“Look,” he said, “the Giralda!”
Across a plaza where fringed palms rustle, at the end of a calle still in faint lilac shadow, stood a tall square tower of tenderest rose color. The Giralda, once the minaret of old Abu Yacob’s mosque, dominates Seville as the Giglio of Giotto dominates Florence, by its imperial right of beauty. The bronze Victory on the summit turned lightly with the breeze; her Roman helmet, her standard, and the olive branch in her hand sharply etched against the fiery blue sky. In the belfry the old green bells—all Christians baptized—San Miquel, el Cantor, Santa Maria, la Gorda, swung to and fro, calling the people to prayer as their predecessor, the muezzin, once called them.
“It is very late,” murmured Concepcion. She spoke slowly, distinctly; I understood her then and after. My Spanish was “coming back to me:” at sixteen I could chatter like a magpie in West Indian Castilian. We hurried on, losing the Giralda to find it again standing like a tall sentinel beside the cathedral. This was our first meeting with Gothic architecture in Spain. The pure lines of pointed window and door, the airy, flying buttresses, the graceful parapet crowning the roof rose stately above us, solemn and inspiring, a very gospel carven in warm gray stone.
“The cathedral is the Heart of Seville,” said Pemberton, “it is a unique thing. No church in Christendom, no Greek temple or Buddhist shrine can compare with it. Not because it is the largest Gothic cathedral and the third largest church in the world, but because it has breath, because it is alive.”
An aged beggar, clean and respectable, lifted the heavy leathern curtain that hung over the door. “Una limosna por el amor de Dios,” he whispered. Concepcion dropped a perro chico (literally a small dog, a copper coin worth one cent) into his trembling old hand.
“Dios se lo paga a V.,” said the beggar, a neat, self-respecting mendicant whose voice lacked the whine of Italy. God himself will pay it to you!
In the rich, dusky spaces of the nave, near the puerta mayor, a marble slab is let into the pavement. Carved upon the slab are the familiar device of the three brave caravels and the proud motto, “á Castilla y á Leon, mundo nuebo dié Colon.”
“This is the tomb of that good son, Ferdinand Columbus,” said Pemberton. A cord tightened round my heart. “That’s a link with the past that holds, isn’t it?”
From that moment it seemed as if we all caught fire from Pemberton, saw through his eyes, felt with his intensity of feeling. The sweeping aisles, the steadfast columns, the soaring arches of that cathedral seemed elemental things, like their prototypes, the forest lanes, the giants of the primeval wood. We could almost feel the spring of pine needles underfoot, smell the resin, see the sunlight striking through the tops of tall pines swaying together, arching the forest path.
The coro the distinguishing feature of Spanish cathedrals—it is like a chapel set down in the middle of a church—interferes less with the impression of the whole building at Seville than in any other cathedral we saw. In the outer aisles, which are free of the coro, you have an uninterrupted view of the entire length of the building, and can realize its sublime proportions, get a sense of the harmony of the whole; the ease with which the vast columns uphold the roof, and divide the whole space into its proper parts. In itself, the coro is like an exquisitely wrought gem in a chaste and simple setting. It is shut off from the nave on the side of the puerta mayor, by a marble façade containing fine bas-reliefs, and a painting of the Virgin by Francesco Pacheco, father-in-law and teacher of Velasquez. On the side towards the capilla mayor and the high altar, the coro is isolated by a magnificent wrought-iron screen where, high up in groups of threes, hang the golden mass bells. Around the interior of the coro runs a double row of choir stalls, marvels of wood carving, in part grotesque, where the carver’s fancy ran riot and reproduced the faces of the men, beasts, and devils that had haunted his childish dreams.