven upon stones on all sides.
