The Torre-Nueva sprang from the middle of the town, just as a palm tree rises from the desert sands. It was built at the time when Moorish artisans, infidel dogs who yet preserved the secrets of the East amongst the Christians (may dogs defile their graves), had spent their science and their love upon it.
Octagonal, and looking as if blown into the air by the magician’s art, it leaned a little to one side, and, as the admiring inhabitants averred, drawing their right hands open over their left arms, laughed at its rival of Bologna and at every other tower on earth.
No finer specimen of the art known as Mudejar existed in all Spain. Galleries cut it here and there; and ajimeces, the little horseshoe windows divided by a marble pillar, loved of the Moors, which tradition says they took from the rude openings in their tents of camel’s hair, gave light to the inside. Stages of inclined planes led to the top, so gradual in their ascent that once a Queen of Spain had ridden up them to admire the view over the Sierras upon her palfrey, or her donkey, for all is one when treating of a queen, who of a certainty ennobles the animal she deigns to ride upon. Bold ajaracas, the patterns proper to the style of architecture, stood up in high relief upon its sides, and near the balustrade upon the top a band of bluish tiles relieved the brownness of the brickwork and sparkled in the sun. Sieges and time and storms, rain, wind, and snow had spared it; even the neglect of centuries had left it unimpaired—erect and elegant as a young Arab maiden carrying water from the well. Architects said that it inclined a little more each year, and talked about subsidences; but they were foreigners, unused to the things of Spain, and no one marked them; and the tower continued to be loved and prized and to fall into disrepair. On this occasion riflemen lined the galleries, pouring a hot fire upon the attacking forces of the Government.
Encamped upon the heights above Torero, the Governmental army held the banks of the canal that gives an air of Holland to that part of the adust and calcined landscape of Aragon.
The General’s quarters overlooked the town, and from them he could see Santa Engracia, in whose crypt repose the bodies of the martyrs in an atmosphere of ice, standing alone upon its little plaza, fringed by a belt of stunted and ill-grown acacia trees. The great cathedral, with its domes, in which the shrine of the tutelary Virgin of the Pilar, the Pilarica of the country folk, glittering with jewels and with silver plate, is venerated as befits the abiding place on earth of the miraculous figure sent direct from heaven, towered into the sky.
Churches and towers and convents, old castellated houses with their overhanging eaves and coats-of-arms upon the doors, jewels of architecture, memorials of the past, formed as it were a jungle wrought in a warm brown stone. Beyond the city towered the mountains that hang over Huesca of the Bell. Through them the Aragon has cut its roaring passages towards Sobrarbe to the south. Northwards they circle Jaca, the virgin little city that beat off the Moors a thousand years ago, and still once every year commemorates her prowess outside the walls, where Moors and Christians fight again the unequal contest, into which St. James, mounted upon his milk-white charger, had plunged and thrown the weight of his right arm. The light was so intense and African that on the mountain sides each rock was visible, outlined as in a camera-lucida, and as the artillery played upon the tower the effects of every salvo showed up distinctly on the crumbling walls. All round the Government’s encampment stood groups of peasantry who had been impressed together with their animals to bring provisions. Wrapped in their brown and white checked blankets, dressed in tight knee-breeches, short jackets, and grey stockings, and shod with alpargatas—the canvas, hemp-soled sandals that are fastened round the ankles with blue cords—they stood and smoked, stolid as Moors, and as unfathomable as the deep mysterious corries of their hills.
When the artillery thundered and the breaches in the walls grew daily more apparent and more ominous, the country people merely smiled, for they were sure the Pilarica would preserve the city; and even if she did not, all Governments, republican or clerical, were the same to them.
All their ambition was to live quietly, each in his village, which to him was the hub round which the world revolved.
So one would say, as they stood watching the progress of the siege: “Chiquio, the sciences advance a bestiality, the Government in the Madrids can hear each cannon-shot. The sound goes on those wires that stretch upon the posts we tie our donkeys to when we come into town. . . .”
Little by little the forces of the Government advanced, crossing the Ebro at the bridge which spans it in the middle of the great double promenade called the Coso, and by degrees drew near the walls.