One more show chamber there is in the “national monument” portion of Alcobaça: a hall lined with eighteenth-century pictorial blue tiles, representing in large tableaux memorable deeds of the kings of Portugal, with statues of the kings themselves upon brackets above; the great tableau at the end, representing the coronation of Affonso Henriques, being an exceptionally good specimen of a poor artistic medium. As I walk through the grave, silent church again, and so out into the bright praça, with its avenues of shady acacias casting long shadows, the façade of the church strikes me as more inharmonious than before, now that the wonderful glow of the slanting sunrays touch the salient points with fire. The front with its seventeenth-century figures, its Manueline central round window, and its elaboration of outlines, so characteristic of the Spanish “Jesuit” style, are utterly incongruous with the pure early Gothic of the doorway, and it is with a sigh of regret that one turns from the contemplation of such a result of wealth divorced from artistry.
The vast monastic building behind the church is squalid and ugly, for the occupation of soldiery does not tend to the æsthetic maintenance of a building. The famous kitchen of the monastery is used now for military purposes, but may be seen by easily obtained permission. As I looked upon it, a bare, great, vaulted hall, with the channel for water still running through it, and the marks of the long line of ovens extending across the wall, I cast my thoughts back at the busy scene that the place presented in the palmy days of the monks, when the flesh-pots of Alcobaça were proverbial through the land. This is how the place struck Beckford on his memorable visit.
“The three prelates lead the way to, I verily believe, the most distinguished temple of gluttony in all Europe. What Glastonbury may have been in its palmy state I cannot answer, but my eyes never beheld in any modern convent of France, Italy, or Germany, such an enormous space dedicated to culinary purposes. Through the centre of the immense and nobly groined hall, not less than sixty feet in diameter, ran a brisk rivulet of the clearest water, flowing through pierced wooden reservoirs, containing every sort and size of the finest river fish. On one side loads of game and venison were heaped up, on the other vegetables and fruit in endless variety. Beyond a long line of stoves extended a row of ovens, and close to them hillocks of wheaten flour whiter than snow, rocks of sugar, jars of the purest oil, and pastry in vast abundance, which a numerous tribe of lay brothers and their attendants were rolling and puffing up into a hundred different shapes, singing all the while as blithely as larks in a cornfield.”
Abbots and monks, lay brothers, and cooks have gone the way of all flesh; and of the plethoric plenty of old no vestige remains in the enormous dingy hall. So, there being no fatted calf killed for me in these degenerate days, I wend my way through the acacia avenues to the humble hostelry where a dinner is prepared for me, eatable, it is true, but a sad falling off from the culinary splendours of Alcobaça in the good old times.
Then in the gloaming I drove four miles through woods of pine and eucalyptus, balsamic now in the soft evening air, to Vallado station on the railway to Lisbon. Out of the darkness at about seven there sprang a long spinning factory blazing with electric light, and humming with the whirr of wheels. The “hands” were just flocking out from their daily toil, and filled the black, unlit road with a gay babbling crowd. There was no town near, and the mill was deeply embosomed in the pine woods: this seemed to me an ideal form of factory life, in which the house of toil, instead of debouching its crowd of pallid workers into fetid town-slums to fester unwholesomely until the morrow, needed but a step from its threshold to plunge them into the sweet air of the pines and heather; and where the “hands,” though they worked in crowds underneath a roof, never ceased to be country folk. It was but a passing flash and hubbub to me in the darkness of my lonely drive, and the toilers to me, and I to them, but fleeting shadows. But seen thus, there seemed to me something of suggestive possibilities in this hive of what is usually an urban industry, set in the midst of lofty pines, sweet mountain herbs, and far-flung folds of purple heather. A railway journey of three-quarters of an hour brought me to the famous medicinal thermal watering-place of Caldas da Rainha, where in the excellent Hotel Lisbonense, which the proprietor, one of those frugal, honest, Gallegos who are the industrial salt of the Peninsula, told me was the largest in Portugal, as it is certainly one of the best, I ended a long day of overcrowded impressions by a night of delightful dreamless sleep.
VII
CINTRA
I had often before seen Caldas in the height of the bathing season, when the midsummer heat made Lisbon intolerable and inspired people with more or less imaginary maladies to get cured. The place then, with its crowds of visitors and pleasant parties, was bright and lively enough; but now that the last pleasure-seeker had fled, and the only people taking the wonderful health-giving waters were the few really sick, and the inmates of the great “Queen’s hospital” adjoining the hot springs, Caldas looked mean and ugly. The drives through the pine forests in the neighbourhood, it is true, are pleasant; but for a fortnight I had been passing through a glorious pine country much more diversified and elevated than these, and Caldas had no fresh attractions to offer me. A visit to the famous factory of enamelled faience, charmingly situated in the midst of gardens, yielded an hour’s interest in the inspection of the late Bordallo Pinheiro’s fine sacred figure groups now in course of production for the shrines at Bussaco, and the hundred curious Palissy-like pieces in high relief, plates of fruit, fish, &c., which are the specialty of the factory. But that being finished the charms of Caldas were exhausted, so far as I was concerned, and the train for Cintra claimed me irresistibly.
The first station from Caldas (Obidos), with its little town, nestles at the foot of an eminence upon which another of the stupendous mediæval castles peculiar to Portugal rears its massive battlements, castles in comparison with which most of the English feudal strongholds are mere sentry-boxes. For these Portuguese fortresses were national outposts thrust forward successively into conquered or debatable land; bases for further extension southward and bulwarks against the return of the tide of Islam. Another two hours of travelling brought us into a country of red rolling hills, with a bold granite ridge on the east and a still loftier ridge beyond merging into the blue mist on the horizon. For miles on either side grand sweeps of flowering heather flushed against breaks and slides of ochre-earth, touched here and there with the light feathery green of the pines; whilst in the dips of hills sheltered valleys of bronzing vines and little white granges, slept tranquilly after the bustle of the just finished vintage. Soon we get nearer the granite hills before us, and looming over the station, upon a great projecting spur of one of these there frowns another of these tremendous strongholds, from which, running towards the east and south between us and Lisbon, there bars the way a series of gigantic ridges and peaks. Most of the heights are capped by towers, and scored along the faces of the mountains may still be discerned lines and marks of earthworks and redoubts. These are the never-to-be-forgotten lines of Torres Vedras, by which the genius of Wellington finally held the legions of Napoleon at bay, and saved Portugal—and incidentally Europe—from the domination of the French.
All the earth seems soaked and saturated in sunlight and brilliant colour; little ancient towns, like Runa, perched on the tops of cliffs, at the foot of which more modern hamlets cluster, testify to the changed conditions between the days when the first need was safety from aggression, and the later times when, the danger of wanton attacking being past, men sought accessibility and ease. Acacias, aloes, canes, olives, and vines spreading down the plain, tell of a benign and equable climate enjoyed in security and peace; a beautiful and favoured land, where nature has done its best to make man happy without making him idle. As the twilight begins to fall we change trains at Cacem, the junction of the small local line from Lisbon to Cintra, and thenceforward we travel due west towards the sea. Before us looms a great isolated mountain, the “Rock of Lisbon,” which seafarers know so well, with its bold outline and its gleaming towers on the topmost crag.
“And Cintra’s mountain greets them on the way.”