“Oh! yes; that bad man is rich, you know, and can afford to have everything nice. It’s just such men as he who eat up poor young beginners like us.”
“Of course,” I answered, coolly; “the man may be bad or good, but so long as he supplies good horses and comfortable saddles, he’ll find customers—though he is a Spaniard, and were to run a knife into somebody every night.” And with this conclusion, we concluded.
We were now on English ground, and fancied ourselves in England. The change happened all on a sudden. We had been in Spain a few minutes back. Spain was not a hundred yards off, and now we were at home, among home-like faces, friendly voices, and familiar scenes; and over our heads, on the crest of the grand old rock waved the jolly “Union Jack.” There was a hunt outside the town, and we met parties of officers in scarlet, accompanied by fair-haired girls, managing their thoroughbreds as only Englishwomen can; groups of red-haired, clear-complexioned Highlanders, stood about the camps, and the infantine population of some English village seemed out at play on the grass; sturdy housewives were cooking, washing, and nursing babies in the tents; the roads were no longer break-neck bridle-tracks, but real, broad, smooth roads, hard and fit for use; the Spanish soldier, in tight moccasins and short brown cloak, had disappeared as if by magic, giving way to the scarlet coat and the tartan.
The “Spanish lines” are, indeed, no more nor less than a handful of houses called by courtesy the town of La Linea. In Ford’s time, La Linea consisted of “a few miserable hovels, the lair of greedy officials, who live on the crumbs of Gibraltar;” at least so he writes of it in 1839, but we were assured that there is a decent inn at La Linea now, and that it is quite possible for belated travellers to sleep there. The contrast between Spain and England—two opposed countries placed in such strange juxtaposition—is most striking. You pass in five minutes from a land of sleepy, blissful lethargy to a stirring, bustling, look-alive sea-port and garrison town. I dare say Gibraltar would not be a pleasant place to live in, but after spending so many weeks among people who think nothing in the world worth hurrying about, and no one’s time of the slightest importance whatever, it was delightful to breathe the business-like, martial air of the place. You cannot help doing in Spain as the Spaniards do, and by the time you have traversed the length and breadth of Old Castile and Andalusia, you must be of a very unimpressionable temperament indeed if you have not imbibed the genius loci, that indescribable Oriental habit of living from morning to night without the least inclination to trouble oneself about anything under the sun.
Here, in Gibraltar, you feel at once subjected to the military spirit that rules it. The streets are alive with music; the sharp fife, the warlike cornet, the rolling drum; there is always a “recall” being sounded, or a réveillé, or a gun being fired. You might fancy war was going on from the constant bustling to and fro of regiments and recurrence of signals. And there is a stirring air about the streets which is quite new. The town is alive with people, all intent on business or pleasure, and if you have any business on hand, you find means of doing it quickly and satisfactorily.
The day was delicious, and at the Club-house Hotel we were met by my friend’s cousin, Colonel——, who carried us off to his pretty house outside the town, and introduced us to his wife and beautiful little fair-haired child. The house commanded a lovely view of the sea, and was surrounded by roses and geraniums in full bloom; otherwise we might have imagined ourselves in England, so thoroughly English was the tone of the household. We had a long, busy, delightful day at Gibraltar, driving about in Colonel——’s pretty English carriage; and the very name of the place will always be pleasant to me on account of the wonders of nature and art we saw there, the brilliant atmosphere that made every impression doubly vivid, above all, the graceful and hearty hospitality of our host and hostess. Gibraltar is magnificent. Sorry, indeed, were we that we could not see it better and make it the head-quarters of excursions to Ronda, Tangiers, and Tetuan. As it was, we saw something of the stupendous galleries tunnelled in the rock, something of the bastions and batteries, something of the marvellous scenery from the heights, and something of the gay, rattling, picturesque town. We saw nothing of the apes—a little colony who have the topmost crags all to themselves, and are most religiously and wholly tabooed, no one being allowed to molest or kill them—and nothing of the three hundred classes of plants, which are said to flourish on the rock. Neither did we see anything of those picturesque Ronda smugglers whom Captain Scott describes so enthusiastically in his travels published nearly thirty years ago. But we saw enough of Gibraltar to leave it with regret and to look upon our last day in Spain—for I suppose I may so call it—as one of the brightest.
At nine o’clock gun-fire we left the port in an open boat, and after an hour’s rowing reached our steamer, the Spahis. The night was glorious, and the sea as smooth as glass. Overhead shone myriads of large bright stars, and the lights of Gibraltar made a lesser, but hardly less brilliant, firmament lower down. We thought, as we looked alternately at those shining fields above and below, we had happy auspices for our onward journey.
