The guards were most civil, as usual, and did their best to explain matters to us. The railway would go quickly enough by-and-by, they said, but the road was a difficult one to work, &c., &c. Mañana, mañana (to-morrow), everything will go quickly to-morrow, is the usual cry.
The villages of Andalusia are very picturesque, and remind you of the west of England, only here the foliage is richer, the skies are of a deeper blue, the landscape is wilder and more varied. Here the white cottages glisten, not amid groves of beech, elm, and willow, but amid the orange-tree, the ilex, and the olive; whilst the uncultivated plains, instead of being purple with heath and golden with gorse, are barren and sunburnt as the face of a gipsy, save where thickets of the cistus and the cork-tree break the dreary sameness.
But there is more than a fancied resemblance between the home of the Andalusian peasant and the Devonshire labourer. The walls of his cottage are constructed after precisely the same fashion, and of precisely the same materials—that primitive, cheap, durable mixture of earth and reeds, which, when whitewashed, tones down into a beautiful cream colour, surpassing the richest marble for softness and mellowness of tint. In beautiful Andalusia, “the poor cottager contents himself with cob for his walls, and thatch for his covering;” as quaintly says an old English writer, and what in England is called cob, with all its varieties of concrete cob, dry cob, rad and dab, &c., is only another variety of the tapia, or mud wall of the Arab and Moro-Andalusian. Of concrete cob indeed, that is, a mixture of lime, rough sand, pebbles, earth, and reeds rammed into cases, are formed not only the noble walls of Cordova and Granada, but the Moorish watch-towers or atalayas, that so grandly rise along the southern sea-coast. We might, if we were so disposed, trace this economical and excellent masonry down to Cain, the builder of the first city—at least, so says a learned authority on the subject.[8] And guided by the finger-mark of learned authorities, we might follow its progress from east to west; for the simple art of cob-building links the cities and civilizations of the ancient Egyptians and Phœnicians with those of the Devonshire peasant, the Andalusian, and the Moor of Barbary, of to-day. No one who travels through the south of Spain will fail to observe the picturesque aspect of its villages; and I have gone out of my way to notice this feature in them, because any relationship in the arts is interesting to a traveller. He will find traces of cob alike in India, in Mexico, in Greece, and in Italy; but nowhere is the original architecture of the Phœnicians more noteworthily copied than in the sunny plains of Andalusia.
After traversing this wilderness of limestone run mad, we glided into a warmer and lovelier zone. We fancied ourselves in Algeria. There were golden plumes of palm-trees waving against a deep blue sky; orange and lemon groves at the foot of bluer hills; hedges of aloe and wild cactus by the roadside; flowers and sunshine and sweetness everywhere. It was Sunday, too, and pretty it was to see the handsome Andalusian peasants in their gay dresses alight and descend at the different stations, with orange-branches, bearing golden fruit and glossy leaf, in their hands. Wherever we stopped there came Murillo-like children to the door, bringing glasses of fresh water, saying, “Agua fresca, agua fresca.”
At the end of these beautiful Eastern pictures came Malaga, a large, white, dusty town, with a quiet blue sea at its feet, and above and around it the most wonderfully-coloured hills, purple, rose-colour, violet, blood-red, rainbow-hued in the sunset and colourless never.
We found Malaga, in spite of its delicious climate, its bright sea, its gorgeous hills, and its Eastern gardens, a disagreeable place. The streets always smelt of fish,—raw fish, cooked fish, fresh fish, dried fish, stale fish. The common people are dirty and unpleasant, a mongrel race, half-gipsy, half-bandit, with an evil look. The pavements are filthy, and all the time of our stay a sirocco was blowing, so that we were choked with dust wherever we went.
We stayed here several days nevertheless; and though we never liked Malaga, could not fail to be enchanted with the oriental look of the place. Just outside of the town were lovely gardens full of roses and geraniums in blossom, and here and there clusters of palms overspreading white-domed Moorish algibe, or wells; whilst we drove for miles along a road hedged in by the beautiful African reed, so like gigantic corn, that is golden in the sunshine and black as the cypress at twilight.
The colouring of the mountains is most delicious, and in part makes up for the fishiness and filthiness of the streets. A ray of the setting sun turns the whole wild sierra into a pageantry of pink, deepest violet, crimson, and amber, and makes you long to be an artist in order to transfix the wonderful scene. Mountain and palm, city and tower and sea, seen through the medium of so rare an atmosphere, might well tempt an artist to linger here.
The English Consul was very kind to us, and from him we learned a good deal that was interesting about the place. He took us to the Protestant Cemetery—a beautifully kept garden covering a hill by the sea-side, from whence we had a lovely view. It is a sweet spot; the graves lie in clusters around the chapel, and are half hidden by all kinds of tropic trees and flowers, the graceful pepper-tree, the orange, the lemon, the palmetto, the cistus, the lily; whilst above them stretch sunny slopes, newly planted with the vine and the fig. The soil is very red in colour and full of iron, which accounts for the beauty and the fertility of the landscape everywhere. I believe that for this boon of a burial-place, alike English and foreign Protestants are solely indebted to the father of the present Consul. Protestantism is an obnoxious weed in Catholic Spain, and all those unfortunate Protestants who died at Malaga before our Consul’s intervention, were buried like dogs in holes dug along the sea-shore. Now, no matter what a man’s faith and nation may be, if shut out of the Spanish burial-ground, he finds a resting-place here.
What gave us as much pleasure as anything in Malaga, was the sight of some orphanages, founded by a young, rich, and beautiful Spanish widow lady, who, having lost her husband and children by sudden deaths, devotes all her time and money to charitable works. The schools are under the direction of the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul, and the letter of introduction we carried with us procured ready admittance. The Sisters who received us had beautiful faces, a little sad perhaps, but expressive of the utmost peace and piety. One was a girl of twenty, and she had the sweetest eyes, brown, soft, and shy, with a child’s complexion, all pink and white, and a child’s rosy mouth—though not a child’s gaiety.