“Indeed? You scarcely look it,” said J.
“Don’t you see?” I cried, “he is the guide, he has been mentioned in Harper and the Century.”
“Take him along!” begged Patsy. “He knows the ropes; he’ll keep us from getting into any more scrapes.”
Old Scorp had crawled in our wake all the morning; his time had come; he claimed us for his own. From that moment till we left the Rock, we were scarcely out of his company, except when asleep or at meals. When not busy guiding travelers, he acted as Moorish interpreter of the law court. A little gliding man, like a composite of all the peoples who have held the Rock, his clothes were English, his manners Spanish, his fanatical eyes were Berber, his energy, in spite of his age, ancient Roman, his keenness as to pounds, shillings, and pence was Phœnician, his manner of cracking a nut—where had I seen that action? In the monkey cage at the Zoo.
The original inhabitants of Gibraltar, a tribe of half-tame, tailless apes, still hold the steep west front of the Rock. They are descended from those apes of Tarshish sent to Solomon, together with peacocks, ivory, and gold, every three years. They live on the summit, where the sweet palmetto and the prickly pear grow. In summer, when man and monkey grill upon the arid Rock, the soldiers at the Signal Station save water for their poor relations, and look the other way when the simian troop goes on a raid to rob the Governor’s fruit garden; they even keep a sort of parish register of monkey births and deaths. How these blue Barbary apes, the only African monkeys in Europe, ever found their way here, is a mystery, like the presence of the Basques in the Pyrenees.
“I wonder if they were here before the convulsion of nature that tore apart the coasts of Africa and Europe,” Patsy ruminated.
Why not say, when Hercules tore them apart? It’s so much prettier!
From the market-place we went to the parade-ground, a quadrangle surrounded by solid stone barracks, where a squad of the King’s Own were drilling. Inside the barracks a military band played Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.” The King’s Own were brisk, young, and fresh-looking newcomers, with the beef and beer of Old England still in their blood; they will not have such pretty complexions when they leave, after three summers on the Rock. The climate that we found delicious in December must be terrific in July. Scorp admitted that it was a trifle warm, though it suited him; we could fancy him basking on the Rock, as if he belonged in one of its crevices. At luncheon we asked Bracelet how he found the summer here. From what he said, Gibraltar cannot be a nice place when the black levanter blows, the dark cloud cap settles on the summit, the clamminess comes into the air, and the stifling east wind takes the heart out of a man and sets his nerves jangling, till he feels like Prometheus chained to the burning Rock. They make out very well in the winter, Bracelet said, with the warships coming and going, people from home running down to the Hotel Maria Cristina over in Algeciras, and occasional shooting trips in the Atlas Mountains. Of course, the great institution is the Calpe Hunt.
“Fox hunting here?” Patsy interrupted.
“No, no, over there.” Bracelet nodded towards the narrow ribbon of sand that ties the Rock to Spain. “In the old days, though, the place swarmed with foxes. Rockwood and Ranter, the first couple of hounds an old parson had out from England, gave ’em some rattling good runs up the face of the Rock.”